303. Tackiness, Deeply Considered

 For some people "tacky" turns out to be a very handy word when they don't want to risk "immoral."  Say the subject of open marriage comes up.  Mutually agreed-upon adultery is to me, raised in the ancien (pre-sexual revolution) regime, immoral.  I want to call it that but, uncertain of the regimes I have survived into, I keep my mouth shut.  If only the word I discussed in my preceding post had occurred to me.  "No, it's only that I find open marriages — you know — tacky."  In what regime could that get you looks?

You may be stronger if you acknowledge that you are square.  But that could take a while.  A poet I knew, the most knowing square of my acquaintance, didn't gain his knowledge until he had what he called an epiphany under a couch in a faculty colleague's living room, where he was groping for his roll of Tums.  The colleague had just done a very cool thing: displayed on the floor nude photos of a student known to many of them in their classes.  (He was an amateur photographer.)  The poet had been bending over with the rest to look at them when his antacid rolled out of his shirt pocket.  He was on his knees, hands sifting the dust balls, when the epiphany came: "What's a person like me doing here?" 

What will be his word for that scene, the cool fellow laying out the pictures for the other cool fellows to enjoy, when he comments on it later?  He doesn't know how much cooler than he his audiences in the big city are, but he senses too sharp a gradient for him to call the behavior "immoral," or "base," or "shameful."  Not even "indecent" will do.  Then it comes to him.  "Well, I just found it too tacky for words."

For a poet searching for substitutes for the more judgmental words in his vocabulary "tacky" looks like pure gold.  And its finding opens a vein for the rest of us.  Down the list of sins and questionables we can run.  Masturbation goes as "undignified," group sex "unfocused," wife-swapping "ignoble," blue movies "down-market," and anal sex "unsanitary."  "Tacky" is so spot-on for lap-dancing — and God knows how many slick magazines (Cosmopolitan, Playboy) — that it remains.  All sex other than nature's one-bulb-one-socket arrangement becomes simply "inefficient."  Presence in cool conversations, life in cool societies, becomes so much easier.

This, working so hard for ease, is what you're forced to when there is no standard for behavior, no yardstick in Buckingham Palace, no meter-bar in Paris.   All you're left with after the ethical center is removed are rhetorical boosts and put-downs.   Knowing that, and prepared by the loss of Plato and God, we former essentialists find it in anything cross-cultural, or intersubjective, or just recurrent in history.

Finding it, this dependable recurrence, is not easy.  You'd think kiss-and-tell books, letting all the kisses hang out ("sex with the princess was fireworks"), would forever be tacky, since the word "cad" had hung in there so long, but kiss-and-tell books have been popular for so many decades now that one begins to wonder.  A society that eats up servants' accounts, including those by public servants, of the misbehavior observed during their time of service, is not going to disapprove of kiss-and-tell books.

Does the fact that there are synonyms for "tacky" in twenty-five languages point to something dependably cross-cultural?  I understand that there's a great synonym, or near-synonym, for "tacky" in Russian, "poshlost."  Vladimir Nabokov, in writing about it, put his finger on what's great about "tacky": in using it "we pass not only an aesthetic but also a moral judgment."  We bluenoses can smuggle the moral in under the esthetic.  (As if anyone were sure of the difference.)

Can we bear the amount of poshlost we'll get in a democracy, where every poshloser gets a vote?  Taste-democracy goes with vote-democracy (every seller of bad taste, every William Randolph Hearst, every capitalist able to influence Congress, will make sure of that) and America, and now pretty much the world, has to live with that fact.  The alternative is totalitarian rule. 

So, if we have to live with it we'd better learn how to handle it.  In our relativistic age that means learning the effective put-downs. 

"Like 'does your mother wear Army shoes?' after a vulgarism?" 

Maybe at one level (you've got to watch the levels here) that would do, but at most levels you've got to show more class.  Like on The Daily Show.  But it's a serious problem, handling tackiness, and we need models.  In my experience Dante's Virgil is the best model.  In the eighth circle of Hell Dante, you may remember, has lingered to enjoy some extreme tack: two louts abusing each other with scurrilous speech and obscene gestures.  Virgil, his guide, notes the slide into voyeurism and says, "Keep on looking a little longer and I quarrel with you....The wish to hear such baseness is degrading."  He shames Dante, but not devastatingly.   When Dante wilts too far he says, "Less shame would wash away a greater fault than yours."  This is no revolver-on-the-dresser case.  But it's a case.  Everything's in proportion, and the point has been made.

"And you think Dante's Virgil can be a model for our time?"

Yes, at least as a reminding figure, if only standing behind us. In front of how many screens might we appropriately hear, "the wish to watch such baseness is degrading"?

"But Dante had such great advantages.  His Virgil had Rome and Greece behind him, the authority of their classics, their heroes, his readers already had an elevated conception of man, that creature made in God's image, a nobility that gave meaning to words like 'baseness' and 'degradation.'  As Sir Gawain, or Chaucer's Parson, or Castiglione's Courtier did a few years later.  What can today's poet count on, standing behind his reader, providing conceptions of man?  Biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, sexologists.  Kinsey, Masters, Johnson."

Right.  Neutral, or supposed neutral, presences.  Killing our hopes unless there's something inside us, a built-in sense of class, that persists, and holds out against the waves of tack science allows. 

"What evidence is there for that sense?"

Well, where did that letter by the teen in the forum come from?  You know, in the last post.  "Classy is not about clothes, makeup, hairstyles, accessories.  It is not about being posh, or wealthy.....A classy girl is a good person, a good friend."  I feel sure she hasn't been introduced to Plato's Idea of the Good, and it's not likely she has a Virgil or a Courtier in her sights.  So how did she come up with that letter?