Zombies, Mutants…and now Crush Videos?

Here is today’s quiz on modern America:

True or False:

It was recently reported (attributed to UPI on-line) that there’s a new fad in town: Crush Videos. These are “a type of pornography in which women wearing boots or open toed shoes crush small animals and insects beneath their feet.” A leading crusader against this outrage is reported to be none other than the diminutive Micky
Rooney.

Answer: True.

True? How can that be true? It sounds like one of those rumors you’d start at three in the morning during the dizzy twilight of a wild dorm party.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this story to see if it does, in fact, pan out. The fact that anyone would consider it remotely possible is testimony that nothing is too weird in modern America to be true.

The manicured estates of suburbia are producing mutant teenagers, armed Nazi-geeks who run amok on shooting rampages. Yuppies are mutating as well, blowing their fuses and pumping people full of lead, too. Meanwhile, the neo-Bolsheviks are grinning like jackals in press conferences, licking their chops at the prospect of finally relieving Americans of those pesky Constitutional rights. Guns didn’t turn America into a bunch of whiners, weirdos, and Wonderbread people. A loss of spirit did. A total sell-out, a transition from being individuals to becoming organization men, a complete gelding of the ancestors of mighty pioneers. I guess this is what happened to Rome. It got rotten, cowardly, and decadent.

Can you imagine a nation of people so scared of living–in any meaningful sense of the word– that they spend, on average, four hours a day watching television? It’s something out of George Orwell’s wildest nightmare. And you wonder why America is soulless. There no reason to wonder why the people are so easily led now, so easily manipulated, so stupidly obedient (except for the few mutants who go crazy and raise the national calls for even more obedience).

And the need for authority is deeply seated now in America. I never gave it much thought, since my buddies were as irreverent as I was, until I wound up in college.

My room mate in college, Mr. Average American, looked at me in horror when he saw my buddies and I packing to charge off into the Mojave desert for a week of camping.

“What campgrounds are you going to?” he asked.

“None,” said I. “We just know of a spot about ten miles south of Route 62.”

“No national park? No rangers? Who is in charge out there?” he asked.

Somebody, to this guy’s mind, HAD to be in charge EVERYWHERE.

“No park, no rangers, no rules–as far as I know. Nobody’s in charge.”

The look he gave me was the glaze-eyed semi-panic I’d expect to see if his television broke in the middle of a show. A place with no rules and nobody breathing down your neck. Bliss, to me. Utter hell, to most.