It's not unusual for me to go over all Europa-weh when something happens to distress me on the political scene. Federal government re-thinking our piddly 12 weeks of unpaid leave to handle family emergencies? Visions of Sweden dance in my head. A goodly chunk of a Pacific Northwestern state's public libraries set to shut down? I daydream about the British Library. Generally, though, popular culture does not make me despair. I know the hidden truth about popular culture in Europe, and that is that the United States by and large does middlebrow better than any European country, with the now-and-then exception of the UK. You want high culture? Europe's got it. You want some decent TV to relax your brain on a Tuesday night? You're not going to find it in Austria.
I generalize, but after 4+ years of watching the best that European TV had to offer (Porn with handtools, anyone?), I'd take a badly dubbed rerun of the first season of Law and Order any day. But I digress. I was about to reveal how it was that my fellow Americans have now made me doubt even our ability to discriminate between decent middlebrow entertainment and absolutely, petrifyingly, insultingly lowbrow fare.
Norbit was the highest-grossing film at the box office last weekend.
I'll freely admit that I haven't seen the movie and have no plans to. Eddie Murphy dons a fat suit (again! what is his malfunction?) to make a fat black woman the butt of his jokes and perpetuates stereotypes about Chinese people. That sounds just great; I can't imagine anyone not wanting to see it. I mean, unless you have even the tiniest sliver of a sense of social justice. Apparently there are $33.7 million worth of Americans who don't possess even that.
Now where do I buy those one-way tickets again?