[Griff]

Originally Posted by Flint

I keep thinking, every time I see the media pundits and armchair quarterbacks rehashing the same, pointless factoids in relation to this latest, inevitable-seeming event, that isn't gun control and/or mental health services, aren't these things a "band-aid" solution to a sick, misguided society, driven by extrinsic happiness, short-term gratification, and completely disconnected from the rich cultural heritage of our evolutionary forefathers, now isolated in a confused, disconnected wasteland of cheap thrills, awash in misdirected neurochemical responses which have no mechanism of purposeful self-regulation, given the novelty of our daily circumstances, and the completely artificial and contrived system of arbitrary moral standards which we must perform constant logic cartwheels in order to even stand living under the thrall of?

This is why I read the Cellar. In one run-on sentence flint has relentlessly circled in on the problem. The modern American man and the modern American culture are incompatible. Our culture is tribal. It became obvious to me while watching the cheering drunken males watching the televised bombing of Afghanistan at a child's birthday party. We can argue about from where this culture is derived. I've read good arguments that it is borderlander (dispossessed Scotch-Irish) expressed through Appalachian culture. We've long harnessed those attributes when killing needed doing but I'd say without a new frontier we're the ones in harness now.