This, after all, is a country where strapping young men take up two seats on the subway while pregnant women and the elderly cling to the overhead straps for dear life. This is a country where parents wear T-shirts bearing scatological messages when they show up for meet-the-teacher night. This is a country where millions enthusiastically tooled around in SUVs for more than a decade, fully aware that these oversized and unmanageable vehicles posed a direct threat to other drivers’ lives.
Those of us who cling to an idea of America rooted in tradition would like to believe that this is still a country where a funeral home is a place to shed tears, not a venue where amateur stand-ups get to try out new material. But that country has vanished as well. Instead, we live in a nation where every funeral home is a cabaret, where no service ever ends without a few words from some dimwit eulogist about the dearly deceased’s golf swing or his ability to roll a doobie while piloting a motorcycle across a sheet of ice and listening to "Black Dog." This is a country where no funeral service is complete without an inappropriately vulgar anecdote or a mawkish rendition of "My Way." No wonder Sinatra ended up hating that song.
Chaim Amalek emails: "I ride the subway every day and while I often see louts taking up multiple seats, I have never seen a pregnant woman stand long without being offered a seat – at least by a white or hispanic man. Ditto the elderly. And as far as t-shirts with scatological messages go (e.g. "Fuck What You Heard About Me" on a fat black woman in a shopping mall), I have never seen a white, asian, or hispanic woman wearing such a t-shirt. Most of the problems the author is pointing to are problems of African-American culture (NOT of African culture – our Africans would never dare do any of these things), but he seems to lack the courage to come right out and call a spade a spade. Which, truth be told, is the real problem in need of discussion."
