More Life Around The Cannibal Pot

"Then there was one old guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby: phonograph records. I guess that was all he ever got out of life. In the old days, he used to skip meals just to buy himself some new recording of classical music. Well, they didn't give him any 'allowance' for records -- 'personal luxury,' they called it. But at that same meeting, Millie Bush, somebody's daughter, a mean ugly little eight year-old, was voted a pair of gold braces for her buck teeth -- this was 'medical need,' because the staff psychologist had said that the poor girl would get an inferiority complex if her teeth weren't straightened out. The old guy who loved music, turned to drink, instead. He got so you never saw him fully conscious any more. But it seems like there was one thing he couldn't quite forget. One night, he came staggering down the street, saw Millie Bush, swung his fist and knocked all her teeth out. Every one of them."

(Ayn Rand -- "Atlas Shrugged", 1957, p. 619)

Noting the story of a bus-driver who's going under on an eight hundred thousand dollar house, Michelle Malkin is notably unsympathetic.

This is only natural, ladies and gentlemen, and not the worst of it that we will see. When people are forced to live each others' follies, what happens is that they just don't care. I've said it before: "I don't care. This government has priced me right out of that market."

Pay close attention: what you're seeing is a stake driven right through the heart of one of the most beautiful attributes of the American character: a people who were always among the kindest and most generous on earth, until their government began teaching them that "we're all in this together," and enforcing it.

Do you think this culture is getting "coarse", now?

You ain't seen nothin' yet.