I'm sure, like me. you've heard enough about the Duke U. "alleged" rape story to last you well into your old age.
What makes me shake my head in sadness is not the fact that the "alleged" victim is black and kind of slutty and the "alleged" perpetrators are white and kind of arrogant shits, or that she is a stripper and a poor struggling mom and a Navy veteran, yadda-yadda, or that there is a good chance that she and her "fellow" stripper concocted the whole story to get even with the boys who haggled over the $800 the strippers wanted for a life-changing three-minute show. Or to see Jesse Hi-Jackson knock over Cynthia McSkinney and Al Sharptongue in his rush to get to Durham so he can stoke the embers of racial animus. None of that merde makes me shake my head in sadness. That's all part of the drill today.The entire episode is pathetic. All this BS makes me not give a damn if she was or wasn't raped or if the boys' lives are ruined. They all brought it down on themselves. It's enough to make you think God is really up there meting out His justice.
But no. What saddens me is how the news reporting we consume today has become so comfortable with the base language of sex. Today, we discuss these things ad nauseum on every talk show on radio and tv, day after day after day, as if the media is trying to fill some bottomless pit of appetite among us common folk for this kind of sewage.
Now I ask those of you who, like me, are over a certain age... say old enough to remember when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn... can you imagine news broadcasters of those more discreet yesteryears looking straight at the camera and describing in lurid detail what we hear today? Try to picture Cronkite telling us about attempts to "sodomize the women with a broom handle." Or how they found someone else's pubic hair on the woman? Or there was no semen found in or on her but there was in the bathroom? But we have no problem hearing Greta Van Cistern salivating over the alleged victim's vaginal injuries, right? Vaginal injuries consistant with a gang rape, says Alan "Phantom-of-the-Opera" Colmes - as if he discusses his great knowledge about vaginal injuries with the unimaginable Mrs. Colmes at their dinner table. Old Walter Cronkite's hands would have trembled violently and he would have dropped his glasses had he found these words on his evening news script.
Which brings me to the main thrust (if you'll excuse the expression) of this rant. I am very tired of the suggestion that my sex life may not be as wonderful as those flirty old couples in those tv commercials for various products which network censors wouldn't allow to be mentioned on tv a few years ago. And what about the fifteen times each day I'm asked via e-mail if I want a bigger penis, suffer from premature ejaculation or want a longer-lasting erection. And why today's obsession with our penises and vaginas? If any of you Cialis-sellers are reading this, go to hell... if I'm a man (and this is just supposition on your part), my penis is like Michelangelo's "David"... rock-solid for four hundred years. And, no I don't want to date any of you haggard old men posing as supple twelve-year-old girls on the internet. Nor do I need six-pound bottles of Viagra to sprinkle like croutons on my dinner guests' salads, thank you. Stop offering me deals on your new glass, steel, marble, rubber or porcupine vibrators just in case I am a woman and really don't have a penis you can make a few bucks on. I am not thrilled to be confronted by this vulgarity everytime I retrieve my e-mail, whether or not I have my SPAM filters on. And I apologize for repeating it here.
Now don't get me wrong. I may be prudent but I am no prude. I enjoy the occasional eroticism as much as any gay cow-puncher, transvestite or single mom. It's the very spice of life. But I prefer subtle French sauces to salsa. I rather get a kick out of Elvgren's innocent naughties, but Vargas goes half-a-step too far, if you catch my drift. I don't much like Playboy centerfolds. I think of ol' "Hef" as a circus freak (sorry all you circus freaks, no insult intended). Imagine a guy his age prancing around in a satin robe, surrounded by a bevy of zoftig young women trying to light his pipe? I have a feeling Hef's pipe hasn't been lit since... well... the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn. His brand of glossy eroticism turns me so off I can't even look at Vana White and not be repelled.
And that's the whole point about today's discourse, be it on tv, radio, magazines, music and the internet. There is no longer a call for decency or manners, and even common politeness is considered "quaint". The polite child is as anachronistic as the Edsel. If that isn't sad, tell me all you moms-trying-to-civilize-your-children; what is?
What we have today in the public square is no longer dis"course", it's dis"coarse."
