Helicopter parents escalating hostilities against the community

When will the cocooning mindset open up? The best way to keep your finger on the social pulse is to look at whether parents allow their children to have a life of their own vs. hold them close and lock them up at all hours.

My brother told me that, in the safe middle-class area where he lives, the local parents are starting to cause traffic problems near school bus stops. They've moved beyond walking their kids to the stop and hovering over them, to driving over in the car and parking near the stop until the bus arrives, when they are allowed to open the door and head over to the bus.

That's right -- drive-in bus stops for school children. I forgot to ask whether the parents let the kids walk from the car to the bus on their own, or whether the parents escort them while hovering.

Was this an isolated example? I googled "parents parked at bus stop" and found several news reports on the first page alone. One article was from the Southeast, where my brother lives. How about a different region, like Noo Joizee? According to this article:

The Jefferson Township Police Department is asking its residents—and particularly parents of school-age children—to help alleviate traffic concerns caused by parents parking vehicles near school bus stops.

Police Capt. Eric F. Wilsusen said that with the rise in parents driving rather than walking their children to bus stops, there has been an increase in the number of vehicles parked near the stops.

"Some bus stops have in excess of 10 vehicles parked at some stops," Wilsusen said in a statement. "The numerous vehicles are causing concerns for traffic and pedestrian safety, particularly at busy intersections."

He added that the police department has seen "numerous complaints" from the community regarding the issue.

And just what kind of post-apocalyptic ghetto hellhole do these poor children live in, where they require such obsessive supervision? "It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you!" The 2010 Census says the town is 91% white and 5% Asian, median family income over $100,000 -- better send your kids to school wearing body armor!

These situations are making it clearer and clearer that helicopter parenting is not just a private choice with private effects, but one that disrupts the lives of others in public spaces and corrodes communal cohesion. In thoughts and in actions, the nuclear family is waging a daily battle against the community. Welcome to "amoral familism" in white middle-class America.

And the parents have nothing to fear, since a cocooning climate favors the tiniest possible social units -- family over community. All they have to do is speak the magic words -- parent, children, family, "as a mom," "as a dad" -- and the debate is over. Get out of the way, community -- there's FAMILIES coming through!

Wholesome and lurid themes in pop culture — separated or mixed together

Despite the trend toward increasingly squeaky-clean pop culture, where half of the top 10 movies at the box office for the year are kiddie crap, there's a counter-movement toward ever more lurid trash outside of the respectable mainstream — serial dramas about serial killers on TV, torture porn movies, and gory voyeuristic video games. Nothing is found in between that mixes wholesome and dark themes. There's a bunch of inoffensive kiddie stuff over here, and a pile of lurid filth way over there.

It's not so different from the climate of the Midcentury, where horror comic books, pulp novels, and the sleazier tiers of film noir stood out in stark contrast to the squeaky-clean world of Father Knows Best, Shirley Temple, and "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?"

In between those periods, pop culture shifted toward a more even spread of wholesome and dark themes. This reached its peak in the '80s and early '90s, when every week one of the mainstream, fit-for-the-whole-family sit-coms ran "a very special episode" about death and grieving, suicide, drug addiction, divorce, teenage pregnancy, teenage runaways, and so on. On the other side of the spectrum, the slasher horror movies portrayed teenagers who were wholesome and basically sympathetic — not brats whose death you'll be cheering along, and not flat cut-outs for puppet-like use in a concern-trolling melodrama like Law & Order: SVU.

Although I haven't seen them, the plot summaries of many hit movies from the Jazz Age sound a lot like "very special episodes" from the '80s — Flaming Youth, Children of Divorce, and so on. Horror classics like Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and King Kong show victims who are basically likable and respectable — not faceless crowds a la the "attack of the giant ants" flicks from the Midcentury, or victims who are randomly abducted without having time to establish their basic likability, a la the comic books reviewed in Seduction of the Innocent, or 21st-century torture porn.

The examples from falling-crime times reveal a cocooning mindset — sure, there's this whole other world of sick perverted crap, but as long as we quarantine ourselves from it, everything will be all hunky-dory. "That kind of thing could never happen here." Or, "We'd never allow our children to..." What begins as an impulse for greater security leads to an ignorant and arrogant attitude about how vulnerable their neck of the woods is to dark forces.

