One point made obliquely in the earlier post, "Thou Shalt Not...", was the tendency of one sin, error, or absurdity to draw along others with it. Uno absurdo dato, mille sequuntur--Admit but a single absurdity, you invite a thousand. As one anecdotal proof, The Bookworm relates what she and her family took in during the annual San Francisco Bay To Breakers Race, an event whose moral trajectory has been ever downward, much as the whole city. Here is part of her account:
What’s interesting about San Franciscans is that, when they get into costume, so many of them opt, not for charm or cleverness, but for perversion. Of course that doesn’t go for 100% of them. It probably applies to only about 3% — but 3% of 100,000 is still about 3,000 people parading the public streets celebrating their peculiar sexual fantasies.
That’s why, within seconds of entering Golden Gate Park, my children were confronted with the fascinating spectacle of an aged gentleman who had wrapped rings around himself, hugely inflating his scrotum, which he then proceeded to shake at the crowd. In a normal environment, he would have been arrested. Here, he was just part of the scenery.
This man wasn’t the only naked one. There were lots of naked people. Probably 90% of them had embarrassingly ugly bodies. Why is it always those with the most avoirdupois, the most pendulous breasts, the most bizarrely tufted body hair, the most mottled skin, and the smallest penises who feel this peculiar compulsion to parade around well-attended public spots in the altogether?
Was it any surprise then, that it was these exhibitionists, despite the vast array of porta-potties, who also felt the irresistible compulsion to pee in the bushes?
There was also a lot of drinking, lots and lots.
So, in the space of one very painful hour, we were confronted with public nudity, public urination, and public drunkenness — and the cops did nothing. (And please don’t ask me why we didn’t leave sooner than an hour. There were reasons.)
There is no good outcome from moral degeneracy like this. Read the rest at the TheBookwormRoom, (listed in the right column here) if you have the stomach.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Uno absurdo dato...
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3 comments:
What the proud organizers of the revelries will find, is that this is not merely a case of people letting "their inner children run free". (And by the way, when all the adults are inner children running free, who will act as the adults to watch over them and keep them from harm?)
What the organizers will find, instead, is that every year the revellers will push the boundaries more than the prior year. Pushing past prior boundaries will become the POINT of it all. The crowd will grow, and the new growth will be those who will be the most unrestrained.
Watch each year for violence. Attacks at first, apparently random. When you see the first murder, when you see the attacks escalate, when you see the signs of intrusion of violent drug dealers, you'll know that they are right over the tipping point. And from that point on the slide will then become shockingly swift.
Mike Devx
Mike,
Makes you wonder what it would take for the cops to intervene; there is already obvious drug dealing going on during these affairs. If gangs had any reason to be interested, the result you mention would probably obtain.
I think the dyanmic driving this is boredom, and the decreasing shock value. I suspect as these little routines at such holiday-like venues become passe, the party-ers will seek to get the same reaction by "shocking" us in more mundane settings, or more and more often. So whether if grows in intensity--your point--or in societal saturation, mine--it will continue to grow.
In places like San Francisco, wide "soft drug" use during a park celebration is probably treated the way speeding is treated here in Dallas. They look the other way unless the violation is really bad (ie cocaine, heroin, etc.)
But when you add on ignoring laws about public nudity, public urination, and any number of others I'm sure, this becomes a completely untenable situation where the organizers and revellers will simply continue to "up the shock value" year after year.
Eventually the rampant and willful flaunting of laws, and the deliberate ignoring of enforcement by the police, will create an atmosphere of dissolution and decay, followed closely by escalating violence. It's inevitable.
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