Evil Country
I am getting very disgusted by what has happened to my country, the in-home media of which are now filled with violence and obscenity. Tho the pervasive, graffic, sado-masochistic violence is more pernicious, the obscenity is more upsetting.
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We have for years consented to something we should never have permitted, TV commercials that speak of "erection[s] lasting more than four hours" during the national network newscasts that schoolchildren are assigned to watch for civics and current-events classes. Now, we are being attacked with even more horrifying obscenity, such as a commercial for a drug (Osphena) to combat vaginal pain during SEX by post-menopausal women! During the news. The news that children are told by teachers to watch to keep informed about the world.
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Other examples of outrageous obscenity are all too easy to come up with.
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• Craig Ferguson of The Late Late Show on CBS routinely and casually talks about warming his testicles before the fire. And his remarks, even in interviews with female guests, are filled with explicit sexual references and mentions of sexual body parts.
• On February 11, 2014, black film actress Regina Hall picks up on Ferguson's repeated references, with film and sound effects, of the practice in the Westminster Dog Show of judges' checking if the testicles of dogs have fully descended (what would that matter, by the way?), by saying that she learned to stroke her puppie's testicles for relaxation! She then said that when the puppy's testicles descended, it had "balls". She then had the dog castrated, and could no longer stroke its "balls". She said something unclear about having learned to stroke her dog's testicles from some other black woman at a funeral, as something that soothed dogs, or babies, or something. That insane discussion, advocating an obscene and degenerate, bestial practice, was on national television!
• In his show of February 20, 2014, Ferguson mentions to two young Indonesian women from the audience that one of the guests that nite is Lisa Vanderpump, and says that that sounds like a penis-enlargement device but is not. That's what this 'gentleman' says to these two demure, young Asian women. Later, when Ms. Vanderpump comes out, she herself says the same thing aloud, expressing some indignation, but repeating the insane obscenity. And at the very end of the show, Ferguson yet AGAIN says "penis-enlargement device". He needs to be arrrested and beaten so badly that he never dares say anything obscene on television again, out of terror for his life.
• On January 31, 2014, Jay Leno 'jokes', of severe winter weather, "[It was s]o cold that Anthony Weiner got his penis stuck to his cellphone."
• On February 20, 2014, the repellant 'sitcom', Mom opens with the title character saying at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous (approximate quote) "I know I usually use this time to discuss my sexual / intimacy (?) issues, i.e., fellatio" — whereupon I immediately turned that monstrous, vile show off forever. Everyone responsible for that astonishingly obscene and disgraceful "comedy" should be flogged on television and the Internet, and banished from media for the remainder of their degenerate lives.
• The character "Deb" of ABC's space-alien sitcom based in my state, NJ, The Neighbors, tells a college boy to "Sac up", a grotesk variation of the questionable expression "man-up".
• A "Superlatives" 'joke' on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, February 1, 2014, terms a writer for that show (at whom some professional athletes are getting even for nasty cracks about them by those writers on prior shows), "Most likely to call his right hand, 'The Mrs.'"
• Seth Meyers, new host of the Late Nite talk show that follows Tonite on NBC, said that a new Apple "app" lets people practice oral sex by licking the fone. Meyers added that you know you're getting better when "Siri", the female-voiced informational guide on Apple fones, wants to talk about a closer relationship. That passes for humor in this degenerate age.
• On Jimmy Kimmel Live! March 25th, a film clip from the movie Bad Words has the character played by Jason Bateman claiming, in a conversation with a small boy (10 years old?) that a word he had to spell in a spelling bee was "auto-fellatio". That's supposed to be funny? No such word would be used in a children's spelling bee. Ever. In any part of this country or any country. That the disgusting, subhuman producers of this film would even put forward such a premise shows them unfit to play any role whatsoever in media. They should be banned from all media for the rest of their disgusting, evil lives.
• Late at nite, various TV stations are carrying commercials for a sexual version of KY jelly ("KY Yours + Mine"), and for Trojan condoms and Trojan's own version of a sexual lubricant! What next? Dildos? S&M leather clothing and whips? Chains and handcuffs? Deviant-sex manuals telling everyone of the joys of violence as eroticism? How much farther can we descend into omnipresent obscenity before our civilization is completely destroyed?
