Paul Fussell tells readers what’s bad in America

BAD. Or, The Dumbing of America, by Paul Fussell, Summit Books, 201 pages, $19.

In his biblical who’s who, “Peculiar Treasures,” Frederic Buechner defines a jeremiad as “a doleful and thunderous denunciation. … There was nothing in need of denunciation that Jeremiah didn’t denounce … the king and the clergy … recreational sex and extramarital jamborees … the rich for exploiting the poor, and … the poor for deserving no better. … He even denounced God for saddling him with the job of trying to reform such a pack of hyenas, degenerates, ninnies … and God took it.”

“BAD” is a latter-day jeremiad on secular rather than sacred themes, and God is about the only subject author Paul Fussell does not denounce. Consider the table of contents: BAD Advertising; Airlines; Airports; Architecture; Banks; Behavior; Beliefs; Books; Cities; Colleges and Universities; Conversation; Engineering; Films; Food; Hotels; Ideas; Language; Magazines; Movie Actors and Other Players; Movies; Music; Naval Missile Firing; Newspapers; Objects, with an excursus on Collectibles; People; Poetry; Public Sculpture; Restaurants; Signs; and Television.

A withering blast covering all that is “… phoney, clumsy, witless, untalented, vacant, or boring that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright, or facinating … (and) numerous awful things to be met with in the United States which if not offensive because pretentious, are offensive because banal, stupid, or subadult.”

Well, sure; so what else is new? Vulgarity, shoddy goods, and bad taste have ever been and forever will be a part of life. But Fussell’s thesis is that there is routine bad, and then there is BAD, and the difference is something like that between manslaughter and premeditated murder.

“For a thing to be really BAD, it must exhibit elements of the pretentious, the overwrought, or the fraudulent. Bathroom faucet handles that cut your fingers are bad. If gold-plated, they are BAD. Dismal food is bad. Dismal food pretentiously served in a restaurant associated with the word `gourmet’ is BAD. … BAD is strictly a phenomenon of the age of hype. … To achieve real BAD, you have to have the widest possible gap between what is said about a thing and what the thing actually is. … The Vietnam War is as good an example as any of the way something bad could be made to seem acceptable for quite a while, until people began to see that what was bad was really BAD, with Lyndon Johnson and William Westmoreland serving as admen.”

Anyone familiar with the non-academic works of Paul Fussell knows that he is a very angry man, and “BAD” will come as no surprise. It is a kind of 100-proof distillation of all that he satirized in “Class” (1983). But one wonders if he is losing control; “Class” was written with tongue in cheek, like “Parkinson’s Law,” and is not to be taken too seriously. “BAD,” on the other hand, seems to border on hysteria.

There is much to laugh about, (“… the only recourse is to laugh at BAD. If you don’t, you’re going to have to cry.”), but it is the laughter of bitterness, not easy-going satire. Perhaps because “As the music critic Virgil Thomson perceived about symphony and opera, so shrewd and ubiquitous is `paid publicity’ that rugged and sometimes contemptuous criticism is, as he says, `the only antidote.”‘

True enough, but is raging against such foolishness worth it? In terms of book sales, of course. Otherwise, it is a great waste of talent. The author of “The Great War and Modern Memory” (winner of three prestigious awards), “Wartime,” “Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays,” and several books on 18th century English literature, has better things to do.

One doesn’t quite know whether to put an arm around Fussell’s shoulder and say, “There, there — there, there” — or administer a quick forehand-backhand across the face and say, “Yes. Right. That’s the way it is and there’s bloody little you can do about it so quit your bitching and get on with life.”

Henry Sherrerd is a free-lance writer who resides in Dexter.