In rising-crime times, pop culture reflects the more streetwise and humble attitude that it can happen here, and that parents or adults in general cannot put up a magic force-field around young people, if the dark forces want to get to them bad enough. Being more out-and-about, and the rising-crime climate that follows along with it, is a humbling experience.

Looking into the texture of pop culture thus allows us keener insight into the popular mind when it comes to a trait as important as hubris vs. humility, which we could not tell from grosser measures like, say, church attendance (butts in seats). Nothing wrong with coarse measures to begin with, but it's striking how much you can learn about people from other times and places by what kinds of culture resonate with them.

Rising inequality from passing the tax burden onto future generations

An overlooked cause of the rising inequality levels over the past 35 to 40 years is the unwillingness of earners to pay enough in taxes to cover the current disbursement of government goodies, which leads to them being paid for with borrowed money. They kick the can on down the road for future earners to deal with — only by then, the can will have grown into an oil drum, full of napalm. Heads up, dudes!

This is nothing more than the earlier generation extracting wealth from the later generation. The early one escapes having to pay much in taxes, while the later one must pay down the debt accrued by the early one in addition to funding current goodies. Did the later one have a say when the early one made the decision to pass the buck? Of course not — they weren't even born yet. It's the most shameless kind of "externality."

If the parasitic generation plays its cards right, they can become the beneficiaries of so many goodies once they're no longer current earners. So when the Boomers either retire or stop working a normal load, they'll start collecting Social Security and Medicare. But it won't be the Boomers themselves who are paying for that mountain of prescription drugs. It'll be yet another extraction of wealth from the Gen X and Millennial earners — this time transferring funds in real time, on top of the delayed effect of passing the buck.

For this article on sponging Boomers, The Economist included the chart below as a succinct reminder of how dramatically the generations differ in how much they'll be getting out of the tax-and-spend system, compared to what they'll have put in. It cannot be reduced to a chart based on age, since you can bet that, by retirement time, Gen X won't be enjoying the level of goodies that the Boomers have since they were young. Millennials can expect even less.

Will this kicking-the-can behavior ever end? Will anybody ever be willing to jump on the grenade to save the future generations of our society?

I've found some data from the General Social Survey which suggest that Gen X and the Millennials are qualitatively different from the Boomers, Silents, and Greatest Gen members, who are for their part remarkably like each other in kicking the can. For the first time in perhaps 100 years, we have a group that hasn't made howling about taxes their main political concern (even more amazing when you consider what today's taxes go to, compared to the '50s or '60s).

As the Scrooge McDucks die off, the majority of the country will be made up of folks who see taxes as like the collection plate that they pass around in church, or paying your dues with the labor union or other civic organization. Nobody likes to part with their hard-earned cash, but maybe someone else needs some of it more than you do. And maybe there are goods and services too expensive for one person or household to buy, which require pooling resources across a much wider base.

I realize this sounds like the first day of civics class, but in our status-striving climate, all we normally think about is "what's in it for me?" rather than how our individual choices affect the rest of society.

Soon I'll begin a series of posts with graphs showing the generational divide across a range of political and economic topics. The first will be attitudes toward one's own tax rate (complaining vs. accepting), and the second will be attitudes toward labor unions ("boo" vs. "meh"). Followed by whatever else I find.

For now, the key thing to bear in mind is how generationally structured the rising-inequality trend has been — and hence, how it will be when the shit hits the fan before inequality can begin to fall. I wouldn't be surprised if the upcoming civil war (or whatever it turns out to be) has an explicit faultline drawn between generations, given how aware both sides are about the role of, say, Medicare in sending the debt burden off into another galaxy.

Can audiences tell how crummy digital movies look? Do they care?

In an article about the replacement of film projectors by digital projectors in movie theaters (about 93% in 2014), they quote David Fincher's cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth about how convincing digital looks these days:

The proudest comment I get is, 'What did you shoot "Dragon Tattoo" on?' To me, if you can't tell, we're getting much closer. There are certain scenes that it's indistinguishable."

Here is the still that the article included to showcase how film-like today's digitally captured images can look, from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo:

You'll notice right away that this looks way harsh on the eyes, given how mundane the setting is. Most folks will not be able to put their finger on it, but their senses will pick it up nonetheless. Look at how blindingly white the light is coming through the windows, and reflecting off the table top and the papers or documents there as well. There are actually fabric curtains hanging in front of the center-right window, but they appear whitewashed.

