[MD] What all is about.

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt]
Looks like Arlo is back spoiling for a fight. He'll get one if he 
suggests that "indecency" is high quality and that the "good ol' 
days" were all bad.

[Arlo]
Where did Arlo suggest "indecency" is "high quality"? As for the 
perennial pining for the "good ol' days", every generation defines 
this by making its own origins "normal". Its a generation-repeating 
trap that has little quality, but knock yourself out.

(Although nothing more than one author's take, with no citations and 
a brevity that lapses into egregious oversimplification, check out 
Wikipedia's entry for "Good Old Days"... 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days)

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"As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of 
the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in 
the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any 
scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs 
guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by 
the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the 
deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death- the birth, not 
of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within 
the body social, there must be - if we are to experience long 
survival- a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to 
nullify unremitting reoccurrences of death. For it is by means of our 
own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work if Nemesis is 
wrought doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace is then 
a snare; war is a snare change is a snare; permanence a snare. When 
our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is 
nothing we can do, except be crucified- and resurrected; dismembered 
totally, and then reborn." (Jospeh Campbell, Hero with 1000 Faces).

"The end of the twentieth century in America seems to be an 
intellectual, social, and economic rust-belt, a whole society that 
has given up on Dynamic improvement and is slowly trying to slip back 
to Victorianism, the last static ratchet-latch." (Robert Pirsig, LILA).