Maybe I'd have felt more positively toward the piece if he hadn't rung in with the usual lame assaults on video games, popular music and consumerism. But I can't go along with his execration of those things, nor, to a lesser degree, with several others.
Is America a very self-indulgent place? Yes, and thanks be to God for it! We have a higher standard of living, longer and more comfortable lives, fewer intrusions on our individual prerogatives, fewer genuinely downtrodden or unfortunate persons among us, and a more tolerant, generous social morality than any society that's ever existed before. Are some of the exercises of this unprecedented freedom and opulence excessive? Yes, they are -- but in most cases the excesses are self-punishing. Moreover, there's no legitimate way to discourage them except disapproval, and such disapproval should be discriminating, not all-enveloping.
It is noteworthy that Mr. Valentine's repeated thrust is "juvenility" -- i.e., lack of maturity. But "maturity" is a bludgeon-word, devoid of objective meaning except as it refers to the ability to engender progeny. If you dislike someone else's priorities but can't criticize them on objective grounds, it's always possible to call them "immature." But why matters of taste should be subject to judgments of "maturity" defeats me. I still prefer ice cream to Dom Perignon; does that make me a "juvenile"? I'd rather play videogames than watch talking heads on PBS; is that "immature"? Or perhaps merely self-indulgent?
Even the great C. S. Lewis, himself no libertine, puzzled over why "the right wines" and "important books" should displace one's native taste for ginger ale and John Buchan.
The Baltimore Sun was once H. L. Mencken's preserve -- he who defined the Puritan as "a man who lives with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy." I don't think he'd approve of Mr. Valentine's near-wholesale rejection of so many things that people like, and which cause no harm to others.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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