10 Comments

As a little old lady, I agree with your assessment of modern "entertainment." I find the routine vulgarity of language and action to be disturbing. The crotch grabbing and spreading, twerking, tonguing, and general behavior best suited to privacy, really grate on me. People complain about lack of privacy, then flaunt their privates. I don't understand it.

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Dec 3, 2022·edited Dec 3, 2022

Nevertheless, there is a glimmering of hope. A handful of young journalists writing for Reuters and the NYT, seem earnestly interested in re-dedicating themselves to letting the evidence lead . . . they are actually listening to and communicating with me and many other parents like me whose families have been harmed by one or another facet of the latest iteration of the baleful "woke" ideology that incentivises our so-called "best and brightest" to narcissism, while peddling lies in service to various anti-human agendas.

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Thanks Jenny....it’s nice to escorted back into beauty....

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Dec 3, 2022·edited Dec 3, 2022

This should make you smile Jenny. Lots of cowbell too!

It's what I play when I'm really disgusted with the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RJvj5HZai8

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Once upon a time, not that long ago, there was a general consensus that there were eternal God-given values that mattered. Even those who routinely transgressed these values (I think, for example, of many in the upper classes jumping into nonmarital beds on weekends at rural estates), this sort of activity was not generally flaunted publicly. Today the outrageous is openly celebrated (which, I suspect, is both the product of an absence of education in biblical truth and a desperate cry for help). There is a big difference between an arrogant pretense of confidence and a quiet confidence in following Christ.

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Keep writing. We have become and anti-culture, a culture of death. The Biblical term is "reprobate." I am not suggesting your thoughts are necessarily religious but I can't help but conclude that our pathology in the west has taken on such a religious architecture that the only I think of us as being In a very sick spiritual condition.

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Thanks again, JH, for hitting more nails on the head than a journeyman carpenter on a Friday. Sometimes I feel like I'm literally dying of nostalgia, and yes, I know what "literally" means. This is a time of stupidity, crudity, and emptiness. Someone will quote a sage from millennia ago complaining about the youth of his time, and then claim that nothing is new, but today is different. The kind of things grownups clutched their pearls over in the past--the waltz, ragtime, Rudy Vallee, Elvis--were innocuous annoyances compared to the thumping "cappin' cops and beatin' hos" crap that tops the charts, and that many young people stream directly into their brains, constantly, today. Ugliness rules. Beauty is scoffed at. It just gets worse and worse.

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Jenny, I grew up in the late 40s-early 60s. There was no TV until I was about nine. There were movies in town and at the drive-in theaters, mostly westerns and gangster movies with a few gems such as Disney's Song of the South (which is now banned because it allegedly gives a false picture of slavery when it actually is set a decade or more after slavery ended.) Although we had radio with a few shows like Little Orphan Annie and Gunsmoke, my main source of entertainment was books. I read everything I could get my hands on, some of it adult even while I was a child. There was music, both on the radio and local when musicians got together with their guitars, fiddles, banjos and mandolins in somebody's living room or front porch and occasionally at a public venue such as a schoolhouse. We had newspapers, but they were local/regional although some reported national news. The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal were unheard of. When I wasn't reading, I was outdoors roaming the fields and woods. Later on, I was hunting. We also went fishing, sometimes in the ponds on our place and occasionally took a trip to "the river," the Tennessee, to a damned segment officially known as Kentucky Lake.

Everything changed for some people when TV came along. Not so much for me because I still did a lot of reading and continued my outdoor activities although I did have my favorite TV programs. For some of my peers, TV entertainment was "dance parties" such as the one hosted by Wink Martindale (with whom I was once Facebook friends and who is far more conservative than most media figures.) I didn't care much for the dance parties although I did sometimes watch them to look at the girls. I was somewhat put out when two girls I knew well and had known literally all my life appeared on one. We went to a Baptist church where dancing was frowned upon.

I had gone from home to the Air Force by the time the Beatles came along and everything started going haywire. Elvis had caused a sensation and Buddy Holly and others had been popular, but it was the "British Invasion" that led to more and more outrageousness. Soon beer was supplemented - or replaced - by pot, which had formerly been found mainly among blacks and Puerto Ricans (who were famous for sniffing airplane glue) which led into far more powerful - and deadly - drugs. This was particularly true among musicians and their fans. "Modern" music no longer comes from the heart, it come from drug-afflicted minds.

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Jenny, somehow, you always manage to hit the nail on the head! (I know, I always say that, but it's true!)

And the French song you linked was lovely, really made me smile!

Going back to what you wrote, I think that main problem is that if you question any aspect of this new dogma or morality (in this case, sex positivity, body positivity, etc.. ) you are likely to be labelled as 'right wing' 'prudish' or 'problematic'. And no one wants to be labelled that. That fear of being on the wrong ('right') side paralyses many of us into grudging acceptance, even if/when we know it's simply wrong or just plain ugly. Common sense has been thrown out to make room for anything new, trendy, edgy and woke, regardless of what it means for real people, in the real world, regardless of whether it actually makes the world a better place or makes people happier. But, if you're not fully on board with it all, you're a 'bigot' 'slut-shamer' or 'fascist' (and once you're past your forties, your age will likely be used against you, too, which is why many middle-aged people are even more keen to show they're as woke and progressive as the young ones!) This black/white way of thinking has penetrated everything, from politics and now, sexuality. Of course, there is nothing wrong with a healthy expression of sexuality, or even being a bit on the wild side. But the behaviour you mentioned, regarding entertainment, has gone from being seen as OTT and exploitative to cool and positive. Remember the mostly negative reaction Miley Cyrus got from the mainstream media when she did that infamous twerking with teddy bears performance in 2013 at the VMAs? One of her back-up singers later said it was one of the most degrading things she'd ever done. I think that video would probably be applauded now. For breaking barriers. The trouble is, so many barriers have already been broken. So, where can they go from there? Increasingly weirder and more provocative behaviour, to stay relevant and get more clicks. Where will it end?

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