I have been thinking about how common rage has become.
I watched The Wire again. The first season was in 2002. It got a 9.3 IMDB rating. It's in my top five TV series.
It features violence, vulgarity, corruption, and public education failure: four aspects of modern American life. It has corner talk. The lowest form of American speech.
This viewing I did not see the show as being about cops, drug dealers, corruption, etc. I saw it telling the story of how our culture is rotting.
Imagine a sewer overflowing. It happened in February in DC. Blockage can result in pipes breaking and sewage in the streets. The analogy I am reaching for is that our culture is being polluted from below. Only a few decades ago, women’s fashions migrated in mere weeks of announcement to budget labels. Now, ghetto fashions migrate to the runways.
In my youth, entertainers came on stage and said Good evening, ladies and Gentlemen. Now, grabbing the croch seems de riguer.
Children emerge from school as ignorant of facts as when they entered. This is because they are no longer taught by rote. Civics was discarded decades ago. Math is racist. The inability to write legibly lessens students’
ability to express themselves. Thank the two teachers’ unions for this fait accompli. [Randi Weingarten heads the American Federation of Teachers and makes over $560,000. Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, earned over $500,000]
We have 20, 30, and 40-year-olds who do not know the three branches of government, who we obtained our independence from and how many moons the Earth has, and so on. How can they possibly understand what the older generation knows? They are prey to accepting whatever nonsense is offered to them.
Ben Sasse writes:
“You don’t pass along America in the bloodstream. You have to actually teach it. And we truly haven’t been doing it since the ’60s. We’ve ended up not doing the important civic-transmission work of explaining what America is, which is the most glorious governance project in all of human history. The Constitution is an unbelievable secular document to build a framework for ordered liberty.”
Every American kid “ought to understand how glorious the Bill of Rights is, and particularly the First Amendment. And we know that kids don’t know any of this.” When he first ran for Senate in 2014, a poll found that “something like 40% of American college students thought the First Amendment was dangerous, because you might use your freedom of speech to say something that hurt someone else’s feelings.” That is “the whole freaking point of America— that you can say something that hurts someone else’s feelings because words are not violence and violence is not words.”
It’s a problem for democracy if people don’t have a shared reality,
Kronos may have been all too human in allowing his ambition and rage to overwhelm every other emotion and consideration. He embodied an insatiable appetite that once unleashed would continue with inexorable and horrible consequences. It is a story played out over and over again in history as ambition becomes activism, activism becomes extremism, and extremism becomes authoritarianism.
“In a republic, you’re always only one generation away from the extinction of freedom.” Ronald Reagan
I hope not.
ReplyDeleteI’m distressed by our political abyss that seems to widen every day. I do blame the internet and social media which allows and encourages us to select what we want to hear. Too many of us are in an echo chamber that extols our ideology and demonizes the other.
There’s a clip of an interview with Rob Reiner talking about the 70s when All in the Family was #1 and 70 million people watched every night. There’s no common experience we have today.
I took your point a little sideways. We do need solid basics in our schools. Three branches of government, one moon, two genders (at least until adulthood).
“Corner talk” that is a new term for me, but from the context I assume it is not good.
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