Our Channels Unthinkable in 1994, unmentionable in 2009.
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Funny how this sentence could apply to an infinite number of circumstances, no?
Among the problems we face as "free speechers" are those of unshared lived experience, and sheer chronology.
There are quite simply millions of young people who, through no fault of there own, have never lived in a time when it was
commonplace to hear "offensive", contrarian words in public, and hear such words praised by liberals as the epitome of
cool.
Young people have never read, or even heard of, Mencken, for instance -- and would find the idea of looking for a "new" one utterly
incomprehensible. Mencken was clearly a "hater." Menken was "mean." And "mean people suck."
Because reality itself is now deemed "racist", one is hard-pressed today to make perfectly sound, if cutting, observations
about everyday phenomena. Those of us who grew up with Dirty Harry and All in the Family and National Lampoon
and Lenny Bruce and Don Rickles and George Carlin and Richard Prior remember a time "when foreigners were
funny."
And the sane amongst us miss those times terribly. We were freer then.
For today's youth, even Chris Rock is "before their time." You can point to South Park, but I wonder how many people
under 30 watch it. It is just too "mean."
Some think our sensibilities have coarsened. But haven't they also, in some respects, devolved into outright
pussification?
Last week, AMC ran Blazing Saddles (1975) and bleeped out, not just standard Anglo-Saxon curse words, but "faggot"
and -- since I literally can't say it myself and so won't spell it out here -- "n****r".
Now really: isn't "n****r" the actual point and punchline of the movie itself?
So why air it at all? (She asked stupidly...)