TABLOID-TV exposure can lobotomize the shame of white-trash
behavior, but it can't entirely create that behavior in the first
place. So where did our rampant trashiness spring from?
Liberals and slackers subscribe to the theory of a backlash
against the excess of the 1980s.
"With `The Cosby Show' they were all doctors and lawyers going
off to Princeton and walking around the house with $1,000 outfits,"
says Mike Judge, creator and voice of MTV's "Beavis and Butt-head."
"All through the '80s I thought there were way too many
good-looking people on TV - you just start feeling inadequate.
"I thought it would be cool to have something on TV where you
don't have to be ashamed that you live in a dumpy house and wear
dumpy clothes and watch too much TV. Along with `Married . . . With
Children' and `The Simpsons,' there's a `power to the lower-income
white people' trend."
Then there is the abdication-of-leadership theory especially
favored by Republicans (despite their party's near stranglehold on
the White House). Harper Lee, author of "To Kill a Mockingbird,"
once said that "with two generations of prosperity, white trash
looks like gentry." Perhaps the reverse also obtains: With two
generations of inertial guidance, gentry looks like white trash.
"This form of (trashy) behavior is much more prevalent among
the Bohemians and the hippies, the upper-income groups in the
Hamptons," says Mary Matalin, host of the "Equal Time" talk show on
CNBC. "It goes from the top down. Ernest Hemingway and Scott
Fitzgerald and all of (editor) Max Perkins' writers were total
slugs - they all beat their wives and drank like fish and slept
around."
The conservative view is acute, though hyperbolic. When we
abandoned teaching the core values of Western civilization, Allan
Bloom argues in "The Closing of the American Mind," we lost our
common mores: "Civilization has seemingly led us around full
circle, back to the state of nature." As Ashley Judd muses in the
1993 movie "Ruby in Paradise": "Why slave your life out when you
can just take? Are there any real reasons for living right,
anyway?"
The present symptom of our social decline, says conservative
scholar Charles Murray, is white illegitimacy. He unscrolls a
dismal statistical litany: In 1991, 22 percent of white births were
illegitimate; 69 percent of those single white mothers had family
incomes under $20,000, and 82 percent of them had a high school
education or less.
An additional stress is rising divorce rates: Of white children
born in 1980, only 30 percent will live with both parents through
the age of 18; those born in 1950 had an 81 percent chance.
Families under the poverty line are twice as likely as other
families to undergo parental separations, and various studies show
that single-parent children are two to three times as likely to
have emotional and behavioral problems.
"If the dominant culture deems you a misfit if you drop out,
then you plug away," Murray says. "If there is an alternative
culture that says, `Who needs that s-?' then dropping out becomes
an option. And that alternative culture is the black underclass.
Of the "wigger," a popular neologism, Murray notes, "It refers
to white kids who mimic black dress, walk or attitudes. But what
they're really imitating is black-underclass attitudes toward
achievement. When a large number of males grow up without fathers,
then they emulate the local heroes - the drug dealers, who get lots
of women, have money and take no crap."
Conservatives, on the other hand, are horrified. "Unless these
exploding social pathologies are reversed, they will lead to the
decline and perhaps even the fall of the American republic," former
U.S. drug czar and education secretary William J. Bennett warns in
Nostradamian tones about drug use, violent crime and illegitimacy
in his best-selling "The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators. …
