The Dumbing Down of America - Here's Why

[vitanola]

What irks me is how now we have to put our hand across our chest for every patriotic song. God Bless America is a great song, but you DON'T put your hand over your heart for it, same with the National Anthem. It's NOT PROPER.

I see the same thing with "God Bless the USA" and Toby Keith's "The Angry American". Now I do admit that our great National Anthem does have a pretty bloody stanza ("Their blood has wiped out their foul footsteps pollution"), but that verse is little known and seldom, if ever performed. Not so with "So we'll put a boot in your @$$..." Saluting that song is like saluting "Goodbye, Mama! I'm Off to Yokahama", "We don't Want the Bacon (What We Want is a Piece of the Rhine" or "Marching Through Georgia".



All right, I admit that I feel an urge to salute the last named number, but I try to restrain myself.

Women aren't supposed to take their hats off, either, but nobody seems to understand that.

I find that positively frightening. How terribly dangerous. Wherever do they put their hat-pins...

 

[Feraud]

Women aren't supposed to take their hats off, either, but nobody seems to understand that.

Men are supposed to remove their ironic backwards trucker caps but most don't seem to understand that either!

 

[LizzieMaine]

Of course, it's hard to take your hat off when you've got one of those giant ballpark beers in each hand.

 

[LoveMyHats2]

There is a lot of interesting view points tossed around so far. Can it not really be a values affair if you wanted to sum everything up? I can be picked on for saying this, but I really do believe it to be true. Anyone in general can toss around numbers and polls, percentages and any set of factors to claim a real answer (officially done all the time) but to me, the problem is values...lack of them. One generation raised to not spank a child, give the child control....allow a way of living to make the child be a center focus point instead of having the child just be a part of the entire picture.....then that child grows up, and has a child of her/his own....a following of different values is now the norm, for that family...and it spreads. Spreads to where a large number of individuals that are adults, are not really willing to be accountable for anything. A once wonderful structured family system and values, have become eroded. Less popular. Some of it can be named, the "pepsi generation". It started a while back, not sure the actual starting point, but for me, it is a reason to desire to continue to hang on to what would be easily called, "the years gone by", the golden age, stuck in the past, what ever you want to call it. Sure socially mankind has always had problems and issues, but it just seems today that in general, what was respected, expected, and happened...is no longer happening. Less personal pride. Many individuals that actually fear a pencil and paper. Yank a cell phone from them, instant panic attack!

 

[Feraud]

Of course, it's hard to take your hat off when you've got one of those giant ballpark beers in each hand.

Apparently it's not a ballgame unless people are getting stupid drunk. The last ballgame I attended with my son was nearly ruined due to drunken idiots yelling obscenities and being a nuisance. Park management did their job of locating and evicting the morons but no one should have to pay current ticket prices and listen to a minute of this nonsense.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Oh, how I hate that stuff. And at Fenway, at least, it's *always* college boys from BU who seem to be majoring in Public Intoxication. And always seem to be sitting right behind me.

At least in the Era, when fans got violent and out of control it was in defense of principles.

YER BLIND, YOU BUM!

 

[Feraud]

Also I imagine the potential to be puked on was lessened with straight out fist-fight..

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

I see the same thing with "God Bless the USA" and Toby Keith's "The Angry American". Now I do admit that our great National Anthem does have a pretty bloody stanza ("Their blood has wiped out their foul footsteps pollution"), but that verse is little known and seldom, if ever performed. Not so with "So we'll put a boot in your @$$..." Saluting that song is like saluting "Goodbye, Mama! I'm Off to Yokahama", "We don't Want the Bacon (What We Want is a Piece of the Rhine" or "Marching Through Georgia".

Though there had been campaigns in the past to replace "The Star Spangled Banner" with "God Bless America" as National Anthem, something which I myself favor. I mean it's a bit embarassing that the tune of two of our most iconic national songs were copied from the British. "The Star Spangled Banner" (old English drinking song) and "My Country Tis' Of Thee" ("God Save The Queen").

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've always liked the idea of having a National Anthem written by a tough Russian-Jewish Lower East Side immigrant -- precisely because it would very much upset the kind of "Americans" who I like to see upset.

 

[Sprinkles]

Police officer doing his part!

Oh, how I hate that stuff. And at Fenway, at least, it's *always* college boys from BU who seem to be majoring in Public Intoxication. And always seem to be sitting right behind me.

At least in the Era, when fans got violent and out of control it was in defense of principles.

YER BLIND, YOU BUM!

 

[Deleted member 16736]

Hooligans back in the day were much better dressed.

 

[Deleted member 16736]

I've noticed that people don't use as many adjectives, probably because they don't know any. Everything now is just "amazing." There's a fascinating science fiction short story by Kornbluth, "The Marching Morons," about a future society of dimwits who rule the intelligentsia. It's fascinating and all-too-real. Kornbluth was right, and if anything, his prediction came true sooner than even he thought it would. When I see demagogues like Obama in the White House, I think only an uneducated electorate could have put him there.

 

[Feraud]

Hooligans back in the day were much better dressed.

It's a rare thug today that can throw a punch and keep his trousers around his waist..

 

[LizzieMaine]

He ain't no thug, he's an avenger for justice. That guy was safe by a mile.

 

[Feraud]

I dunno..the guy looked out to me..

 

[Fletch]

Well, why not think up a way to fix the old [coat tree]? Unless it had crumbled into dust -- in which case you ought to be searching for termite exterminators instead of furniture dealers.

I overloaded it, and the soft screws bent into the soft sockets in the softwood dowling. And one day, I pulled off the clothes and everything just drooped. (As happens to the best of us in our difficult middle years, only there, you can't really blame cut-rate construction.)

 

[jamespowers]

Obfuscation is the first refuge of the insecure mind.

They still try to inveigle the moron on the street though.

 

[Fletch]

Clearly, what is needed is more fistfights. I've only been in two in my life, and look at me.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yeah, but you never called Reiser out at second in the bottom of the ninth with the pennant on the line.

Don't feel sorry for that ump -- he was a former prizefighter, and got in a few licks of his own before the guy in the leather jacket stopped laughing long enough to break up the fight. The fan, a flower of Brooklyn named Frankie Germano, apologized for causing a ruckus, and the umpire dropped the charges. Deep down, he knew Reiser was safe.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

Hooligans back in the day were much better dressed.

If todays "gangsters" met the ones from the twenties & thirties, they would probably curl up into the fetal position & cry out for Mommy!