There is a great virtue to American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt, the new book by John Beckman. That virtue is that American Fun strives to be about more than nostalgia. This isn’t a book by a man rhapsodizing about the kicks of his youth, but rather a well-researched argument that America is objectively a less fun country than it used to be.
Beckman defines fun as two things. One is “risk, transgression, mockery, rebellion” – i.e., poking the eye of the establishment. The other, which isn’t necessarily separate from the first, is “the fun of pranks, lewd dances, wild parties and tough competitions that unites the crowd in common joy.” People who break rules to have fun often find their fun becoming accepted – early rock and rollers, comedians like Richard Pryor who confronted racism, 1960s fashion designers who broke away from Mad Men rules about how to dress. And if done right, fun can strengthen civic life: “At even the diciest moments in history the people’s rebellion has strengthened democracy. It has allowed people to form close bonds in spite of prejudices, rivalries, and laws.” Dancing to Motown music did as much to break down racial barriers as any civil rights legislation.
Beckman praises pranksters and rascals throughout American history. He starts with Thomas Morton, the 17th century founder of Merrymount, a hard-partying rival to the Puritans at Plymouth. Morton was a libertine, free thinker and lover of “revelries.” He encouraged indentured servants to revolt, and advocated integration with the Algonquian Indians. Morton had too much fun for the Puritans, who banished him from the colony. In American Fun Thomas Morton is a kind of founding father of merriment, and from him author Beckman traces the long line of Americans who changed the culture by having fun. These include the people who ignited the American Revolution, which largely started in pubs and street corners; African-American artists and swing dancers in the 1920s; Beatniks of the 1950s and Hippies of the 1960s; rule-breaking skateboarders of the 1970s, and block-party rappers of the 1980s.
Beckman writes from the liberal perspective, and this is the liability of American Fun. The book energetically champions the fun of breaking rules, but Beckman is so eager to defend rebels that he plays down the reality that fun can turn destructive and sad when completely divorced from any kind of common sense. Pool hoping, lighting firecrackers, drinking tequila and dancing in the streets are all great ways to have fun, and they can all carry the charge of illegality that has always been a part of fun. But when they slide into self-destruction, with taking drugs and having sex with multiple anonymous partners, it becomes something other than fun. Beckman loses perspective in not acknowledging that God, Mother Nature, the universe, or whatever you want to call it seems to have given us natural parameters for judging what is healthy iconoclasm and risk-taking and what is genuine stupidity. As the Buddha said: if the guitar string is too loose you can’t play it, but if wound too tight it snaps.
Beckman calls Occupy Wall Street fun, but anyone who saw it up close knows that it was a sad, joyless, and filthy spectacle. Beckman doesn’t grasp, or doesn’t want to grasp, that liberalism had changed over the course of the last century, and that it, not conservatism, now represents the iron fist of the killjoy. My favorite part of American Fun is the section on a 1923 dance marathon that took place in New York. The city had a law against marathon activities of more than twelve hours, but when the police arrived and tried to break up the couples, the dancers simply went to New Jersey – that is, they danced to New Jersey. They danced out of New York’s Audubon Ballroom, into a waiting van where they kept dancing, and onto the Edgewater ferry, where they continued to swing right into New Jersey. When the cops busted them up in New Jersey, they crossed back into Harlem, and then headed for Connecticut. All the while dancers were passing out, partying, and defying the police.
Now ask yourself: if such an event were to take place today, who would be eager to shut it down – the conservatives and libertarians, or the nanny state Mayor Bloomberg liberals? Who would you rather have a beer with – Ann Coulter or Gloria Steinem? Who seems looser and more fun – George Bush or Barack Obama?
Liberalism anti-fun ethic is evident in places run by the left, not least my hometown of Washington, D.C. There are speed cameras on every block, just in case someone, even in the wee hours of the morning, decides to have a little fun and speed. In Montgomery County right outside the city, and the most liberal piece of geography outside of San Francisco, not only firecrackers but sparklers are illegal. At a school not far from where I live, bureaucrats just put up a long fence along the top of a big hill – the spot where we had all gone sledding and skateboarding as kids is suddenly considered too dangerous.
The left’s speech police, trigger-warning sensitivity, and oversight of every micro-aggression has created an entire generation that is more uptight than their parents – and grandparents. A segment of the gay population, a community once known for transgressive fun, has become shrill and dogmatic, punishing anyone who doesn’t support their causes. And while digital devices and games appear to provide fun, they lack the physical release and danger that gives authentic fun its edge. From our long commutes to our food police, from political correctness to speed traps and speech codes, from humorless feminists to zombified kids on their devices, no one’s having a good time anymore.
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