posted
It was hardly meant as a deadly insult, Dags. And I think, quite frankly, that OSC himself would readily admit, if pressed, that "his world" is hardly the majority culture; after all, being "worldly" is practically a Mormon insult, which it hardly would be if most of the world were seen as silent but "virtuous."
But he rarely does so admit, because no one likes to argue from the position of a radical fringe group when they can make it seem like their opposition is the radical fringe group.
The simple fact, though, is that OSC is in a fairly radical minority, something that was driven home to me particularly emphatically by Mack Street's marital hang-up in Magic Street -- in which a decision that would make sense to almost no other American is presented as being forthright and staggeringly moral.
Now, I'm not saying he doesn't have the right to belong to a moral minority; of course he does. And of course he's entitled to wish that he were in a silent majority of right-thinking people who're being oppressed by a soulless media and often-corrupt government. But, by and large, this is not the actual world in which we live, and I see absolutely nothing wrong with pointing out -- when he makes sweeping generalizations about the world in which he believes himself to live -- that the two are probably not the same place.
The alternative, quite frankly, is to assume that his poison pen is often aimed directly at me and others like me -- and that would be intolerably rude. So I prefer to imagine that he's writing about a hypothetical world full of wacky and nearly human people, kind of that guy in the "B.C." comic who sets his tablets adrift "overseas."
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