(Long Island, NY) Have you checked the local headlines lately? Cannibals, brawling high school footballers, carjacking, shooting sprees…rotten news stories about rotten situations, bad people, and the good people victimized by them.
I’m actually starting to long for the days when corrupt officials, their bribes and scandals took up most of the newspaper. I suppose I sound fairly curmudgeonly here, but it’s a chance I’m willing to take. I mean, what is the problem here? Is it something in the water? Maybe people are just getting worse? Can we blame the full moon?
Of course, there have been reports of this rotten stuff since the beginning of mankind’s ability to write. Ancient Rome had its fair share of hooligans, con men, murderous loonies and other unsavory types. Of course, most of them would up being in charge of the place. Regardless of your feelings about George W. Bush or Bill Clinton before him, neither of those two ever commissioned a great hollow bull sculpture to be made with the express purpose of roasting a human being alive inside it. The emperor Diocletian is said to have done that for one reason or another. Yes, folks, in spite of our permanently baffled federal government on both sides of the political fence, there are actually worse things out there.
Still, most people insist that we have it much worse today than ever before. “Those headlines are only the start!” they cry. “Look at the wicked excesses of Hollywood!” You know, for once, I might actually be in agreement. After all, who gives millions of dollars to a company to make a movie version of “The Dukes Of Hazzard?” This is wretched excess on a Babylonian scale. I can think of fifty million better, and less frivolous ways to spend that kind of money. A massive giveaway of plastic “redneck teeth” wrapped in a twenty-dollar bill is a good start. I’d stand in an endless line at the movie theater for THAT. Well, at least for the $20.
And what about these declining morals? Just look at those movies coming out over the summer. “Get Rich Or Die Tryin” starring Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. One day the movie posters show him holding a pistol, and after public hoo-hawing, the posters are replaced with Jackson holding a baby. The moral decay here is obvious. Anyone who can be pressured into changing their artist vision (no matter how cheesy and lame) by a bunch of bad press is obviously shot through with shoddy morals. How spineless! How weak-willed!
Of course, in MY world, the real crime is that Curtis Jackson has a whole generation of kids dropping their plurals. Damn you, Curtis Jackson, the correct usage is “Fifty CENTS!” Plurals, I tell you! PLURALS!
Moral decay, crummy values, and bad grammar. We’re in big trouble here, folks. That’s not to downplay the seriousness of the recent spate of lousy news; in this “if it bleeds, it leads” news environment we live in, it seems inevitable that most of our headlines will be very depressing.
That’s why I don’t subscribe to the newspapers. If I want to get depressed, I’ll do my taxes. One day some enterprising company will try and market a “good news” publication, if it hasn’t happened already. The fate of such a venture is obvious-it will fail more miserably than an attempt by George Bush to put a happy face on the war in Iraq. I think we might just be addicted to our crappy headlines, our bad news, and our natural disasters. Why do people watch disaster movies? War movies? Tear-jerking dramas? What’s going on here?
I could venture a guess, I could offer my armchair psychology, or try to reason my way through that one, but I’m stuck. I can’t get past gangsta rappers who refuse to use the letter “s”. It’s something I’ll never, ever be able to get my head around, and this problem might just usher in the end of the world. I think perhaps I might have this blown a teeny bit out of proportion, but I can’t be sure. I’m too busy wondering why all the words in pop culture that DO use some kind of plural have swapped “s” for “z”.
Of course, I also know that I’m fixated on this because I’ve gotten tired of making fun of people who watch “The View”.
