Stoopid Stuff

Cultural Insanity

OK, it's official. Americans are insane. I'm not sure how we decide what's important and what isn't, but the process doesn't seem to include logic, critical thinking or any rational process whatsoever. Our collective cultural prudery, knee-jerk understanding of right and wrong and the ongoing brainwashing process have contributed to a completely irrational worldview.

What's got me going off like this? Well, I heard this report on NPR this morning. And I had to wonder. How many killings, savage beatings, brutal rapes and wall-to-wall near random gunplay do we see in movies? Smoking and sex are bad. No amount of horrors, brutality, the worst kind of abuse, hatred and misogyny are even important enough to comment upon.

Now personally, I don't get really wound up about what's portrayed in movies and television. People know that it is story-telling. Reading a novel is a much richer, more profound experience and yet down through the years I have heard nobody saying that we must control what our kids read for fear it will encourage them to act out those same awful behaviors. Nope, the fact of the complaint is not an issue for me.

The substance of the story, on the other hand, most certainly is. What it says about Americans sense of propriety. The things we find acceptable, and the things we don't. Most effectively represented by our long nightmare of being so horribly tormented by a glimpse of Janet Jackson's right breast. The horror! Jack Bauer can kill, maim and torture and people rave about the quality of the program. But a perfectly lovely, harmless breast causes a national upheaval. That's bizarre.

This is representative of the American people's odd sense of cultural acceptability. People who rail against abortion, who are determined to make certain that every woman carry every pregnancy to term without consideration for the consequences, not just for the woman but the child, will then turn around and with a straight face happily endorse capital punishment. Life is sacred, I guess, right up until that belief interferes with some kind of dark-ages, biblical reprisal killing.

Now don't read this as somehow "pro-smoking". Smoking is nasty. It smells bad, kills you without even providing a decent buzz. I cannot for the life of me understand why cigarettes remain legal in America. The only theory I have is that they provide no pleasure whatsoever, so our puritanical society will allow them to be sold and distributed. If they got you high, they'd be gone by now, except for a thriving underground tobacco business. For that matter, I don't really care what they show in movies - let the person telling the story tell it the way they envision it. But it is the priorities, the categorization of "good" and "bad" actions, those things we find unacceptable and those things we embrace. It just seems that the American population needs a good dose of pragmatism.

posted by mikey @ 9:12 AM