SOMETIMES I FEEL like a frog that has been placed on a stove in a saucepan filled with cool water and doesn't hop out as the heat gradually rises. America/the world/civilization has been going to hell in a handbasket since long before I was born. The decline and fall of America/the world/civilization seemed to be all anyone talked about when I was growing up during the wonder years -- that's when we wondered who would drop the Big One first, the U.S.A. or the U.S.S.R. That we would all die in a fireball leaving our shadow on the sidewalk was pretty much a given. That we would go to hell for all eternity afterwards was also a given, although Philadelphia Catholic school children also knew that we had a get-out-of-jail-free card (a Perfect Act of Contrition) if we could only have the wits to say it in the five seconds between the flash and incineration.
Culturally America/the world/civilization has been to hell and back so many times I lost count a long time ago. Elvis, bikinis, the Beatles, mini skirts, hippies, interracial anything, same sex everything, disco, yuppies, androgeny, gangsta rap, greed, more greed and, currently, crying over spilt greed. All of these were pointed to as signs of doom about to be delivered (meanwhile in North Korea a diminutive militaristic madman named Kim Jong Il is playing chicken with nuclear weapons like a teenage drag racer on Delaware Avenue.)
I have lived through dozens of culture changing evil influences, influences that would have turned the nuns who taught me into pillars of salt. It's easy to draw the line between right and wrong, but what about the line between wrong and this-is-so-wrong-it-says-something-about-society wrong? Remember the teenage girl from Florida who didn't wear panties on yearbook photo day resulting in a photo that showed more than she wanted? Look at the American Apparel ad in the back page of the current Philadelphia Weekly and tell me that doesn't cross some kind of line. The model meets the reader's eye, her legs are spread provocatively. Her legs are bare except for colorful scrunchies on her ankles and a trim black wedge between her legs. OMG! As a male looking at that ad, I can tell you that the word "SCRUNCHIES!" will never have the same meaning. And I guess that was the point.
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