“within living memory residents and companies were fleeing Gotham, that newsweeklies heralded the rotting of the Big Apple and movies like Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy plausibly depicted New York as a nightmare peopled by freaks. “
And some people feel New York has changed? Some people feel New York is no longer “a nightmare peopled by freaks”?
The book could have been much shorter if New Yorkers had concealed carry permits in the 70’s....or even today.
“To the elites, in fact, all the “victimless” disorder wasn’t just harmless but healthy: drugs were mind-expanding, madmen were marching to the beat of a different drummer, blasting boomboxes were the exuberant expression of what we hadn’t yet learned to call multiculturalism, and restraint was oppression. As Bellow understood, social disorder flowed from cultural change.
Of all the Puritan restraints, sexual restraint was Number One on the elites’ hit list. The opposite of a virtue, it was now deemed harmful, malignant. As the ascendant psychotherapeutic worldview had it, Sammler caustically notes, “the bad puritanical attitudes from the sick past . . . have damaged civilization so much.” In the 1960s, the elites wanted “the final triumph of the Enlightenment—Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Adultery!”
Little has change, less has improved. http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/RevealingStatistics.html
see also http://conservapedia.com/Moral_decline