{"id":4910,"date":"2008-09-14T08:45:49","date_gmt":"2008-09-14T16:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=4910"},"modified":"2008-09-14T14:18:11","modified_gmt":"2008-09-14T22:18:11","slug":"what-happened-to-our-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=4910","title":{"rendered":"What Happened To Our Country?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Queenan writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Queenan writes: 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,43],"tags":[12446,12442,3519,12441,12447,12448,8461,12439,12440],"class_list":["post-4910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blacks","category-satire","tag-african-american-culture","tag-country-joe","tag-dear-life","tag-golf-swing","tag-hispanic-man","tag-hispanic-woman","tag-joe-queenan","tag-stand-ups","tag-teacher-night"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4910"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4917,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4910\/revisions\/4917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}