This is a textbook example of digital having less dynamic range in brightness levels than good ol' film. Digital must make a trade-off that film does not -- pick up details in darker areas and wash them out in brighter areas, or vice versa, since the range is not wide enough to pick up both.*

If they made the other decision, the girl's black clothing would look uniformly black, like somebody traced around her outline and hit "fill" inside with MS Paint. It hardly looks any better, though, when they hit "fill" on the windows, table top, and documents with bright white.

And please don't try to rationalize this harsh crappy lighting by arguing that it's artistically justified. It's just an ordinary mundane setting, nothing supernatural or from-another-dimension is about to break through the window and into the apartment. It looks like two people who aren't having as much fun on vacation as they'd planned, and are looking for something to kill the time in the middle of the afternoon.

Perhaps it's a quirky, idiosyncratic, "signature" style? Nope. Check out this shot from an even more famous movie that the director and DP teamed up on, Fight Club:

Daytime setting, couple of people sitting around in a room lit partly from inside and partly from outside. Yet the window is not blown out into a featureless plane of ultra-white. There's enough detail for us to see each blind, and even those thin vertical strings that hold them in place. Table surfaces do not have their texture whitewashed.

But that movie was filmed in 1999, before the studios learned that audiences had lowered their standards so much that you could show them crud and still get the butts in the seats. No way you could've projected the highest-quality Betamax tape onto the big screen and expected a 1980s audience to habituate, worrying less about the quality of the image they're going to be looking at for two hours than about whether their popcorn has too much salt or whether their stadium seat is soft enough.

By now, the look and feel of film is a distant memory for most folks. That's the reason why they'd have any trouble telling if The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was shot on film or digital.

* To stylize the difference, it's as if film could pick up details in light levels ranging from -5 to +5, but digital could only do -5 to +2, where anything greater than +2 gets treated as "+2". So +2, +3, +4, and +5 would all be rendered at the same brightness level -- namely +2, the upper extreme, i.e. really fucking bright.

Boomer representation in major political bodies

Baby Boomers (born from 1946 to '64) as a percentage of big-time political office-holders (current figures for the U.S.).

President: 100%

Governors: 78%

House Reps: 75%

Senators: 63%

Supreme Court Justices: 56%

And the majority of the non-Boomers are not X-ers but Silents -- the hidden generation that has tag-teamed with the Boomers in bankrupting and destroying Western economies and polities (a topic for an upcoming post).

By this point, the fix is in -- why bother voting? I've been old enough to vote since the '98 elections, and have cast it exactly once -- for Nader in 2000. (Not terribly different from Buchanan -- populist leftie vs. populist rightie.)

The Millennials are starting to become more numerous than the Boomers in the general population, after the aging process has winnowed out a fair number of Boomers, and as the echo boom has worked its way into the 20-something age group. The baby busters of Gen X tried holding up the fort the best they could while they were vastly outnumbered, so now it's on the Millennials to launch the attack on the Boomers.

True, they're introverted, awkward, and bratty. But awkwardness just means they won't make change in a face-to-face, storm-the-castle kind of way. They could still pull a lever in the cocoon of a voting booth.

And just maybe their brattiness can be harnessed to defund the preposterous and unsustainable entitlements for, e.g., prescription drugs through Medicare -- AKA, Boomers stubbornly continuing to eat junk food like children, getting diabetes and metabolic syndrome broadly, and wanting healthy younger people to foot the bill. And all without having to alter their diet, as a token of good faith and atonement, but feeling entitled to binge on carboholic junk until they drop dead.

And all those later-in-life health consequences of debauchery when they were young. Think of how much poor health, especially cancer, is the sum of all sorts of cryptic STDs and lingering side-effects of hard drug use. "Hey man, it was the Seventies, we didn't know any better... now pay our Medicare bills -- or don't young people have a sense of responsibility anymore?"

Gen X likes to rag on how lame the Millennials have turned out, but politics makes strange bedfellows, and as usual the future will prove to be an interesting time indeed.

Overuse of close-up shots in movies: not a borrowing from TV

Those who can stand to watch Millennial era movies more than I can have noticed that there are way too many close-up shots nowadays. See David Bordwell on the topic here and here, as well as a lengthy thread on the forums at cinematography.com.

