Roman Catholicism: A Hundred Million People Bowing

Historians Differ On When The Consumer Culture Came To Dominate American Culture. Some Say It Was In The Twenties, When Advertising Became A Major Industry And The Middle Class Bought Radios To Hear The Ads And Cars To Get To The Stores. ... But There Is No Question That The Consumer Culture Had Begun To Crowd Out All Other Cultural Possibilities By The Years Following World War Ii.

Imagine Spending Four Billion Years Stocking The Oceans With Seafood, Filling The Ground With Fossil Fuels, And Drilling The Bees In Honey Production - Only To Produce A Race Of Bed-wetters!

By The Reagan Era, The 'culture Of Poverty' Had Become A Cornerstone Of Conservative Ideology: Poverty Was Caused Not By Low Wages Or A Lack Of Jobs But By Bad Attitudes And Faulty Lifestyles. The Poor Were Dissolute, Promiscuous, Prone To Addiction And Crime, Unable To 'defer Gratification' Or Possibly Even Set An Alarm Clock. The Last Thing They Could Be Trusted With Was Money.

Our Great Common Challenge ... Is To Free People From Religion, Get It Out Of Our Laws, Our Schools, Our Health Systems, Our Government And, I Would Add, Also Our Sporting Events. I Would Really Like To See Some Separation Of Church And Stadium, If We Could Work On That.

When Television Families Aren't Gathered Around The Kitchen Table Exchanging Wisecracks, They Are Experiencing Brief But Moving Dilemmas, Which Are Handily Solved By The Youngest Child Or By Some Cute Extraterrestrial Houseguest. Emerging From Family Ties Or My Two Dads, We Are Forced To Acknowledge That Our Own Families Are Made Up Of Slow-witted, Emotionally Crippled People Who Would Be Lucky To Qualify For Seats In The Studio Audience Of Jeopardy!