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Townhall...
Zinging a New Song of
a Culture Gone Wrong
By Marybeth Hicks
7/20/2011
I’m working the refreshment tent this week at the music festival in my
hometown, putting in my volunteer hours for our children’s school, when
I realize I am not shocked by the tattoo-covered, fifty-something woman
walking toward me in Daisy Duke shorts and midriff-baring bustier.
Her stiletto sandals, black nail polish, pigtails and pierced, red lips
donšt faze me in the least. I turn to her without blinking and smile
easily as I ask, “What can I get for you?”
In retrospect, it’s possible this is the moment when I surrendered to
the reality that our cultural decline is now complete.
Heck, when you donšt bat an eye at a teenage boy’s gauged ears (those
are the pierced ear rings that put giant holes in the ear lobes), and
you take for granted that the child in front of you in church will
spend the entire service playing games on a Nintendo DS, and you don’t
roll your eyes anymore when you realize your middle-aged neighbor is
highlighting his hairSwellS youšve been worn down.
There was a time when it made headlines that a young woman’s phantom
pregnancy resulting in her unexpectedly giving birth, when she thought
all she had was a bad stomachache. This happens so often now there’s a
reality show on the Discovery Channel called “I Didn’t Know I Was
Pregnant.”
For some of us mothers, for example this is like naming a
show “I Didn’t Know I Was Breathing.” But culturally, we’d be in the
minority.
Sadly, those days are long gone, faded into cultural oblivion along
with obituaries in which the last names of surviving family members are
all the same.
Not only has our culture devolved into a celebration of diverse and
widespread tastelessness, but those of us who yearn for bygone days of
common social mores are loathe to even mention such things, for fear of
offending the people we find offensive.
Perhaps this is why the new book, “Of Thee I Zing: America’s Cultural
Decline from Muffin Tops to Body Shots,” by radio host Laura Ingraham
with co-author Raymond Arroyo is such a treat. For culturally cathartic
ranting, it’s well worth the cover price.
But be forewarned: “Of Thee I Zing” may elevate your blood pressure.
Reading Miss Ingraham’s observations about dirty dancing at the prom,
designer duds for infants, and airplane seat companions who fire up
laptop porn will likely cause you to break into a sweat when you
realize your chances of avoiding such phenomena are nil.
Then again, Miss Ingraham offers perhaps the only reasonable response
to such fads as holiday sweaters, internet dating, and mealtime house
calls from Jehovah’s Witnesses: A good laugh.
“The path from Florence Henderson to Snooki is a rocky one! It’s a path
that we should avoid, and help our children avoid, if at all possible.
(If for no other reason than to stop the proliferation of the Snooki
bump, I believe it is possible.),” Miss Ingraham offers.
“Of Thee I Zing” should make us realize that if we put today’s American
culture into a time capsule, we will all be a mortified when future
generations discover the truth about us. That is, assuming they have
regained some cultural decorum by then.
Perhaps in that distant, decorous future, our spray tans, invisible
braces, sagging pants, flip flops at formal functions, blue jeans at
funerals, and fascination with the likes of Charlie Sheen will be only
the outdated trappings of a society that lost, for a time, its good
breeding.
“Taken individually these cultural failings are not the end of
civilization,” Miss Ingraham says. “But taken as a whole they indicate
that we have lost respect for our human dignity and are setting a truly
tragic example for those who will follow us.”
“We are better than this as a people, and so are our kids.”
Read it at Townhall
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