A Declaration of Principles

1991 marked the 50th anniversary of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. During the year just past, a restored print of the film classic was released and Welles' unmatched artistic achievement was much discussed in the press.

One of the most memorable scenes in Citizen Kane occurs early on, when the title character, a filthy-rich newspaper mogul modeled on William Randolph Hearst, begins his first venture in newspaper publishing. On the front page of the first edition of Kane's first newspaper, he orders printed, in a boldface box, a "Declaration of Principles" which, he promises, will guide his publishing policies.

This issue of Sojourners marks the fifth anniversary of this column's publication. On this considerably less auspicious occasion, the aging columnist finds his thoughts turning toward things like first principles, guiding philosophies, and other pretensions. Of necessity this column bounces from topic to topic from month to month in a fairly free-floating fashion. And within the confines of this meager page it is often difficult to do more than describe a phenomenon and spew forth a vaguely reasoned opinion about it.

However, behind those five years of opinions, and even behind the choice of 50-odd topics, there is, if not a consistent philosophy, at least a persistent set of assumptions. So this month we will slow down for a moment and look at those underlying assumptions.

THIS COLUMN BEGAN WITH the firm conviction that in America today pop culture is politics and politics is pop culture. Today this conviction, born of the first Reagan term, has only deepened. During the Reagan years, this fact of life was most visible in the remarkable way pop culture--television and movies especially--served as the medium for implementing Reaganaut ideology.

However, as the bloom has faded from the Reagan rose, what has become even more interesting, at least to this watcher-listener-reader, is the way that, despite the all-consuming push of commercialism, American pop culture remains at least marginally autonomous from official ideologies; and sometimes it is even able to function as a field for resistance.

This, I am convinced, is because American pop culture is not only a commercial culture--though it is certainly that--but it also often displays some of the earmarks of a folk culture. That is to say that it is, in some very real ways, intimately intertwined with people's real daily lives. It reflects the felt needs and aspirations of the mass of ordinary people and is even, sometimes, a means of self-expression for them.

To an astounding degree, American popular culture is the culture of America's outsiders. U.S. foreign policy, which all the world despises, has always been the exclusive province of America's Northeastern WASP elite. American popular culture (especially music and movies), which all the world loves, is disproportionately the province of America's blacks, Jews, hillbillies, urban ethnics, and gays. As a result it sometimes provides the conduit through which dissident ideas and images can reach the American mainstream even when the political channels are nailed shut.

This interplay of commercial interests, official ideology, and popular self-expression makes the popular culture of the American people an especially vital battleground in the war for the American future. That war is, as it has always been, one between interests that see the masses of people as economic vassals (worker-consumer drones), and those that see the people as the sovereigns of society destined to create their own world by God-given right.

The former forces will always seek to use cultural expression to demean, trivialize, and divide the mass audience. The latter will seek always to ennoble and unite it. Both impulses are visible (and audible) on a daily basis in American TV, pop music, and movies. And that is what this column is most often about.

FINALLY, THIS VIEW OF culture is also, believe it or not, tied up tightly with a set of religious and theological assumptions. It is probably appropriate to a Christian journal that I state them at least once.

I am convinced by scripture, reason, and tradition that all the messy human things of our daily lives--like food and drink and love and sex and politics and song and story and science and even commerce--are at least potentially the instruments for God's grace in our lives and our world. It is up to us to try to locate where God's grace is active in our lives and our world, and to cultivate and build upon the goodness and humaneness that God has already placed in our midst.

With this set of theological assumptions, as a Christian watcher-listener and critic, I am especially and increasingly concerned to locate the kernels and pockets in American popular culture that may bear a word of redemption, freedom, and community. That culture is the very stuff of daily life for the vast majority of the American people. And if they are to find the resources to make a better country and a better life for themselves and their neighbors, they will have to find some of them in the stories, songs, and information they absorb.

Of course, the other side of that coin is the battle to bring a wider variety of choices, and the openings for more human content, into the commercial media arena. That is a field for political-economic struggle which will be increasingly important in the years ahead. Our (including my own) ideas of how to carry on that struggle are rather underdeveloped at the moment. But that is a direction which I hope will evolve in the next five years. For as long as I write in this space, I promise to keep poking in that direction.

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.