It must be a heavy burden you bear to be so estranged from your culture. Are you really as unhappy a person as you so often sound?
My personal opinion is that in many ways, American culture is less decadent than it once was. Folks as a whole used to be far more brutal in their prejudices, ignorance and bigotry than is largely true at present. And in many ways the average American is more polite and considerate than was true a couple of generations ago. Nor despite the rhetoric, do I think our culture today is more a culture of death than it was in some age past; indeed, I think the reverse is true.
I don't understand where you all keep getting the idea I'm the least bit "unhappy". It's silly. I'm happier now than I've ever been in my life. I have no fear and though I may suffer like (or sometimes more than) others, I generally find it's a great source for wisdom and charity.
By the way ... my Mom admitted the other day to sometimes "feeling like TORIE" when she gets off the phone with me and wonders "what the hell did she just say?"
As is so often the case with your contributions, Torie, you enlighten by asserting the exact opposite of reality. Gutting all cultural loyalties, and then turing them into a methodist ice-cream social does not indicate "tolerance" or "politeness" and is, in fact, the antithesis of multiculturalism
Tolerance is the ability to let someone live who is not at all like you. Politeness is the ability to fear, loathe, sometimes abominate someone and still speak in the public square without killing them.
In my great-grandparents time more people held more diverse prejudicesas you call them and almost no one had locks on their doors. The country never engaged in a 78 day bombing campaign in order to teach a recalcitrant foreign People the lessons of "humanitarianism". Such brutality would have been unthinkable.
There is no ignorance as brutal as the ignorance of modern American tolerance-mongers because their prejudice is based upon the superstitious belief in the great god One--the Baal that consumes all individuality; the horrible idea that, really, underneath, we are all the same.
Doesn't it make you just a wee bit nervous when you realize that the United States was never as hated by the poor people of the world as we have been since we enshrined "tolerance" into our foreign policy? You really don't see the horrible paradox of that? No. Of course not. Paradox is a frightful thing to Enlightened folk. They like the clean, well lighted, antiseptic and safe ways of the women's "health" clinic--nothing more tolerant than that--eh?
Your kind Torie, is a killer. The fact that you display your vanquished as mummies in your museum of tolerance makes you no less awful to contemplate. You gut true diversity with the same relish that you gut the language.
And were you around two generations ago? I was around before then, and if you were you must not have been living in the same USA I was.