But Schechter is also missing something by inferring that the only negative consequences of coarse culture can be quantified by crime statistics. Doesn't creeping stupidity -- the way that public discourse has been dumbed down over the past 30 years -- count? What about the mass media's part in that?
A crowd in the 16th century that gathered to watch someone be drawn and quartered might number a few hundred or a few thousand bloodthirsty souls who were getting their jollies. Those people who lived outside the cities or who were repelled by such things didn't have to have it be part of their daily diet.
In a media-driven culture, you can't avoid it even if you want to, short of joining a Trappist monastery. Besides that, there's the spurious realism of the modern media. Someone shot in a 1939 western clutched his stomach and fell down in a neat, bloodless bundle. Someone shot today is likely to have his head explode in a shower of brains. More realistic? Presumably. (I've never actually seen anybody shot, and I hope my luck holds.) But so what? Why is realism intrinsically preferable to a more oblique artistry? It isn't, actually; it's just far more commonplace, because it doesn't require any imagination on either end of the production process. Schechter's book is entertaining but rather thinly imagined; it would make a better argument as a much shorter piece in The Atlantic Monthly than a book between hard covers.
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