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108 Articulating culture in the media age

the “right decisions” more or less on their own. The incident he describes,
where his son has downloaded inappropriate media, does show that he
intervened, but yet his assessment of the outcome was that the decision
was his son’s, a decision that happened to coincide with Glenn’s own pref-
erences in the matter.
Third, these ideas about parenting are clearly normative, in that what
he wishes to project of himself and his ideas he would consider to be
models for others. There is also a normative undercurrent; a social philos-
ophy that connects his own “self-help” orientation with a broader
culture – influenced by the media – that stresses “victimhood” instead of
self-reliance. It is important to see that, for Glenn, this conflict is one that
has religious and spiritual overtones. For him, his religious conversion was
deeply connected with his triumph over his alcoholism. He sees, then, the
question of self-reliance as something that is also deeply spiritual. He
cannot disconnect the two. The media are implicated in undermining this
spiritual/self-reliance value in a couple of ways. They portray examples of
victimization at the social group rather than individual level, and in their
attempts to contextualize such things they (to Glenn) perpetuate excuses
for individuals not doing anything to better themselves. They further
traffic in materialistic as opposed to ascetic values, thus undermining the
kind of moral uprightness that Glenn sees as important to spiritual self-
reliance.
It is hard to miss that much of Glenn’s representations of his social/spir-
itual philosophy is inflected with race. These statements are not simple
statements about issues of victimzation, self-reliance, and self-control in
the abstract. The examples he uses are focused on race, and this is clearly
an issue for him.
Fourth, his narratives connect him with others, both significant and less
significant, binding his sense of who he is in the narrative to a concomitant
sense of the others he relates to, specifically his children, Liz, and the men
who form his social network at church. One way this is expressed is in
terms of his relations with his sons. He aspires to convey to them the
essence of true manhood. Invoking one of what I called “the repressed
modes” of religious experience in Chapter 3 – experience itself – Glenn
suggests that what society needs is concrete rites of passage for young men.
This works at resolving another contradiction addressed in Glenn’s narra-
tive, that exists between an impersonal, media-saturated society, and a
personal and individual encounter with what is right, good, and appro-
priate.
Fifth, a particular normative or ethical dimension enters because Glenn
is a recovering alcoholic. He sees himself, and wishes to be seen, as
someone who has conquered that disease through a mixture of
autonomous action and commitment to his faith. His concentration on his
own experience – its centrality in his narrative of self – really dominates