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Sexuality is not itself disgraceful, but the unwholesome promotion of sex for the sake of sex is socially destructive. The feeling seems to be that there is no such thing as "private" anymore, and everything that happens can be broadcast openly to everyone, including children. The media have become child molesters.
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Drugs. Recreational drugs are being promoted at the highest levels of media and society. Marijuana has already been legalized in two states for open recreational use, and "medical" marijuana, a disgraceful fraud, is legal in 20 states and the District of Columbia. What next? Prescription 'controls' for legalized recreational drugs, be it Ecstasy/"Molly", Special K, cocaine, heroin, even methamphetamine? We know that there is widespread misuse of prescription drugs, in various forms, from once-legitimate patients entitled to a single prescription who secure multiple prescriptions thru "doctor-shopping", to the use of prescription meds by people who were never entitled to a prescription but who obtain unwarranted prescriptions from corrupt physicians or who simply help themselves to other people's prescriptions in unguarded medicine chests. And thus we know that subjecting dangerous drugs to prescription "controls" means nothing.
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Moreover, all the multitudinous commercials for Viagra, Levitra, and Cialis are for what are, beyond question, recreational drugs for recreational sex, but because they are prescription "medications", we are supposed to pretend that they are legitimate meds for legitimate "health" problems. Now some company has just been denied approval of a "female Viagra" pill, but the FDA is permitting more "trials" for possible future approval of yet another recreational drug for recreational sex.
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There has been an almost total surrender by what should be the guardians of public safety, to the smarmy pretense that we 'cannot' stop drug use, but have to admit failure, and agree that attempts to suppress drugs are more destructive than would be simply surrendering to the radical-libertarian stance that society has no right to tell anyone that they cannot take into their own body anything they want to, whether they think that drugs are harmless, or understand, intellectually but not emotionally, that those substances can disrupt their life and even end it — because the drug-legalization crowd has lied shamelessly, to trivialize the literally "grave" consequences of use of the drugs that society outlawed. A bedrock minimum of 39,000 Americans are known to die from drugs each year.



We are now to believe that legislatures outlawed those substances for absolutely no reason! Never mind that it is hard to get legislatures to do ANYTHING for even the most persuasive of reasons. In regard to drugs, however, we are to believe that legislature after legislature has done something for absolutely no reason! Sure they have.
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Surrender to Crime. In regard to another protection of public safety and morality, a number of states have abolished capital punishment, even where there isn't 1/1,000th of 1% of doubt as to the guilt of the person consigned to death. And then we are surprised that we have far and away the developed world's highest levels of murder and other heartless crime.
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Crime, Even Murder, as Entertainment. Part of the problem is that the popular culture trivializes violent crime, making it over into entertainments.
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To use only a few examples, an episode of the oft-repeated syndicated TV show Comics Unleashed has a 'comic' bit in which a man pretends to be a jealous Latin woman speaking to her boyfriend. 'He' says, to allay her jealousy, that the other woman is dead. 'She' says, "I know. I killed her." The other comics on the panel, and the audience, laff. Oh, yes, murder is funny — in a country gone mad.
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The b&w classic TV show from the late 1950's and early 60's, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, regularly made lite of murder, to the point where it was supposed to be funny. Again, American media put forward murder as comedy! That is despicable insanity.
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Even when the media do not try to make violent crime and even murder funny, films, theater, and television are hugely shot-thru with crime as entertainment.
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• Bullets Over Broadway, a new Broadway musical, has both a gangster and a hitman character. What fun.
• Deborah Copaken Kogan, author of the novel, The Red Book, in a TV interview on the PBS show Book Case, says of warfare that it's "a young man's, and now, thank goodness, young woman's" business. Thank goodness warfare is now a young woman's business?! Yes, women, who in prior eras and other countries, have been exalted as the font of life, are now free to pursue a career as killers — of men, women, and children — "thank goodness".
• The Ion Television network typically devotes some 13 hours a day to marathons of programs like Criminal Minds, Without a Trace, Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (sex crimes), and even Canadian crime shows like Flashpoint. Almost every day of the week, Ion Television broadcasts 13 hours in a row of crime as entertainment, yet dares to refer to its offerings as "Positively Entertaining" (where we are to think of their programming as carrying a "positive" message! How can that kind of endless wallowing in crime fail to affect people's minds?
