What's wrong with me?

There is a motion picture playing in my living room. I am not watching it. I believe it is called Children of Men. I can hear it from the relative safety and comfort of my study. As near as I can tell every third or fourth word is fucking. There is, literally, almost non stop gunfire and explosions. Personally, I find it almost impossible to understand why anyone would make such a movie or why anyone would watch it. I cannot even remember the last time I saw an ad for a movie on tv that was not violent. I guess there must still be movies being made that are not violent, and that do not replace our potentially useful and beautiful language with incessant variations on the work fucking. They are few nowadays. I am not particularly upset by the words fuck or fucking. They have become so commonplace these days that they no longer register as dirty words or even shocking ones. I am upset by the fact they are used so frequently and thereby debase our language and arts (do we still have arts?). What would our scriptwriters and novelists do without these words? It seems to me we got along quite comfortably without such words for a very long time. Indeed, I was reading some W. Somerset Maugham short stories this afternoon. Marvelous stories. Maugham, I believe, was in his prime probably our greatest short story writer. He didn't have to use gutter words to convey his wonderful tales of human conduct and foibles. Neither did Hewmingway, Fitzgerald, or others of that generation. So what has happened to us? What has happened to talent? What happened to the great comedians, W.C. Fields, Jack Benny, Chaplin, Keating, etc.? They managed to entertain without having to resort to shock and awe. I think that's it, they had talent and didn't have to just try to outshock everyone else. Of what conceivable value are people like Coulter, Limbaugh, and the other hate mongers? Why is it they have large audiences that apparently like what these no-talents say day after day. And what's wrong with me that I cannot seem to enjoy any of this?

I am so disgusted with the state of the world, particularly Bush/Cheney's "war," and the scandals too numerous to count, I am taking two or three days off. I just can't stand anymore at the moment. I shall go to the Annual Seattle Library Book Sale, eat seafood, drink some wine, and pretend there is at least part of the world left that is sane and decent.