Pop Culture? Poppycock!

I feel your pain. Do you feel mine? I bet you do. Yes, I refer to that niggling noggin splitting pain, that bone gnawing anguish, that teeming existential angst we experience whenever we face The Ugly Truth.You know what I speak of, for like my humble self, you too are a highly discerning individual. Intellectually aware, artistically appreciative, cultivated, indubitably enlightened to a “T.”Kindred souls you and I, we folks of gentle nature, we who cringe at double negatives and dangling participles as if they were sidewalk spitting or public urination. (They might as well be, you say!) We, who are dumbstruck by blatant ignorance as if it were a whack to the side of the skull by a cricket bat; we who recoil as garish tattoos and vile body piercings mar the landscape like graffiti violates a beautiful city’s grand architecture.(May I suggest a stiff gimlet, heavy on the Rose’s?)The Ugly Truth cuts like a cleaver. Civilization (such as it is) faces extinction due to man-made Global Deforming of the Culture. Dial 9-1-1 pronto, fellow citizens! This pop culture pollution is no mere befouling limited to innocuous pockets of mobile dwelling deviants, multimillionaire shock jocks, slum landlords, porn stars, scum lawyers (excuse the redundancy), horny politicians, the prison populace, Hollywood wannabes, network TV executives and New Jersey housewives.Oh, no sirree! That humongous slick of putrid multimedia excrement flowing mainstream to our pristine daisy adorned doorsteps has transmogrified entire gaggles of society. An invasion robbery of our finer senses and inherent good taste is imminent. Fortify yourself, my friends! (It will be prudent to stock up on adult drink.) Great art - classical music, literature, painting, philosophy, haiku for heaven’s sake - is threatened. Nothing is sacrosanct.Hear the tortuous drip, drip, drip? Plop, plop, plop? I share your despair. Numbed down to drooling Neanderthals, we will likely drown in an incessant data deluge of toxic “D list” celebrity drivel, insidious social sell and narcissistic blah, blah, blah. Pray tell, wouldn’t it be lovely if technology elevated culture instead of infecting it like an STD?What we have now is Culture with a “K.” Good grief, the krappy (pardon my French) Kardashians make poor Paris Hilton look like Grace Kelly. Hussies carp, kvetch and curse ‘til the cash cows come home to their leopard decorated Beverly Hills mansions, tacky TriBeca penthouses, gauche South Beach luxury condos. How I ache for a culture that ennobles the soul.The pain. The pain. Will it ever end? Compadres, unite. Cork open that precious bottle of Bordeaux Lafite-Rothschild ’85 you’ve been saving for such a crisis as this, put your sorry feet up on a plump ottoman and immerse yourself in Shakespeare, Mozart, Flaubert, Schumann. I’ll set society’s GPS for civility, refinement, urbanity. I fear they are, alas, lost somewhere over the rainbow in cyber space.