Close-up shots allow us to read detail on the face, but obscure body language and posture, as well as the setting. We generally only see one person at a time, so we don't get to see the interaction between characters — only cutting from one to another. Other people are part of the setting, so we also can't see how the characters are placed with respect to one another in space, nor where they're facing (e.g., are two characters looking at each other during an exchange, or is one of them facing / looking away?).

A common complaint is that this overuse of close-ups makes a movie "look like TV," where the norm is one close-up shot alternating with another for each line of dialog, on and on and on.

I don't care for contempo TV shows either, so this sounds a little off. My hunch is that TV didn't used to rely so heavily on close-up framing and shot / reverse shot editing. That would mean the trend has affected both TV and movies, though perhaps being even more common on the small screen.

Let's investigate, shall we? I'll take it for granted that today's lame-o shows follow the close-up approach, if everyone says so. But I also checked the trailers on YouTube for the first and second seasons of Orphan Black, one of those trendoid "edgy" shows that styles itself as breaking new ground but is jumping on the bandwagon of the look du jour. It too is mostly close-ups, and minimal movement from either the camera or the actors.

What about older TV shows? Sit-coms are out because comedy, even today, is shot from farther back so we can see the characters interacting with each other, and see their reactions to each other in real time rather than interrupting one's expression to catch a glimpse of another's. That leaves action and drama, which have both undergone the shift toward close-ups. Fight scenes today are shot close up and tight around the characters. And drama unfolds in alternating close-ups of two people standing still or sitting down.

Well, I've already written an off-the-cuff post about how engaging the camera work was on Magnum, P.I., so why not continue with that example? It was one of the highest-rated shows in the '80s, its theme song landed on the Billboard charts, and it's one that anyone would nominate for definitive '80s TV shows. So this isn't cherry-picking.

It's also worth studying because it was an even mix of action and adventure with drama and mystery — and not comedy. Does the dramatic dialog unfold in shot / reverse shot while close up? Does the action lock right onto subjects, blocking out the arena that it's taking place in?

I'm certainly not going to review every episode, or even do a close reading of one scene in one episode. That could be cherry-picking. Instead I've put together an array of 20 screenshots that come from the thumbnails of full-length episodes available on YouTube. This places each shot halfway through the episode, not at a spot that I purposely chose to make old TV look better than new movies. I didn't cherry-pick which episodes I included either — the first ones that came up in the search results.

Here is a just-dropping-in look at a couple dozen episodes of Magnum, P.I. (click to enlarge):

None is shot up so close that only the face is in view. The single shots are from far enough back that we typically get a sense of place from the setting. The somewhat closer-up shots are two-shots where we see characters interacting with each other, using their hands and upper body language. Plus that two-shot of the not-so-friendly dogs. Just think of how much we'd lose if we only had a close-up framing the dogs' heads -- are they even facing toward some character, or are they just the type that barks indiscriminately? Quite a few have more than two characters interacting, and placed at different distances from the camera.

Read that earlier post on the show for a closer reading of how particular sequences tend to play out. The blocking is not just "enter room, walk straight to standing / sitting spot, and start blathering for five minutes." Actors move around the setting, often at different distances (e.g., someone pacing nervously in the foreground, while another leisurely strolls around in the background, with a wall separating them so neither is aware of the other, but with a window through it so that we can see both movements).

Lots of examples too of what Bordwell calls "the cross," where A begins on the left and B on the right, and their paths lead A to the right and B to the left. Simple switching like that makes us attend more to the action, rather than tune out spatially once we know that A has plopped down here, B has plopped down there, and they'll never move around until they need to leave the scene.

While on YouTube, I watched some scenes from an episode of Columbo, and there too there was no heavy use of close-ups. Indeed, the most famous staging of characters on that show has Columbo in a medium or long shot, almost ready to leave the setting when he remembers "just one more thing" that leads him to backtrack into a closer-up shot to ask the suspect another couple of questions. Like Magnum, P.I., that show combined mystery and drama, though not action (or comedy).

That's my take on what's going on in both TV and movies from the past 20-odd years — a shift away from mystery, anticipation, and tension, and toward obviousness and instantaneous reflexive responses.

