the new puritanism -1

You dawgs you can go on and on, and on and on, and on and on, about a fairly obscure invention, the ice cream machine, yet a simple device like the pencil that touches everybody's lives and is possibly in danger, gets not a yip out of either of you, 

But I'm not going to get into that today.  After listening to a whole day of admiration of our brave Hollywood heroes standing up for what's right and leading us to a better world, I feel compelled to ask two questions:  Do the arts elevate?  and Should the arts elevate?  By arts I mean everything from the avant garde to Shakespeare to the tv sitcom.

Do the arts elevate?  Sometimes it seems like we think so.  We teach some kind of art from Kindergarten to college, supporting the arts seems to be generally accepted as a good thing.  But one has to consider, if the arts have the power to elevate, don't they also have the power to degrade?  Certainly some people think so and they express this thought by deciding that some art elevates and some art degrades and of course they want to decide which is which.

But wait, what about free speech?  But wait shouldn't we protect the children?  There is a common feeling that children should be protected from the harsher realities of life.  Myself I don't cotton to it, I don't see how seeing a blue movie is going to destroy a child.  Kids have eyes and ears.  They know what is going on around them.  When I was a kid I was always playing shoot em up and soldiers, but when it  came time for me to do it in real life I became a Conscientious Objector.

But a lot of people think that adults can't handle reality either.  If they see where somebody has sex outside of marriage and has a good time and nobody gets hurt, or that a criminal is successful in crime and raises a passel of handsome kids and dies in his bed, why they will think that maybe they ought to try it.  I am speaking here of the Hays Code as to why all the movies of our youth were crappy.  Well they weren't all crappy, but you kind of had to look at them with a cocked eye because you knew they didn't reflect the real world

I think it was in the 70s that the code finally faded away and we started to get some really good movies.  And this trend has continued.

But anymore I am not so sure, now we have the scourge of political correctness and it seems that we are entering a new age of puritanism.  I don't like it.