Posted on 06/04/2007 9:52:00 AM PDT by Hank Kerchief
(If you want on or off this list please freepmail me.)
Hank
$!@#’n Bump.
Hell yeah!
>.>
}:-)4
Lovely sentiments. Historically speaking and in realistic terms in most of the world today it just ain't so.
What in the world would the point be of vowing "till death do us part" if all it was doing was stating the fact of eternal love.
The purpose of the vow is to give one something to cling to and uphold when the feeling of love hits a bump.
The words were in use in print and recorded works going back to the 1920s. Doesn’t excuse their widespread use.
But when the dominant media culture gives the sitting president a “pass” for receiving oral sex while deploying troops on the phone, there won’t be any judgements made.
I was taken aback by the rude children responding to Martha with things like "ya" and "yep". When I was growing up as a child we were taught to refer to adults as "yes sir and "yes mam" ~ Is this something that is no longer taught to children?
The N word excluded
Very interesting. I’m not a habitual “cusser”, but I readily admit to cursing when I’m angry (or startled), and I’m always ashamed of it afterwards. That doesn’t seem to be enough to stop me the next time though...strange. But I do notice that profanity is more and more commonplace everyday, and that really is a shame. I really notice it now that I have a 3 year old daughter.
I have spent years cleaning up my language after years of regularly sprinkling my speech with curse words. It is far harder than giving up smoking, which only defiles the body. Profanity is definately worse than smokinfg in that it defiles the mind. When public cursing became avant garde in the 1960s, it was an indication that the culture was sliding toward its dissolution. Everything we’ve seen since then confirms it. This nation has to begin turning around or it simply will not survive, and you can make book on that.
If anybody wants to experience the profanity the author refers to, just swing over to DU.
No s%$!
There are trade-offs in cultural change. While in past, bad language was actually quite common among the lower classes, in the middle classes it was used as risque humor among non-mixed groups, and had been for some time.
But polite people, then and now, generally refrain from casually using bad language in polite situations. It is just not a polite thing to do.
It shouldn’t be looked at in a vacuum, either. In much of middle America, cliques of holier-than-thou religious people were often very oppressive to anyone they could look down on, and were one of the big reasons for Kinsey’s sexual revolution, which sought to overturn this repugnant social order.
For example, the movie “Footloose” was not really about the 1980s, it was about the 1950s. John Lithgow’s portrayal of a domineering preacher offended by dancing, in that case, was the norm for much of small town America. And a lot of people resented it.
Another little known aspect of the time was real segregation in many places, with a white and a black side of town, living parallel to each other, and in some cases, with a nearly parallel structure of authority, one for whites and one for blacks. It was in its death throes as well. The end of “separate but equal” social classes.
It was a very stratified society of small towns instead of the far more homogeneous Levittown-modeled suburbs that were just starting to crop up.
Idealizing the 1950s is foolish. Were the people then happy with what they had and were, they would have kept it, instead of looking for and finding better ways of living.
Good article. I work with a few people, my boss in particular who have absolutely no control over what they say. We’re in a business environment and it amazes me what he gets away with saying in a mixed environment of supposedly professiional people.
He can’t use the argument of blowing off steam either. He seems to live in a perpetual state of anger and self-rightousness. Everyone else but him in our rather large company is either incompetent or a liar.
Why does he keep hiring incompetents and liars? What does his doing so say about his skills as a manager? :)
I doubt the author is claiming that the 50s were superior in all ways to today. It’s obvious, I think, that they weren’t, with the issues you mention prime examples. Jim Crow was a blot on America, and we should all be glad he’s gone for good.
However, it seem equally obvious to me that we haven’t gotten rid of self-righteousness, for example. It just morphed into PC. Different groups are trying to push their values on the rest of us, for different reasons, but the attitude is almost identical. One exception is that the government is more involved today in enforcing the designated values, or at least lip service to them.
Can there be no possible middle ground between “banned in Boston” and competitive genitalia flashing among young starlets?
You understanding of what the 1950s was like is based in part on "Footloose?" You're pulling our leg, right?
"No one puts Baby in a corner!"
It ain’t his people. It’s everyone else in the different departments of the company.
Thank you for posting this.
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