Summertime is the season for sanctioned cultural slumming, or so holds a seldom examined article of American folklore. The basic notion is hinted at by language that appears all the time in cultural journalism—"summer entertainment," "summer movies," "summer reading." Such phrases suggest that it is all right for respectable Americans to indulge their appetites for cultural cotton candies when it is too hot to digest quality stuff. Anybody caught at the beach reading something other than Proust or Nabokov is thus assured of amnesty.
The folklore is sound as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly far enough. Cultural slumming is certainly big in the summer, but nowadays it hardly lets up in the fall, winter and spring either. The American craving for cultural junk has become a yen for all seasons. Book buyers did not wait until summer to turn Miss Piggy's Guide to Life and 101 Uses for a Dead Cat (ugh!) into bestsellers, and disc jockeys will not stop broadcasting "easy listening" schmaltz when autumn arrives. The rush for fatuous books on diets and moneymaking never lets up, and of the endless boom in frothy tales like Harlequin Books and Silhouette Romances, Book Marketing Executive Kay Sexton of Chicago says: "People are absolutely addicted."
In fact, pop (for popular) culture has become—to borrow the word that means childish, meatless mush—mostly pap culture, a.k.a. trash, kitsch and schlock. In the ten alltime top moneymaking movies, most of fairly recent vintage, the pap quotient is stunning; the list includes: Star Wars, Jaws, The Empire Strikes Back, Grease, The Exorcist, The Godfather, Superman and The Sting. The same is true of the very hottest novels (among them: The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Love Story) and of the top nonfiction books of the past ten years (The Late Great Planet Earth, Chariots of the Gods, Your Erroneous Zones, The Joy of Sex). And almost everybody knows the pap quotient of television: Hee Haw is still going strong.
Though the prevalence of lightweight cultural matter may not be surprising, its universal acceptance is nonetheless striking. Two decades ago, the priests of high culture railed at the possible harm to mind, spirit and aesthetics that might result from the proliferation of junky cultural works—"Masscult," to use the sinister word that Critic Dwight Macdonald put on the lot of it. Said Macdonald: "It is not just unsuccessful art. It is non-art. It is even anti-art." Now cultural pap is bigger than ever, but the champions of high culture seldom bother to protest any more. Pap has triumphed as an American staple, and now so abounds that it tends to be noticed, like the air, only when it contains some particularly noxious pollutants.