Framåt och utför!

Vad sägs om den här tesen? Caitlin Moran på The Times i Storbritannien har mentalt behövt omvärdera sin historiska orientering.

We were talking about America yesterday when a thought suddenly struck me: while we have always presumed that the US embodies our soon-to-come future... what if, instead, it actually represents our past, and everything we have progressed from? [...]

I say this because the latest hot news from the States, as reported in last week’s Times, suggests that the Americans are now actually looking to us for pointers to their future. Britain! Bad Teeth And Lard Land! Apparently, this season of American Idol... has taken on a distinctly British tinge.

Det som hänt är att en kampanj, votefortheworst.com, dragits igång för att rösta fram en medelmåtta till vinnare av den enorma talangtävlingen American Idol. Simon Cowell är så rädd för att kampanjen faktiskt ska lyckas att han hotat med att hoppa av programmet om det skulle ske.

So, to recap: in the States there is now a national campaign to vote for a loser, as a joke. This is, surely, the biggest outbreak of un-American behaviour since the McCarthy era. It’s positively British. This is the kind of thing we do. We, after all, pioneered the wry celebration of lacklustre or downright awful things...

Morans slutsats är djärv: jakten på det dåliga är betydligt mer avancerad än jakten på det som är excellent. Att upppskatta något förjävla dåligt har inget att göra med att man befinner sig i en kultur på dekis, utan är ett symptom på en kultur som har ett överskott på fulländning

Consider: in the 21st century, we can now, at any point, access any moment of artistic brilliance. Elvis’s Sun recordings. The Beatles working through early versions of Strawberry Fields Forever. The Muppets doing Ma Na Ma Na. Given this, then, it is, perhaps, understandable why we might, eventually, tire of things that are good. There are too many of them! You can get them as a polyphonic ringtone for £1! Good things are everywhere!

Things that are bad, on the other hand – genuinely awful, as upsetting as watching an orphanage burn to the ground on Christmas Eve while Santa struggles on the roof with a broken leg – are rare. [...]

Because while iTunes, YouTube and a thousand illegal download sites make acquiring a 1,000-strong playlist of undisputed genius an afternoon’s work, finding awful stuff is a great deal harder. Really awful records still have to be tracked down in dusty record shops. They never make the Top 75. They need, to be frank, the eye of a connoisseur.

Given this, it’s fair to say that, these days, it’s the bad stuff you’re into that defines you – and far more eloquently than the good stuff. It requires effort. It requires discipline. It requires, oddly, taste. Therefore, any American voting for the ridiculous, cheerful, doomed galoot Sanjaya Malakar to be the winner of 2007’s American Idol is, paradoxically, making the US a more culturally refined place. I think you know what I’m going to say: yes, I’ll vote for that.

Alltså: ju crappier kultur ni söker upp och framhäver, desto mer framtida och sofistikerade är ni. Framstegsberättelsen inverteras: den bekräftas men upphäver sig själv.

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