Re: WSN--what's up?

I've noticed the same thing lately.  The *in your face* culture of being coarse, abbrasive and offensive, a culture which was discovered on the fringes of society among the working classes and poorest of neighborhoods, among the least educated and most vile of characters has become mainstream.  Instead of being growing up and becoming adults,  people seem to be patting themselves on the back for how clever they've become, how manipulative, how with their years of experience they've come to excell at being unreasonable, intellectually dishonest and ethically bankrupt. People seem interested in becoming judgement proof,  in the spiritual sense,  too piss poor to go after because there is an absense of guilt, self-reproach or any true sense of personal ethics.  But then, that's the name of the game in this town,  it's dog eat dog and let the devil take the hind leg.  Of course, the government is supposed to step in and make sure the little guys who are trying to eke out an honest living don't get trampled in the process but with all that government reform and business and industry deregulation and the unbridled greed and the deliberate utilization of race as a component in the social stratification of society,  well isn't a little criticism of what is really going on called for?   One professor I used to encounter was often bent out of shape at the proof that a student was using theory as a tool to analyze day to day political reality.  I believe he called it confusing theory with reality.  Gunder Frank discussed this aspect of the higher educational system in which the dominant ideology  was transmitted to students through a process in which the modes of thought and analysis were controlled, regulated and directed by professors who were anything but disinterested parties to the process.   There is a great deal of conformity in this country.  There is a pecking order.  We are not a nation that believes in equality for all.  We are a nation of deal making and aggression in all it's forms and of rampant, unscrupulous self-interests.  Was it George Orwell who said, "Wherever I hear people boasting of their freedoms I hear their chains rattling."  ?

KR