Before, you could clearly perceive the configuration of the characters relative to one another, relative to the larger setting, and their trajectories (relative to each other and within the setting). You can't anticipate with projecting a current movement forward. No path of motion, no anticipation. But anticipated outcomes are not actual outcomes — you're held in suspsense until the climax or pay-off where you see if what you were projecting actually took place or not.

With super close-up shots, all that stuff that would've been included in the frame of reference has been sealed out, and you can't project where anything is heading. If there's no action, the result is dull. If there is action, the result is disorienting rather than engaging. Either way, close-up after close-up alienates the audience.

This ties into a separate but related shift in editing away from longer shots and toward a rapid pow-pow-pow rhythm. A single fluid shot allows you to anticipate the outcome, be held in suspense for a little bit, and then see if it happened or not. The interrupting back-and-forth rhythm prevents a physiological reaction from building in intensity, or develop into a full emotion or thought. It's like your sex partner switching positions every 1.5 seconds — dammit, just hold still for a little while so we can get it on.

But the ziggy-zaggy rhythm is a topic for another post. (See how annoying these abrupt cuts are?)

Luddite experiments: the rollerball mouse

I've been using an old rollerball style mouse at my desktop computer for the past three or four weeks, and have found it better than the laser style mouses that replaced them over the last 5 to 10 years. It's a three-button scroll wheel model by General Electric (model 97859).

Here are a few thoughts on the differences:

1. The older ones are heavier, from the ball and the mechanical guts. Even the casing feels strongly built, not flimsy. More importantly, the added weight dampens your hand motion, so that the mouse doesn't take off with a typical movement. A lighter mouse almost has you making an unconscious effort to bring the movement to a stop, like a slight step on the brakes.

2. There's more friction between the mouse and the surface underneath, as the ball runs over the mousepad. This adds to the dampening of motion, like the old school steering wheels that gave the driver tighter control (unlike the newer, looser wheels where you turn too far and need to turn back to compensate).

3. The movement is smooth, fluid, and analog, as the ball spins the wheels in contact with it. It's not noticeably smoother than the laser mouses, but not less smooth either, as lazy thinking about "old technology" would predict.

4. There's more feedback, as a result of the above features. You're just more in-touch with what you're doing, whereas the laser model has a weightless quality that removes the feedback that should be going to your sense of touch. Both models give you visual feedback (the pointer moving on the screen), but the rollerball provides a redundant channel of sensory feedback. It's like using a keyboard with buttons rather than a touchscreen "keyboard".

5. The mouse buttons require a bit more force to press down, and there's a more audible click. They're still simple to use, but that extra bit of resistance and noise provides good feedback when clicking on something. The weightless, mushy, quiet mouse buttons actually require more monitoring on your part because they're so easy to press that they accidentally get pressed more often, and there's no "warning" click that goes off when this accident happens. This is an older vs. newer difference, not necessarily a rollerball vs. laser difference.

6. They're larger and fit more comfortably in the (adult male) hand. Another older vs. newer difference. The small and flimsy types require a somewhat tighter grip whenever your hand is on the mouse, which strains the hand muscles or tendons over time. You can't sense this from only moving it around for a second or two, but that added flexing / gripping adds up over a session of computer use. With a larger mouse, it's more like you're just pushing it around, while your hand rests on top.

The closest analogy I can think of is that rollerball mouses are like paintbrushes, pens, pencils, or crayons going over paper, canvas, or some other rough-ish surface, while the laser type is like the stylus for a touchscreen.

So, they're better functionally and ergonomically. The only downside is their higher maintenance, from the dust that is swept up inside the mouse whenever the ball is rolling. From my level of usage, I've had to clean out the mouse once a week, which takes all of a minute or two. For those who don't remember doing this, you remove the ball cover on the bottom, set the ball aside, and use your fingernail or something small and scrape-y to remove the ring of dust stuck around the two wheels inside. I don't need to clear it out with compressed air or anything extreme.

That downside is by far the most common complaint about them, but from the hysteria you'd think they required laborious scrubbing every couple of hours. Over the course of a week, you spend more time and calories brushing your teeth. But, in our throwaway culture we reject anything that requires even minimal maintenance. Your paintbrush has paint on the bristles and needs to be rinsed off? Nah, fuck it, just toss it out and buy a new brush.

