ONE WORD: KARDASHIAN

Can one insane blended family bring down a whole civilization through media? I am beginning to think so. I look around me in my urban environment and wonder how we got here as a nation. I should have been watching reality TV, specifically TV about Bruce Jenner and the Kardashians. I would have garnered a partial answer to my question long ago.

I remember when reality TV began in earnest with MTV's snake pits of narcissists and the Osbourne brood. At the time, I tried tuning in and found my gag tolerance was lowered exponentially within minutes of watching these travesties. I had worked in psychiatric nursing for years and suddenly the group pathology I was committed to working against had become money-making media. I chalked it up, erroneously, as a passing thing. As it turns out, that was like denying that a strange mole could be a melanoma.

Reality media metastasized. I won't call out the various perversions of human civility it has fostered, but I am pretty sure it has come close to covering the entire spectrum. Things like conceit, greed, rudeness, delusions of grandeur, boilerplate narcissism, and so on. And it's popular.

What does this say about American culture? Well, for one thing, there are too many people with too much free time and insufficient mental skills to occupy themselves more constructively for their own good and the sake of their society. It certainly lends credence to the observation of some that America has gotten the politicians it deserves.

The rush to the bottom, which has been labelled "social equality" by some misdirected Marxists, always works. Hitler's regime used it artfully to rally the disenchanted to his banners. When appealing to base nature started to be less effective, that regime used its basest coverts to its ideology to force the regime on the intelligent hold-outs. We see this happening now on college campuses, where lunatic mobs are manipulated into attacking intelligent speakers who urge resistance to the corruption of American debate and discourse. All very Kardashian.

From hooker dress to dirty sweats as normalized street garb, the evidence of our cultural decline is everywhere in the metropolitan environment. Retail clerks, once the models of civility, ignore customers or talk over them to their colleagues. Customers accept Soviet-style lines in retail establishments, even though sparsity of goods is not an issue. Businesses exploit media-enforced stupidity of customers. They push the limits with under-staffing and poor customer-service training to see how far they can widen their profit margin.

An army of techies supports the decline. They develop heroin-like app after app for those addicted to smart phones. The evidence is plain to see at any stop light if you are driving. Drivers in media trance must be reminded by honking to move when the light turns green. The obstacle to easy movement isn't just increased traffic. It is the smart phone and the GPS driver who hasn't a clue about getting from point A to point B without being told what to do next.

Like previous advanced civilizations, ours is at risk of plummeting down the other side of the evolutionary hill. Perhaps the cycle of history is inevitable. I always hope for a better result.