“America has become a cruel and vicious place. We reward the shallowest, the dumbest, the meanest and the loudest. We no longer have any common sense of decency. No sense of shame. There is no right and wrong. The worst qualities in people are looked up to and celebrated. Lying and spreading fear is fine as long as you make money doing it.
“We’ve become a nation of slogan-saying, bile-spewing hatemongers. We’ve lost our kindness. We’ve lost our soul. What have we become? We take the weakest in our society, we hold them up to be ridiculed, laughed at for our sport and entertainment.”
God Bless America.
Back half a century or so ago, my friend Bill Madden and I used to joke about who would be taken out and shot if we ever found ourselves in charge.
It’s not as dark as it sounds. After all, we weren’t commissars. The game wasn’t political at all. Our victims would be chosen strictly on the basis of bad taste, with the idea being if they weren’t around, our culture would somehow be uplifted.
These days, wow.
We wouldn’t have known where to begin.
The quote at the beginning is from a 2011 film by Bob Goldthwait. It’s called “God Bless America,” and it’s about how what we call popular culture has become so bad, so disgusting, that it might be beyond salvaging.
Joel Murray plays a man with a terminal illness who has just lost his job. He basically snaps and starts shooting people, reality TV stars and rude people. Unfortunately, things are so bad that it’s sort of the starfish story in reverse. You really can make only a very small difference.
I’m not sure we even have a culture anymore, at least a dominant one. The only thing I can think of that draws a massive audience across the culture is maybe the Super Bowl. There’s no “I Love Lucy” or “Dallas” or “M*A*S*H” that has people talking around the water cooler and there are very few movies that draw big crowds and big lines on their opening weekend.
I hate to have to blame television — particularly so-called Reality TV — for the fact that our country may be circling the drain. It’s such an easy target and cheap shots are so negative. I’ve never watching “Jersey Shore,” anything involving Kardashians or real housewives or anything about that imbecilic south Georgia family.
I did watch one episode of Trump’s show and that was one too many. And while it would be a reach to say “The Apprentice” got Trump elected president, there is no doubt in my mind that the image of competence presented on that show made it possible for him to run for president without getting laughed off the stage,
Once he got there, he started tearing the country apart like a Thanksgiving turkey. And after all the damage he has done in the last eight years, now he says that his campaign is the retribution for his supporters against the left.
Both Trump and his chief challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, are painting themselves as traditionalists, basically as defenders of white people.
White men.
The kind of white men who don’t care if policies helps them and their families at all, as long as they make the people they hate unhappy.
In the process, we’re creating a divide that makes it almost impossible to be one country.
And that’s only 22 years since we truly were one country.
Trump basically destroyed all that, and if you listen to his true believers — the Trumpanzees — talk about him, it’s as if he is Jesus’ better brother. I saw an interview with one man who said he could support Trump even if he saw him murder someone on the White House steps.
“He’s the only president in my lifetime who really loves America,” he said.
I have a feeling you might find that hard to believe, so here it is.
In all seriousness, how do youy come back from that?
If you’re Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert, how do you ever settle down and compromise to get things done in Congress?
I have a Republican friend on Facebook. John Rummans lives in Colorado and he responded to one of my posts with this:
“I don’t think there’s a bandage big enough to hold this country together.”
Sadly, he might be right.
And if he is, the egomaniacal Trump will go down in history as a much bigger figure than even he could have hoped.
The Man Who Killed America.