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When I was in college, California table grapes were thought of as something Untouchable, the way real fur coats are nowadays. I’m sure there are now young Palinists all over our college campuses, but in those days if you were merely a liberal you might as well be Spiro Agnew. You had to be a fire-breathing radical to be taken seriously. This was, after all, the sixties. Maybe you’ve heard of that decade.
So I could have joined today’s boycott of the Super Bowl over the fact that the network accepted an advertisement from an anti-abortion group and yet refused an ad from a gay dating website. I would have felt justified, and a little bit noble. I would only have missed one football game, plus endless lame commercials masquerading as art (some of them way more offensive than the one in question). But I watched the game and the ads, and I don’t think any principles were trampled.
In fact, what I believed about right and left (and right and wrong) has been pretty much trampled in the forty years since college. I no longer believe anything I hear on the news, and it seems that politicians are either liars or crooks or totally incompetent. That isn’t how I thought the twenty-first century would turn out. I was pretty sure the sixties were the start of something, not the end. |
