Care to see the chief theater of operations in the culture wars? Just take a stroll through the Sherman Oaks Galleria, a twinkling mall in California's San Fernando Valley. This is where the great outpouring of pop culture comes to market, a market that caters to all the moods of the American disposition, from moonglow to bloodlust. At Sam Goody's, the chain record store, the CD bins are stuffed with amiable releases by Hootie and the Blowfish and Boyz II Men. But they also hold the gangsta rap of Bloods and Crips and Tupac Shakur. Nearby, at the Time Out video arcade, Jordan Trimas, 16, is playing Primal Rage, a game in which dinosaurs tear one another to pieces. "Sure, the violence influences kids,'' he shrugs. "But nobody can do anything about it.''
At the Sherman Oaks multiplex, it's the same mixed bag. On the wide screens there's a face-off between the two top-grossing films of the week. Casper (the Friendly Ghost) offers his doe-eyed version of mortality against the merry bloodbath that is Die Hard with a Vengeance. But over at Taco Bell, 15-year-old Christopher Zahedi will tell you he prefers the rougher stuff. "I liked the part in Pulp Fiction where the guy points a gun and says a prayer from the Bible and then kills everybody,'' he offers. "You hear the gun go brrrr. It's cool.''
In their worst nightmares a lot of parents can also hear that gun go brrrr. They aren't so sure it's cool, just as they aren't so sure it's cool when they come across the more stomach-turning specimens of pop music in their kids' CD collections. That's why, when Bob Dole went to Los Angeles last week to blast the entertainment industry, he touched a chord that transcended the party politics his remarks were shrewdly crafted to serve. Though popular culture has a long and proud history of offending the squares, during the current decade it has particularly kept its sharpest edges to the front. Whatever is scabrous and saw-toothed and in-your-face is probably brought to you by the major labels and the big studios. For parents, the pervasive electronic culture can start to look like some suspect stranger who hangs around their kids too much, acting loutish, rude and drunk.
It was that anxiety Dole was speaking to when he accused the powers behind American movies, music and television of flooding the country with "nightmares of depravity.'' Warning that the more extreme products of pop culture threaten to undermine American kids, he called on the large media companies to swear off the hard stuff. "We must hold Hollywood and the entire entertainment industry accountable for putting profit ahead of common decency,'' Dole said, then raised the heat considerably by singling out one company, Time Warner, the media giant that includes the largest American music operation, the Warner film studio and a stable of magazines, including Time. One day after Dole's speech, William Bennett, the former Education Secretary and drug czar, sent letters to Time Warner board members asking the company to stop distributing rap with objectionable lyrics.