Why am I glad? It seems to me that in this present age our culture is typified by (a) people being mainly interested in self-gratification and (b) people being not the least bit hypocritical about admitting (a).
How does abortion figure in? Abortion is what happens when "mistakes are made" with regard to sex, and when it comes to self-gratification, sex (at least, the way it is used today) is the Big Kahuna of gratifying the self.
Or at least it is one of the top three, along with binge eating and not stopping in favor of oncomig traffic while exiting a parking lot when talking on a cell phone and not looking where one is going.
We've become a nation, not just of slipshod drivers, but of slob divas.
The term "diva" used to apply to temperamental female singers in the world of opera. No more. After making a brief stop as a description for temperamental female singers in the world of pop, it is now getting applied to, among others, overpaid baseball players, decidedly male. I guess that means that to the extent we all act the way a Barry Bonds acts or Sammy Sosa used to act before being traded to Baltimore — or to the extent that we would if we thought we could get away with it — we're all divas.
As for the "slob" part, check out Susan Reimer's article "Flying the friendly skies with slobs" in the 7/12/05 edition of The Baltimore Sun. Reimer chastises a fellow traveler waiting in the airport security line for berating a woman ahead of him in line for wearing Arab clothing, saying to her, "Why can't you dress like an American?" Then Reimer scowls at the "team jackets, sleep pants and flip-flops" worn by a traveling sports team; the women's attire consisting of "halter tops and strapless tops and spaghetti-strap tops and tops that failed to cover pierced navels"; and the "men wearing those sleeveless undershirts that are often called 'wife-beaters'."
"I saw young people wearing T-shirts," writes Reimer, "that said stuff you are not allowed to say in public. (Although none of them said, 'Why don't you dress like an American?')"
If this is the sort of thing is Americans are wearing to fly these days, Reimer says she opts out. "What ever happened to khakis and a golf shirt?" she writes. "I know we are in the dog days of summer, but what about a sleeveless shift and a pair of dress sandals? Does everybody have to look like they just stumbled out of a Laundromat?"
Yes, Susan, they do ... if there is no self-gratification in dressing nicely, and if the primary statement people want to make is, "I may be a slob, but at least I'm not a hypocrite about it."
And it goes deeper. There seems to be a kind of unstated conspiracy going on, to the effect that slob-diva behavior in public on my part sanctions slob-diva behavior in public on your part, and vice versa. If we all act slobbish and sluttish, cynical and rude, then everyone's doing their part. We're acting as a community of slob divas, which in the old days would have been an oxymoron, as if one had said people were generally acting selfishly unselfish.
I contrast the current scene with what things were like when I was growing up in the 1950s and early '60s. That's right ... I mean the Eisenhower administration, recently lampooned by Stephan Pastis in his Pearls Before Swine comic strip:
"Locked in some past era that has almost no connection to present times," à la Bil Keane's daily Family Circus panel? Sounds good to me.
I can't really prove that people were less into self-gratification then — and more into being kind, gentle, chaste, polite, and neatly dressed — but everyone knows that's how they seemed. It was a Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Norman-Rockwell-picture-on-the- cover-of-the-Saturday Evening Post world, and if people in their private lives weren't really as apple-cheeked as all that, at least they kept up appearances.
In other words, say I, hooray for hypocrisy!
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