Wednesday, November 26, 2003 :::
 
A Mind That Suits used a ticket voucher to fly to North Carolina for the holidays. The air is clear, the temperature is perfect, the people are friendly, and the traffic in Wlimington has apparently sunk to an entirely different level of awfullness in five weeks. This is not a good trend.

NC also means Mac-land for A Mind That Suits, which means no formatting or linking in blogspot.com . This is something that should be changed soon, but here we are for the while...

Grim stuff on the cultural front, I am afraid. Read on at your own risk.

Since 1986, when Washington, DC, got its first "Classic Rock" station, A Mind That Suits has been an afficianado of contemprorary rock--meaning whatever the kids were listeningt to. That is because after three months of hearing the same old hits from his childhood (or somebody's) played to the point of inducing illness, he vowed never to be as boring as most of his contemproraries. Yes, you were more likely to hear great music on the radio in 1971. No, the supply of kids making good music did not stop i n1974.

But radio stations now are completely controlled by corporations that program according to market studies. Thus did Surf 107 (107.5) here in Wlimington go from a good way to learn about new music to a station that played suicide inducing metal at all hours. About the only thing remarkable is that here away from the major cities, playing songs with the F-bomb left intact is regular.

The ugly sound of the F-bomb, and a funny but disturbing song, put A Mind That Suits in mind of a fact of teenage boyhood and some sorded facts of modern culture.

If you hang around kids and they are comfortable enough with you that they let their guard slip a little, you know that they use the expression "MILF." This is really true. The first three letters stand for "Mothers I'd Like to." Now, the funny thing is, when A Mind That Suits finally had this explained to him by a young acquaintance, he was regularly associating with mothers who felt that if you did not mention sex, their boys would never think of it on their own. They would of course be scandalized to realize that at least some of those angelic youngsters had in fact assigned them a ranking according to personal tastes. (None of them vouchasafed that they were, in fact, but they were not angels. None of them was the informant on MILF.)

Boys just are NOT sweet little teddybears.


And these selfsame mothers--and some, but fewer, fathers-- would get angry if they were presented with the realities of the culture in which their kids grow up. Now, A Mind That Suits doesn't listen ot the radio or watch TV except here in NC, and so some things seem new which may have been around for a few weeks. And there is a huge hit just now entitled 'Stacy's Mom," whose chorus runs something like, "Stacy's Mom, has got it going on. I know it's wrong, but I'm coming on strong for Stacy's mom."

Surf 107, mirroring a national trend, a few months ago dropped its humorous but old fashioned drive team in favor of a national link up to two extremely crude guys who operate out of Atlanta, though they take calls in the morning from all their markets, which stretch at least as far South as Panama City. And this morning's topic? True life MILF incidents. Yup. That was at 8 this morning. That is what is following your kid to school.

Stopping in briefly to the local Barnes and Noble provided a reminder of just how far such rot has sunk into our ELITES. The front of the store had a bunch of self-consciously chickish chick lit. Much of it came heavily praised by the usual In set of literary reviewers, and much of it was blatantly pornographic. Not sexy. Pornographic. Picking up one novel, entitled, if memory serves Burn, A Mind That Suits read the following burb--he is quoting from memory, and not making this up. "Set in the midst of 1950's sexual repression, Burn revisits the well-known narratives of oppressive McCarthyism, Jewish socialism, and pedophilia, only from the seldom heard perspective of the menopausal immigrant female." Why one would BUY such a book is hard to understand, because it was so badly and childishly written that A Mind That Suits sped through five or six pages in a minute or two. Badly and childlishly, in the way of real pornography. And the younger protagonist is a 13-year-old boy who walks around naked in other people's gardens and relieves himself, the Rousseauian imagery being as obvious as it could be. So this is pedoporn aimed at educated women.

A Mind That Suits cannot start the day without the Wall Street Journal, which was denied him today because he got up late and the boxes were all empty. So he did something he never, ever does: he bought the New York Times, a mistake unlikely to be repeated.

But there was one good bit of news in a report on troop rotations in Iraq. These may be unwise, for a variety of reasons--providing large slowly moving targets being one of them--but apparently someone in the Pentagon had enough sense to realize that our hard won relationship with Iraqis on the ground needs to be maintained. So the replacement troops will be sent in for a period of training and joint maneuvers. And the local commanders are welcoming this because troop levels--which they all apparently feel need to be increased--will be increased for some time. Thsi writer's father, a company First Officer in Patton's legendary Third Army, explained that what army leaders dictate, adn what lowere level commanders command are often different,b ut here is an instance where they are using the desires of the political bosses in order to get what they need, and that is great. The reason they are not going for it directly is the increases are "politically contentious." Yet there is only one person contending over them, and that is Donald Rumsfeld. Way to go, lower level commanders.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and so will not have anything depressing on it.

Have a good one...

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:48 PM


0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.