Whether I like any of them or not is irrelevant. A lot of people I like would make very poor Presidents, and some of our best Presidents weren’t people I cared much for. Wait until Congress or the Supreme Court frustrate Obama, one of his plans doesn’t work as advertised, and a crisis arises with a group or in a place he never heard of. All three of these things will happen, guaranteed. THEN ask me what I think of him.

On the deeper issue of vulgarity, color me unsurprised. You could pretty well say what you pleased about politics, philosophy or religion for some time, though there were considered to be inappropriate venues. When the “anti-censorship” drive continued into the 1960′s, what you see now on TV was pretty much the only objective left. In fact, we’ve probably LOST ground otherwise–political beliefs sidetracked, for instance, or race and religion–some of each, anyway–placed off limits to avoid “offense.”
The good news is that you can skip this. In the 1960′s, commercials were pervasive. Everyone born 1952 and prior could listen to this day to certain instrumental music and tell you what cigarette brand it promoted, prior to the Ban. If someone claims to have been a STAR TREK fan from the beginning, ask him to describe the “Dodge Rebellion” girl. It’s the acid test. But in the era of the CD and the DVD, the only time I ever hear a commercial is if I have lunch in the work cafeteria. Television comes home by series, and situation comedies don’t come home at all. Beware of everyone who laments the fragmentation of America into a thousand micro-cultures. Those people generally have an important message for you to listen to.
As for money as a source of status, I don’t think it’s true. If it were, people like Jobs, Gates and Turner would have the same respect once accorded Carnegie, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. The moderns have as many sycophants as they care to rent, and people hit them up for money, but that’s not respect. Various critics to the contrary, not only are we serving God poorly, we’re not serving Mammon particularly well either.

What we’ve got is a radical egalitarianism NOT based on religion or any major philosophy, but on a screaming insistance that there are no standards and consequently no way to judge. I don’t expect this to last. The philosophical underpinnings of human equality were found in judeo-Christian beliefs and arguably in some of Western philosophy down to about the French Revolution, and both have reasons why some people ought to be accorded more or less respect. Without those, we’re rather in the position of the cartoon character who can walk out over a cliff and keep walking–so long as he doesn’t look down and see he has no support. My reading is that we’re approximately to the point at which Wile E. Coyote looks down and sees that he’s standing on air, but has not yet begun to plummet. In historical terms, it will be a brief interval.

Which is not to say that there are not groups and regions in America where respect–and self-respect–are gained as they always have been. I have twice this month been in gatherings in which certain individuals were deferred to because of their known accomplishments, and this Sunday I’ll be with another group which believes in standards of behavior and in judgements.

But no such group and no standard of conduct or judgement is pervasive in America today.

In summary, I knew little about Eminem, and having googled him, think less. I tentatively like Obama (an improvement over my initial impression of him as too young and therefore not tough enough for the job), although I’m keeping my final judgement in abeyance until I see whether his drastic actions will help with the economic disaster.

For the rest – obligations, whether to oneself as a human being, to one’s family, neighbours, employer, or country, are all out of fashion. So are heroes, especially the small-scale non-splashy heroes like the poor parents who nevertheless manage to feed, clothe and raise their children to be honest and hardworking, in spite all temptations to give up or take ethical shortcuts. I think partly this is because of the tendency to emphasize the feet of clay all public heroes have which end by convincing people that no one is REALLY heroic. If someone who rescued a drowning victim drank too much, then clearly the community leader who fought for a local hospital or road wasn’t anything special because she said things that offended people or maybe had unacceptable views on some current orthodoxy – animal rights, race relations – and the unfortunate poor parents clearly shouldn’t have BEEN parents since they shouldn’t have concieved until they were sure that they could provide middle-class comfort to their kids, which is practically child abuse and not heroic at all.

I used to think that the no-warts views of explorers etc I grew up with were unnecessarily sanitized, but I now sometimes wonder if we need our heroes sanitized and can’t reconize them in a warts-and-all view.

I don’t think Jane was actually writing about heroes. but isn’t a hero simply someone who does more than the basic social obligations that everyone has? And if there are no agreed-upon basic social obligations, how can there be heroes?