Give me your slackers, your bored, Your muffin-topped masses, yearning to eat free, The wretched refuse of your tweeting horde, Send these, the mannerless, TMZ-tossed celebrities to me, I lift the golden lid of my rubbish bin’s door. —The Inscription on the Statue of Liberty (circa 2011)
If you want to see evidence of America’s cratering culture, just stop by your local shopping mall.
I had never experienced vertigo before. But as I was riding down an escalator last September at a Northern Virginia shopping mall, I became so dizzy I almost careened over the railing. It had been a while since I had braved the mall scene alone. Rushing toward me were some of the most horrifying, unsettling images I had seen since Rosie O’Donnell posted her 9/11 video blog.
Below me, on the left, was a group of six young girls wearing jeans so tight, Jacques Cousteau could have worn them on his last undersea expedition. And if he were alive today, he’d be shocked to know that humpback whales can not only survive on land, but text, snap gum, and suck down thirty-two-ounce milk shakes masquerading as coffee drinks. Then to my right, two adolescents were leaning up against a store window, shaking back their floppy bangs and fiddling with the waistbands of their jeans. Upon closer inspection, I saw they were pulling their pants down, not up, so as to showcase their pastel-colored boxer shorts. They paused briefly from their hair/underwear routine to venerate the cleavage of a model in the Victoria’s Secret window display. Whatever Vicki’s secret was, it appeared to be a secret no more.
As I stepped off the bottom of the escalator, I almost walked into an ugly collision. A Rascal scooter had a head-on with an over-under Bugaboo stroller. Upon impact, the elderly scootee was thrown to the ground. The infants, outfitted in Dolce & Gabbana baby couture, started wailing. In a white rage, their demure and compassionate mother cursed out Grandpa at the top of her lungs. “Do you know how much this stroller costs, old man?” she shrieked, pointing at the cracked front wheel. “More than your last Social Security check, I can tell you that!” As the dazed senior citizen struggled to get up, a forty-something guy wearing earbuds and a Quadrophenia T-shirt stepped right over him. The old gent just moaned.
Meanwhile, the Rascal had a mind of its own and kept rolling toward a portable kiosk where a man was getting his eyebrows threaded. The threader was so startled at the sight of the approaching scooter that she caught the tip of the man’s nose in the threads. “I knew I should have gone to Elizabeth Arden!” the now bleeding thirtyish man screamed, as he jumped up.
Everywhere I turned was a fresh horror. Outside a nearby toy store, a child was splayed out on the filthy floor, kicking his mother and wailing “ZhuZhu pet! Gimme a ZhuZhu pet!” Despite her leg injuries, the mother blithely continued walking, ignoring the display. On the other side of the mall, near the food court, a family devoured individual troughs of lo mein like hyenas hollowing a carcass on the savannah. Their faces literally pressed into the bowls, not a one of them even glanced up as I brushed their table.
Overwhelmed by the visuals, I fled into a nearby coffee shop. I took a seat between a senior citizen playing FarmVille on his iPad and two teens texting in trances. They didn’t even look up. Sipping my “skinny” latte, I suddenly thought, “I hate foam. I distinctly told the barista no foam.” Tossing the cup aside, I stared in disbelief at the tragic panorama on all sides.
“Is this it?” I wondered. “Is this what our forefathers fought for? What my parents struggled for? Is this the American culture the Greatest Generation had in mind when they stormed the beaches at Normandy? So we could aspire to be like the Kardashians or land a role on The Housewives of Miami?
Our manners are shot. We dress like homeless prostitutes and derelict drug addicts. We spend countless hours social networking and end up becoming less social. Our pop culture has popped.
In areas as broad as personal grooming, recreation, education, parenting, faith, and even the way we travel, the verdict is in: we have fallen faster than a discount facelift. We’re going to hell in a handbasket (and the handbasket was made in China). Even if our economic and national security challenges disapperared overnight, we’d still have to climb out of the cultural abyss into which we’ve tumbled.
Look around you. Do you even recognize what passes for American “culture” these days? If Thomas Jefferson were penning a Declaration of Independence for America today, he might write:
“When in a coarse state of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bonds between themselves and the cultural blight degrading the Republic … they should declare the causes which impel them to separation…”
What follows are “the causes” that compel us to sever ties with this culture, halt its decline, and find a better way. It is a patriotic intervention. When you love something you fight for it—and I can’t bear to see America go down like this.
The first step toward recovery is admitting we have a problem. Since others are either incapable or too distracted to identify the cultural threats afflicting America, I take the patriotic duty upon myself. Herein I will point out the cell phone barkers; the four telltale signs you are in a lousy restaurant; our penchant for inane exercise fads; the worst children’s names in American history; our idiotic fixation with high-end cupcakes; each fraudulent holiday created by the card industry; and the young people who, like, speak in grunts, not full sentences.
So bring along your gas mask and something to protect yourself—we’re going deep into the nether regions of American culture. As harrowing as this journey may be, it is also rife with hilarity. So rejoice, fellow Americans! Our cultural renewal begins here.
