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As the war in Iraq showed, social and cultural fragmentation can mirror and even abet each other. Normally you can count on war to bring a country together, as happened for a while after 9/11. But Iraq quickly found the U.S. divided, both within itself--Michael Moore at the Oscars and the Dixie Chicks vs. Toby Keith--and against much of the rest of the globe. There was a corresponding theme of us--or rather U.S.--against the world in 2003's pop culture. Overseas artists critiqued America for the way it reacted to 9/11 (in the short-film anthology 11'09"01 and at "The American Effect" at the Whitney) and for its pop-culture excesses (in the London opera Jerry Springer). Joe Millionaire 2 featured a fresh-scrubbed cowboy from Texas romancing 14 worldly European bachelorettes under the pretense that he was a multimillionaire--a devilish if inadvertent satire of U.S.-Europe relations, playing off each side's worst stereotypes of the other (the lying cowboy vs. corrupt, chain-smoking Old Worlders). Maybe the most plangent treatment of American isolation was Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as Americans in a Tokyo so alien, it might as well have been Neptune.
And in Iraq, unlike Vietnam, there was no Walter Cronkite to speak for the great middle. Ratings for cable news shot up, while big-network newscasts stayed level or even dropped. Some viewers' media choices became a kind of political secret handshake. Pro-war, you watched Fox News, learned that the war was a rout and disdained the liberal big media. Antiwar, you watched BBC News--or al-Jazeera on satellite--learned that the war was a quagmire and disdained the jingoistic big media. Pox on both your houses, you watched Jon Stewart.
Or you voted none of the above. What network did the most people watch the night the ground war began? NBC. While ABC and the Fox network went with war news, the Peacock had the sense, bravery and civic responsibility to air ... Friends.
In an overentertained, overmediated society, mainstream culture becomes more and more a secondhand experience. We are less influenced by books, movies, CDs and plays--who has the time?--than by what we hear about them through the media. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, for instance, helped prompt a national seminar on gay-straight relations--even though only a couple of million of us actually watched any given episode. Only so many people were technologically intrepid enough to track down the Hilton video online--but the so-called scandal (which was what, exactly--that a woman had sex with her boyfriend?) helped draw millions to her reality show, The Simple Life. We may not have watched the MTV Video Music Awards--but we all knew about Britney tongue-wrestling Madonna.