Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.
All the cant and hypocrisy, all the damnable survivals, all the vestiges of old truths now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas—The ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men—the heroics about war—my country right or wrong—oh infinities of them! Oh the tragic farce of the world.
He was a soldier fighting WWI on the Western Front at the time.
The corrosion of our public language reflects deep pathologies — societal, cultural, economic — in the body politic.
Here we are in the 70's when everything really is horrible and it really stinks. The mass media, everything on television everything everywhere is just rotten. You know it's just really boring and really evil, ugly and worse.
Limbaugh has been warning us about a deep cultural rot in our intellectual class, an accelerating collapse of standards, and the institutions necessary to support and sustain limited government. Yet, the Beltway consultant class and the party leadership would not listen.
There's been cultural rot since there's been culture.
There's such cultural rot taking place, such a disintegration throughout our culture. Values, morality, you name it. Standards have been relaxed, and people are not being held to them. People's intentions, if they're said to be good and honorable, that's all that matters.
Every generation thinks the cultural rot during their time is worse than it's ever been. That's not true.