You won't like the rollerball mouse if you prefer the weightless, friction-less experience where ultimately we'll just think of where we want the pointer to go, and it'll go there. If you prefer to keep in closer contact with the tools you're using, give them a try. The difference is not major, but enough to be worth it -- especially considering how cheap they are nowadays. I got mine at a thrift store for a dollar.

Bonus feature: they almost all use the PS/2 connector, freeing up your USB ports for things that you will plug and unplug frequently (not a mouse).

Jennifer Lopez wondering if the whole fake gay boyfriend thing was worth it

If you keep in touch with Blind Gossip, you've already known about J.Lo's "boytoy" serving as nothing more than a gay eunuch for an aging woman who's already been through three divorces. In reality, she's getting bonked by her bodyguard. See here and here.

Today the news is coming out in the mainstream media that the queer is involved with some tranny. Try keeping a lid on your fake relationship now. Her publicists will have to work overtime to spin this as one of those things that a modern woman just couldn't see coming, how awful it is for a man to cheat, and so on.

With someone whose time has passed and has already gotten divorced three times, you can understand her wish to maintain a semblance of desirability by officially dating someone, while not wanting to get close enough to get burned again. But, grow up and become a spinster.

By refusing to age gracefully, the modern career gal who takes on a gay eunuch faces the inevitable moment when his filthy faggotry will come to light. They aren't exactly known for their discretion in sexual behavior. ("Hey, random dude who I just followed into a public bathroom, can I suck your cock?")

Even if your publicist does successfully spin the story as the poor trusting woman caught unawares by the crafty queer, the public is still going to view you as a pitiful, clueless dupe — not a shrewd modern woman who's still got it goin' on.

I can't wait until this happens with Anne Hathaway's fake gay husband. Couldn't happen to a nicer person...

The Catholic church and Boy Scout abuse scandals as part of the '80s revival in the wake of 9/11

The bulk of sexual abuse cases within the Catholic church and the Boy Scouts were part of the broader rising-crime trend of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Yet it took until 2002 for the Catholic church scandal to break, and 2007 for the Boy Scouts scandal. (The Washington Times did a series on the Scouts in '91, but it did not reverberate throughout popular awareness.)

Fast-forward to 2014, and we aren't dealing with these topics anymore — not because we've become desensitized, accepted them, and come to expect such behavior. If it hasn't been a hot topic for awhile now, we can't be desensitized to it. And those who weren't tuned in to the period when it was a hot topic, like the younger Millennials, ought not to be desensitized, and should be raising a stink.

It's just something we don't want to think about anymore. The Boy Scouts are going to let faggots back into the ranks of troop leaders any day now, and no one is making the obvious jokes about what that just might lead to. We're supposed to trust the experts and authorities within the organization and any governmental supervisors, and go along with it. Thinking about, let alone talking about, y'know... sex, especially when it's perverted, harmful, and offensive, would just be... well, awkward.

What was it about the climate of 2002 to the late 2000s that allowed these topics to surface and be taken at least somewhat seriously among the elite and the general public alike? You didn't see this level of outrage during most of the '90s or during this decade so far.

I think the public response to cope with 9/11 put folks in a more open mood, both the victims who were coming forward and the audience who could've chosen to tune them out. When people sense a rise in the level of dangerous attack, they naturally band together and support each other more than when they feel like the world is safe enough to go it alone.

So, from about 2002 or 2003 through I'd say 2007 or '08, the social climate suddenly got more open, engaging, and freewheeling. There was also a revival of pop culture from the later half of the '70s and especially the '80s, as we sensed that those rising-crime times had lessons to teach us in our post-9/11 world. However, after 5 to 10 years of no more 9/11 style attacks, we gradually came to view the original attack as an awful fluke, and resumed the closed-off cocooning trend that began back in the '90s.

Not only, then, was that climate more favorable to discussing an epidemic of sexual abuse in the abstract, it was even more open to these concrete scandals because they took place primarily in the '70s and '80s. We weren't remembering only the uplifting parts of life in the good old days, but the darker current running under everyday life back then as well.

In 2014, high school kids couldn't find it any uncooler than to sport the American Apparel / '80s aerobics look that their counterparts were in 2006, and bringing up the depravity of homo leaders in a major church or youth organization would just be... y'know, awkward. It almost feels like we're back to the second Clinton administration, only more so, with neo-Hanson and neo-Spice Girls music on the radio, and with sex scandals striking audiences as titillating (at most sordid) rather than disturbing.