Tacky, Tacky, Tacky

I suppose an old lady mourning the loss of gentility and good manners sounds like a chorus from the Flower Drum Song, but reading the stories written since the election, it's difficult to believe they describe people and events born of a supposed polite society.

Perhaps the coarsening of the vernacular of today has added to the reek of the miasma that stands over the political scene in this country. WTF and it's lengthier versions are almost protocol for expression of nearly any sentiment....their use starting in kindergarten and spreading throughout every aspect of our society.

I am not a prude. And I don't like euphemisms when straight talk is the clearest path to understanding. However, the lack of respect for one another, and the lack of even a modicum of delicacy in our daily discourse is debasing. 

The Conservative view in this country considers it unpatriotic to care what the rest of the world thinks of us. But we do care and we should care. And the fact that the opprobrium heaped on our country and its leaders is well-deserved, is for those of us who are of even minimal intelligence and sensitivity, an embarrassment hard to bear.

And it isn't just the offensively colorful language that has become the currency of our communication that diminishes us; it is the offensively parochial religious dogma  that a terrifyingly large segment  of our population seems to feel  is right and proper to jam down the throats of every living being in the country. 

Unquestionably the GOP has produced - not just this year but since the Clinton years - political hacks of the worst caliber. Twenty years ago they were just mean, conniving and insulting; now they are practically brain dead.

How could a man like Dick Lugar have lost his party's support to a candidate like Mourdock? How could a candidate like Todd Akin ever have been elected to the House, much less given a go-ahead to the Senate?

How could a baby-faced governor like McDonnell think he has the right to order a vaginal probe on any woman, including his wife?

How can we give credence to the hysteria of the Bachmanns and the Palins and the Coulters and the Becks, and the Limbaughs and all the rest of the crazies that take up space in our media?" 

Finally, it is for that Southern Gentleman from Mississippi who can't seem to get his own tongue around his Mother Tongue, to verbalize his assessment of the loss the GOP suffered, using the same fulsome rhetoric that characterizes this era:

"We had shitty candidates," he said.

He's right, and it's good old Anglo-Saxon terminology. But maybe it would be a good idea if we start to muzzle some of it and let the South try to rise again. At least the elegant parts of it. 

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