What is our culture, our society?

If this isn't a racist society or culture, what is it?

• A culture of excellence. A culture of achievement.
• A culture of do-overs.
• A culture of second or third chances.
• A culture of competition. A culture of love of neighbor.
• A culture that respects history with all its flaws.
• A culture of religious freedom or freedom to have no religion.
• A culture of generosity and love.
• A culture of families making life better for their kids.
• A culture of immigrants, refugees and old timers living and succeeding together.
• A culture with respect for education, the arts, hard work, amber waves of grain, and old glory waving.
• A culture of nationalism, patriotism, good old boys, and ladies night out.
• A culture of freedom of the press and freedom of speech (increasingly controlled by the fat cats of technology).

A culture where the people are ready to say, enough already.

What’s on the I-pods of the Occupiers?

Take the Money and Run; Eat the rich; Let’s go crazy; Shakedown; All I need is a miracle; Tax man; Been caught stealing; Money for nothing; Money’s too tight to mention; Smooth operator; Money changes everything; Little lies; Burning down the house; Money, money; Material girl; 9 to 5; Gold digger; Putting on the Ritz; Free money; The pretender;

Americans often feel the same way

So many people I know say, "I rarely watch TV; or, I need to turn it off when the grandchildren are visiting." Therefore, what this Jordanian author Diana Abu-Jaber says about returning to her birth country, reminds me of what many Americans think of our hyper-sexualized and violent TV stories

"Years of shows like “Baywatch”—and now, even worse, so-called reality TV, give Middle Easterners the idea that Americans are all corrupt and decadent and frightening. Sort of in the way the American media portrays Middle Easterners as frightening and sinister."

Look!! A way for westerners to bond with middle easterners.

Popular culture or neo-paganism

Not only have I seen beautiful cities and rural vistas in Italy, but I've seen five recent movies (transatlantic flight) and read one recent novel, "Nineteen minutes" (Jodi Picoult, 2007). It's a long flight, our destination was 5 hours ahead on the clock, so I was awake all night and saw "27 dresses," "Definitely, Maybe," "Dan in Real Life," "La Mome," and "Bucket List."

If you don't see many movies, don't watch much TV (just saw my first "Sex and the City" last night--season 3, chlamydia episode where Miranda makes a list of 42 guys she's slept with--ah, romance), and read primarily non-fiction, you do get out of touch with just how morally impoverished, spiritually starved and values-empty our popular culture is. Or maybe it was the recent visit to the ruins of Pompeii that put it all in perspective.

It's not that these movies showed a lot of skin, or people romping through bedroom scenes, no, that's for the 1970s and 1980s films. It was more disturbing than that. Sex meant nothing at all. Wasn't at all erotic. It was like any bodily function, from eating to defecating. Only cuter. For instance, the "Definitely, Maybe" storyline is a complicated twisted series of flashbacks as Daddy attempts to explain to a 10 year old which of his three squeezes in his younger days (a Clinton campaign worker) was her mother. All the adults in this film are promiscuous, but it's critiqued as sophisticated, sweet, simple, smart, fresh, rewarding and non-formulaic, depending on the reviewer. Except for one, much smarter than the rest. I tried to pick up the extended review, but the computer froze (out of shock?), so I have no idea what came later--and it seemed an odd source, The Portland Oregonian.

"The flashback itself is a romantic dramedy that's far smarter than junk like "27 Dresses." Unfortunately, to enjoy that flashback, you have to ignore two gargantuan idiocies: No sane father would twist his daughter into knots by telling this story. It's full of booze, cigarettes, infidelity and sex with women who aren't Mom."

Using cigarettes in a movie will get you far more criticism than bedroom follies, so that is mentioned in several reviews. It's no wonder that Miranda had chlamydia and 42 lovers by the third season.

On a happier note: a little girl across the aisle was singing while we watched the movie. She started with B-I-N-G-O (Mom was trying to sleep), then moved on to Jingle Bells, but kept forgetting the words. Soon it morphed into Bingle Jells. She has such a brief time to be a little girl.

If it bores me

imagine how the poor news readers must feel. I don't watch much TV at home, but here at the lake where we don't have cable, for some reason the TV is on more. All I've heard or seen is Harrison Ford, American Idol and the spike in gasoline prices which in Toledo, the home base of most of the stations is at an eye-popping $4.25. It's $3.95 or $3.99 here on the peninsula. But really, how do people stand reporting this level of mindless made up news when there are really important things like manipulated elections, sneaky, dishonest lies about the environment, and the temperature of Lake Erie to talk about?

This is the kind of news that makes one grateful for PBS, and Canadian TV.

Tom Brokaw doesn't get it

Tom Brokaw's new book, Boom, examines the influence the baby boomers have had on our society and culture, and he includes a wide variety of well-known and non-celebrity persons born in that era. Listening to him being interviewed on Laura Ingraham this morning and then reading some excerpts from the web, I was left with the impression conservatives know a lot more about how liberals think and react than the other way around. (Just as a quick aside: the only way they know how to have an interesting conservative character on a TV series is to afflict him with dementia--Boston Legal.) Laura pointed out that the single most important boomer to impact our culture, love him or hate him, is Rush Limbaugh, who got a quick mention in a section about drugs and not the media (I'm assuming his prescription drug addiction). Brokaw defended himself, not by addressing Rush's influence on millions, but by decrying the influence of talk radio in general--that it isn't balanced, and Rush mocks people. The Democrats when in power, will continue to harp on that.

He doesn't get it. Rush (and Medved, and Hewitt, and Ingraham, etc.) ARE the balance. The radio airways are open to the liberals, but they haven't succeeded in drawing an audience that will hold the sponsors. People don't listen to talk radio because there is nothing else--they listen because they want to hear another view that they can't get on broadcast news and cable news, where liberals have a lock. During one of the news breaks on a conservative show, I get to hear Anderson Cooper, a Vanderbilt/Whitney descendant, go on and on about global warming (guilt?). Many conservatives interview people who disagree with them, and usually make them look weak. Laura nailed Tom on this point, and he wandered off into the swamp of "we're never going to resolve this. . . .so why belabor the point."

Here's something else he doesn't quite grasp--the women's movement. In writing about the women's movement that evolved at the same time his daughters were growing up, he says, "One of our daughters is now a physician; another is a vice president of a major entertainment company; and the third is a clinical therapist. They place no limits on their ambitions, but for them, those ambitions also have had to fit within the context of having children. For all the gains made by women, and the recognition within society of how important that is to a healthy body politic, we have not satisfactorily resolved the workplace consequences of having children."

Why not say, "We have not satisfactorily resolved the family and parenting consequences created by women going off to work 10-12 hours a day."

The fascination eludes me

Although I'm not into entertainment statistics, when the first day opening sales of a computer game go beyond popular movies and books, beating out movies like "Spider-Man 3" and books such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows I at least take notice.

Gamers have made "Halo 3" the biggest launch in entertainment history by scooping up enough units to bring in an estimated US$170 million in its first 24 hours on store shelves, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) announced Thursday. TechNewsWorld

But I don't get it. Even mentioning this should uptick my site meter. Oh well. Back to my October Book Club selection.