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Inhuman Coldness. Beyond crime as entertainment, we have odd glorying in other people's misfortunes. A commercial in New Jersey, which recently legalized online gambling for NJ residents, shows one woman asking another, "Did you hear that Joanie and Todd broke up?" A second woman says, "Good!", then goes online to gamble at the Internet operation of an Atlantic City casino. So, a loving relationship breaking up is something to celebrate, and gambling is a good way to celebrate it!
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The United States today is plainly a society that has lost its moorings and is floating around aimlessly and destructively. And not just self-destructively. We embark upon war after war, directly and indirectly slautering people by the hundreds of thousands for insufficient reason, or no moral reason at all, even as we abstain from intervening in places that legitimately warrant our intervention, such as Syria.
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The notion seems to have taken over society that people don't need moorings nor moral guidance, on anything. Everyone can make up their own mind about everything, no matter how stupid, ignorant, and naive those people might be. Values mean nothing. Nobody needs a personal morality; and assuredly nobody needs a socially originated and imposed morality. Anything we want to do is fine, even if it adversely impacts others.
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The main argument of the drug-legalization conspiracy is that if someone ravages his or her own life thru drug use, that's their own business, and nobody else has anything to say about it. No, the spouse and children of people who destroy their lives aren't harmed by the destruction of that spouse or parent! Of course not. Nor are members of the extended family, nor an employer, nor co-workers, nor drivers or pedestrians when drug-addled losers take to the roads. We are to believe that drugs are completely harmless, to the person who uses them, certainly, but most especially to everyone else on Earth. Guess again.
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Moral Teachers Wanted. The Nation has no moral arbiters nor leaders anymore. Few people pay any attention to sermons in houses of worship, nor read any moral teachings from any source, not the Bible, not church bulletins, not the writings of major philosophers of our own time or history, not from any source whatsoever. We don't need no steengking morality!
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The teachings of the Bible were of course in many cases nonsensical, based on the will of a nonexistent God — which was actually two entirely different (nonexistent) Gods: the Jews' God of Wrath, as delineated in the Old Testament, and the Christians' God of Love, as delineated in the New Testament. The two Gods demanded different things of people, but theologians kept trying to persuade everyone that the two entirely incompatible moralities were identical! The pretense was that, altho the mandates were facially inconsistent, that was only how things appear to people who don't know the Bible; but once you know the ins and outs of "Judeo-Christian" theology, you will see that it is actually completely consistent despite many, many blatant internal contradictions.
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The consequence of the confusion over what the Bible mandates is that anyone can use the Bible to justify any moral stance. Rightwingers claim that God is on their side, in their vicious selfishness and heartlessness toward the suffering of the poor and powerless, and that God wholly approves the pursuit of wealth as a good in itself. Liberals say that Jesus (a part of the Godhead) insisted that we be merciful and generous, and that it is easier for a camel to pass thru the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I really like this Jesus guy, whether he be real or a character in moralistic fiction.
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Observers who understand that there is no way to reconcile the contradictions within the Bible, have had to cast about to find more rational guidance as to morality. Alas, there have in recent decades been relatively few major thinkers of wide popular following who have devoted themselves to guiding people as to moral choices. Yes, we have had advice columnists who discuss the petty morality of etiquette and interpersonal niceties. And yes, we have some talkshow hosts who explore some aspects of interpersonal morality. But there are few to no widely heeded commentators who address grand matters of social and political morality, even as to domestic (U.S.) issues, much less as to world-spanning moral questions.
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There are very few publications or television programs that discuss such matters. There may be some Internet sites that address grand morality, but none has massive readership, much less nearly universal readership. On PBS, the public-affairs program Moyers & Co. regularly discusses political issues in moral terms, but it is almost alone in that, and is not one of PBS's programs with a major audience. A number of programs on PBS and commercial networks survey politics in terms of the game, not the morality.
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Those of us who see the nitemare this country and planet have become are as much voices in the wilderness as any prophet of old. We haven't, as yet, been killed, like John the Baptist or Jesus of Nazareth. But that might be only because we cannot make ourselves heard and thus have no influence on events, no ability to stop the powerful from doing evil.
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In order to know what to do, we need to appreciate what has gone wrong, and understand how it happened. Then we can evaluate what might fix things. I shall, from time to time in this blog, address various aspects of this evil country, speaking to specific areas (e.g., "Evil Country: Distribution of Wealth") rather than to a specific number in an open-ended series of essays ("Evil Country, Part 11").
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:57 PM