A trend emerges

Clearly racially motivated mob violence - not in some gritty urban setting, mind you, but at the Wisconsin State Fair.

I'm not sure how one would go about setting up definitions of specific types of incidents or assaults so as to get a statistical handle on the matter, but this has definitely been a year for random spontaneous outbursts of mass barbarity. There was the recent trouble outside the Cleveland venue where George Clinton and Parliament - Funkadelic were headlining a "unity concert."  There was the July situation in Peoria in which some yay-hoos were setting off fireworks in a housing project.  When the police moved in to see what the hell was going on, the perps turned the fireworks on the cops.  Over Independence Day weekend, there were four separate shooting incidents in downtown Indianapolis, one near the upscale and traditionally serene Canal Walk.  Milwaukee saw a spate of looting and fighting around this time.  Chicago has been plagued with public-transportation train cars being set upon by gangs.  There was the May shutting down of a northern Alabama water park due to mass fights among teenagers - mostly girls.  There have been several high-profile beatings in fast-food restaurants around the nation.

Most of these instances had a racial angle to them, but I'll tell you what, I'm going to address this in a colorblind fashion.  There is no doubt an ample supply of activists - community organizers and other such bottom-feeding scum - that would tell me it's impossible to do so.  I beg to differ.  Any kind of racial implication is merely an excuse to try to impart meaning where there is none.

What the sum total of these occurrences indicate is a palpable breakdown of general public order.

None of the matters I've written about since the launch of LITD (or elsewhere, such as my newspaper column, my occasional pieces for other sites, or my old blog, Bent Notes) are occurring in a vacuum.  The utter denial of what is really going on economically in this country and Europe, the cultural rot that has taken over television and popular music, the class envy and America-hatred foisted on generations of college students (and, indeed, high school students) over the past four decades, and such evidence of the deterioration of decorum and civility as the increasing prevalence of litter and road rage, are all of a piece.

You can't fray the fabric of civilization without a general anxiety permeating society as a result.  People don't feel okay anymore, for myriad reasons.

When I teach rock and roll history at our local community college, about the third week into the semester, I post trailers for 1950s turbulent-youth movies - The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, High School Confidential, Cry Baby Killer - at the site for the course.  It's clear, when one takes them all in in one sitting, that the Hollywood suits had found the perfect marketing ploy for this influx of adolescents with unprecedented spending cash in their pockets: cinematic congratulation of their distinctness as a generation, the complextity and barely contained animal innocence of their furious and frightened souls.  And the popular-culture machine has been telling every generation of teenagers (a word that only entered our lexicon in the early 1940s) since how special it was, and how its stormy cauldron of pent-up feelings needed to be catered to and understood, how it really had more to teach the tradition-steeped elders than vice-versa.

Not only is this how we do entertainment now; it's also how we do politics, witness the freely spewed infglammatory rhetoric such as the labeling of the Tea party movement as a force of terrorism by no less a luminary than the vice president, or the drawn-out camp-out on the floor of the rotunda of the (once again) Wisconsin capital by union thugs screaming for their goodies even when they and everybody else knew the state was running a budget deficit.

As I write, the stock market roller-coasters over and under the positive line as traders madly try to get a split-second sense of what to do with investment dollars before the closing bell rings in the weekend.  There is no long-term take on anything.

My father - he of the belief that table manners and proper grammar were sacrosanct -used to do his best to impress upon me the fragile nature of Western civilization, how, for all the stone edifices that housed its hallowed institutions, it ultimately hangs by a gossamer thread.

The thread is stretched as thin as it will go.  An orderly life that makes sense is not guaranteed - for your offspring in two decades, or for you and me next month.

It's late in the day.