We've known that for a long time. It might be the only sentence in American English about which there is a consensus. Kurt Vonnegut put his finger on this in an article about the 1972 Republican National Convention*.
During the Nixon and Johnson years, or the Nam years, tons of kids, youngsters of all walks of life, staged hundreds of protests against the war. Each of them came home learning the same bitter lesson: our government just isn't interested in our opinion anymore.
That was, I think, when we all should have thrown our hands up. Which reminds me, now, of the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama ran, and won, on the word "Hope". Hope sells. Sex, like hope, sells. Unlike hope, sex is something we can have.
Our country is going to hell in a handbasket.
It's not hard to agree with Beck and O'Reilly about that. It is hard to agree with them about why our country is headed there. They think we're headed there because our disenfranchised few are trying to stake out some part of the American Dream for themselves. They aren't so up front about that. They try and push the idea that "equal under the law" is a property of socialism or communism, which is true. It is true in the same way that "having a tail" is a property of sewer rats.
According to FOX logic, a horse is trying to be a sewer rat because a horse has a tail.
That's the logic. People buy it. And so, our country is going to hell in a handbasket.
*"In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself", in Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons
To be fair, in the same book is the Playboy interview where Vonnegut says, "You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit."
ReplyDeleteHAHAHAHAH yes, call me a sewer-rat, too.
ReplyDelete