I came downtown this morning so that I could attend a noon lecture at the library titled The Age of Pretence: Reflections on Post-Modernism. I’d heard about the lecture, sponsored by the Langara College Community Lecture Series, from the events section of the VPL’s website, which didn’t provide much more of a description beyond the title and the speaker.

I’m no scholar of post-modern theory. In fact, I’m woefully ignorant about post-modernism beyond the simplest of understandings. That’s why I went. The more discourse I hear about the subject, the greater the depth of my knowledge and understanding. That’s the theory, anyway, and it was with that expectation that I planned to attend this lecture.

I first suspected that my expectation was not to be satisfied when I entered the Alice McKay room at the library, sat down and looked around at the audience. I unscientifically calculated that the median age of the attendees was about 106, and pondered why the audience was so heavily represented by the apparently well-to-do elderly demographic. I’d picked up a brochure at the door listing all of the series’ speakers, at the top of which in large letters was the word “Success”. Imagining that it might be an acronym for some sort of seniors activity club, like perhaps Sexegenarians Undergoing Continuing Community Education Services Society, or the like, I searched for a clue, but nowhere in the the brochure was there any explanation of the “Success” title. It’s a weekday, it’s free, and it doesn’t require a bingo dabber is all the explanation I could come up with for the makeup of the audience.

I have nothing against the elderly. In fact, I often get along better with seniors than I do with those in my own age group, so I’m not complaining about their presence at the lecture. I think it’s great that they choose to do something ostensibly intellectual with their free time. I simply raise it as a reasonable curiosity, since I have not attended a public meeting at which the median age was so high since I went to the annual general meeting of the Social Credit Party in 1985, where one could sit in the back row and be amazed at the preponderance of blue-rinse.

As it turned out, the Socred blue-rinse image was not wholly inappropriate. The lecture was not so much an explanation of post-modernism as it was a diatribe against it. Either the speaker, a retired Langara lecturer named Martin Toren, tailored his speech to the tastes of his audience, or his reputation amongst the conservative blue-rinse set attracted the audience. He started out by summing up post-modernism as a reaction to the enlightenment in which all certainty about scientific, philosophical, and religious truth has been inadvisably discarded, and then spent the rest of the lecture blaming post-modernism for such current atrocities as bad grammar and blue jeans.

Toren bemoaned the lack of respect for authority, the abandonment of proper and sensible fashion (including the tragedy of women failing to wear skirts), and awful architecture, blaming the French (specifically Foucault and Derrida) for introducing all kinds of crazy ideas. In one appalling example, he talked about the decline in dressing standards by describing how modern fashions come about.

According to Toren, designers such as Nike go down to the “black ghettos” and see what clothing trends all the young black men have created for themselves, then sell them to the rest of “us”. Apparently, 25 percent of all black men do time in prison (Toren’s figure), where they are not allowed to wear belts in case they try to hang themselves. Therefore, when they get out of jail black men run around the ghetto with their pants half falling down.

Toren also inferentially blamed black people for the decline in the appreciation of classical music by explaining that post-modernism demands that we all strive for the lowest common denominator in our cultural practises, as exemplified by the “fact” that the biggest selling music today is rap and hip hop. According to Toren, anyone who can rhyme and create a backbeat can write a rap song, which he embarrassingly proved by reciting his own, mercifully brief, rap. Except for the fact that each line of his little poem ended in the same rhyme (and I’m not even sure that that is characteristic), it bore no relation to rap at all, as far as I could see. I was just relieved that Toren didn’t put a ball cap backwards on his head and tap out a backbeat on the lectern while affecting an ebonic inflection.

Throughout all of this, the elderly members of the audience who were still awake were chuckling and nodding knowingly, for it seemed that they had probably got what they came for: a speech by an old geezer complaining about how the world has changed by pointing fingers at everyone and everything that doesn’t fit their Victorian sensibilities, without acknowledging their own complicity, and without once mentioning the word “capital”, that force through which they were able to amass their privileges at the expense of many of those they blame for society’s decay.

I could be misreading Toren’s lecture. Perhaps I’m taking too seriously what was secretly intended to be a stand-up comedy routine suited to the entertainment on a cruise ship, but I suspect not. There certainly was an undercurrent of humour to the lecture, but it’s the kind of humour that isn’t really about being funny. Rather, it is the kind that camouflages a cowardly sort of intellectual dishonesty that allows one to express his classism, sexism, racism and, yes, ageism, in subtly destructive, yet socially acceptable, ways.

I did a couple of semesters at Langara, and I’m happy to say that I did not have to suffer any of Martin Toren’s classes. The college would do well to work on improving the content of future lectures.