To: Stitch who wrote (6595 ) 9/23/1998 10:16:00 AM From: JHP Read Replies (1) | Respond to
STITCH, OT-------- when you visit the states take a trip to FOXWOODS in Conneticut --an Indian owned gambling resort--see if the indians of today are not being treated better than before--but Stich what moral decline? As for the White House,since when is it a temple guarded by vestal virgins?This is a place where horse-trading and hot and cold running sex are more common than sainthood. "Ma, ma where's my pa"was the jingle about Grover Cleveland's illegitimate child:Warren Harding reportedly hid a mistress in the closet.And in what Bill Bennet would call the good old days two presidents,JFK and LBJ, had affairs while living in the mansion. If money is the mothers milk of politics,sex is the soda pop: cheap, available, and temporarily thirstquenching.Whats declined is not morality but hypocrisy.Today we may be hearing more detailsabout people's sex lives, but just because we did not hear about it in the good old days ,it does not mean it was not going on.-- But more important, underneath the declininhg morality pitch is a wish for restoration-it was so wonderfully serene when white men could cover their indiscretions with a veil of silence, and you did not have those uppity woman, blacks, gays,Hispanics, and Asians making a racket. I would argue that society is significanty more moral today than it was when i was growing up in the 1950s.Then men did abuse woman and children, and it was their own private business. Rape, battering, and sexual harassment were almost never mentioned. There were quotas on Jews in ivy league schools. Blacks were strictly segregated in the south, and in the north de facto segregation kept blacks out of good schools, good jobs, and good neighorhoods. Sexiism was the order of the day- woman could not get decent jobs, and in the jobs they did get, they had to tolerate abusive bosses and co-workers in silence. So lets not use Bill and Monica as a symbol of anything except adolescent behavior and personal folly. I understand how you came to own that bridge Stitch, but the american people do not want sermons on their morality from anchors, reporters, and spinmeisters whose own private lives do not resemble that of Saint Francis of Assisi. Lets relegate the moral decline arguement to the garbage can where it belongs. My best to you, John
