Kultursmog

In a small e-mail group I'm involved in, we started talking last night about the new Sony kids movie "Open Season." One of our number is a film critic, and got an advance preview. She said the thing was so filled with juvenile crassness (farts, snot, poop, the whole megillah) -- all meant for kids -- that it didn't so much outrage her as leave her overwhelmingly sad. Tainted, even. She told us that she thought for the first time in a while that she wishes she could just pick up and move somewhere else to get away from the pervasive crappiness of our popular culture. But she knows there's really no escaping it.

Boy, is that ever a familiar feeling. I find it hard to work up much outrage over this or that aspect of pop culture anymore. It's just a constant low-grade depression, like a hangover headache you can't ever get rid of. It's like the whole culture lives under fluorescent light. Like there's a pervasive Kultursmog everywhere (the term originated with R. Emmett Tyrrell, as far as I can tell). This is what we're raising our kids in. My kid Matthew likes to read the comics. Right next to the comics runs the daily "Dear Abby" column. Julie and I have to cut it out and throw it away most days before we can let our 6-year-old read the freakin' comics. Sure enough, one day earlier this week there was a headline that went something like, "Hubby wants public sex, but wife unsure."

Right next to the comics page.

Kultursmog.

In New Hampshire, a high school cancels a dance because the kids won't stop dry-humping each other on the dance floor. Don't expect the parents to back the administrator, though. According to the report: "But some students and parents don't see it that way. They say that like the jitterbug and disco before it, grinding is just a sign of the times."

Only a moral idiot sees no difference between the jitterbug and dry-humping. Parents as corruptors of their children and the community's morals. What can you do but shrug? That's Kultursmog. An entertainment writer friend predicts that within a year or two, this will be everywhere, and the only places administrators will be able to stop this is in Christian schools. I'm so glad for my son's Christian school.

"But we can't withdraw, we have to engage the culture!" an Evangelical friend said to me today. Yeah, sometimes. But I tell you, I'm glad that Noah didn't decide to stick around and engage the culture when the rain got heavy, and instead climbed aboard his ark and pulled up the gangplank.