It’s sentiments like this that make me hopeful of what will be denoted a “conservative” shift generally in the society – not for ideological reasons, but simply as a natural expression of pre-political (or maybe meta-political) response to what is unquestionably a degeneration of public expectations of both popular and high culture. I myself am a youngish man possessed with the same impulse to find, hide, and horde, the grownups’ Playboys; I play guitar, was raised on the 60s culture, admired the usual canon of misfit artists and philosophers in my formative years, and to some extent still do. But the fact of the matter is there comes a point when the social norms are in fact a reflection of reasonable social relations, to deviate from which is not a necessary act of revolution or rejection but a paroting of habits with origins in a struggle that has been victorious, continued enactment of which is only a form of destruction, no longer one of creative destruction. It is my firm belief that we have moved beyond the reasonable phase of the revolution – difficult as that may be to satisfactorily describe – and that it is now eating our young. I had a friend who I went to college with (’95-’99) who was raised without being allowed to watch television until she was 16 or so – at which point, she said, she didn’t want to, because most of what was on was stupid. In other words, she simply escaed being inurred or acclimated to what is simply a bad habit. We should find more such common sense approaches to these problems, because they are all easily within our power to remedy. And it’s going to happen sooner or later anyway: the question “liberals” should ask themselves is whether they would like to contribute to the general mellowing of the sex and violence (porn, hiphop/rap), or whether they would like to leave it to the Evangelical Christians they are so mortally afraid of, the rapid increase of whose ranks is largely fuelled by exactly the sentiments the author of this article refers to?
