the mooch

It’s too bad he’s gone, but can we ever forget him? A newly minted Communications Director for the President of the United States of America who apparently didn’t see anything wrong with telling a reporter that one of his White House colleagues was ‘trying to s*ck his own c*ck’.?

In New York City, of course, there isn’t. I would submit, though, that most Flyoverlanders do have a problem with this; they’re just too cowed to admit it. It’s part of the problem with this country—that we’re letting New York (and its westward-migrating confreres in Hollywood) determine too much of our national culture. What’s the matter with this, you ask? I don’t know, you tell me. Do you find anything wrong with this, anything obviously cringeworthy, anything totally ‘inappropriate,’ as the current euphemism would have it?

Something’s wrong with a culture that treats us daily to the vulgarisms of a Howard Stern and nightly to the casual profanity of a Bill Maher. Oh, I know, I know: ‘Free Speech! I may disagree with what you say, etc., etc.’ But have we become such sheep that we no longer even protest such an assault on propriety? I’m just saying there’s something wrong with this, something wrong with a culture that has led itself to believe that this kind of thing is really acceptable.

It reminds me of something the late comedian Steve Allen said about the increasing vulgarity of comedy toward the end of his life. “These people pride themselves on ‘pushing the envelope,’” Allen said, “but why do they always insist on pushing it down?”