Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, and North West

America and Western Europe sure have their priorities right, with newsworthy items blanketing newspapers and magazines while the airwaves reflect our culture. For example, it seems that the April cover of Vogue Magazine, featuring a rap thug and a porn tart, has been covered as extensively as the sinking of the Titanic was back in 1912, except that those were pre-TV and pre-Internet times, and only ink-stained wretches invaded our homes daily. Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, claims that she wanted to feature those who define our culture and who stir things up.

That’s not even original, because another monthly some time ago featured the mass murderer of the Boston Marathon on its cover in a sexy pose. The Muslim thug—whose family was described by the neighbors as loud, obnoxious, entitled, and prone to dumping waste from their state-subsidized home into others’ garbage cans—was called “pillow-soft” by besotted family friends, according to the report by Rolling Stone contributing editor Janet Reitman which accompanied the controversial cover. The Tsarnaev family defines our culture better than Wintour ever imagined, in being obnoxious, loud, entitled, polluting, and hating the very system that keeps them alive and kicking—and murdering innocents, I might add. Vogue is one long shopping catalogue of overpriced and mass-produced pop culture junk, and it’s the best there is, the rest too horrible to look at and certainly to mention in these here sainted pages.

Oh yes, the porn tart that featured on the cover of the glossy with her rap thug fiancé was said by Wintour to have “real guts” because she created a place for herself in the glare of the world’s spotlight. When I read it I did a double take. To describe a porn tart as having real guts is such an abuse of language it deserves at least three years in a strict penitentiary. Almost as bad as the talking heads on television who pompously insisted that the Boston bomber felt inferior to his older brother and that’s why he planted a bomb on a sidewalk full of women and children. Nice! This loopy, new-agey psychobabble fills the networks each evening, but I am told that daytime is far, far worse. Full of idiotic, monosyllabic morons telling the world how much better they feel about themselves. Like the Duke University co-ed, whose father is a doctor in the military who recently came home from a tour in Afghanistan to find she had made a porn video with men spitting on her while she serviced them orally; she said on national TV that she feels “empowered” as a woman since the video went viral. The university seems to have approved. Again, how nice. In the meantime, students at New York University tried to shut down a restaurant because its owner, a devout Christian, kept it shut on Sundays, and the company made some charitable contributions that they didn’t like. “He must be a homophobe and a racist,” said the one sign that can be repeated in these pages. I.e., Christian now translates into racism and homophobia. Go figure.

So, what has happened to us? That’s an easy one: egalitarianism and immigration. Once upon a time the WASP establishment had standards and people tried their best to uphold them. Teachers and priests held us to account. Now they reach way down to the lowest common denominator in order to avoid the R word being slung at them. Hollywood and the TV industry have a hell of a lot to do with the new standards. The F-gerund is almost compulsory, and was recently used by an American emissary. That diplomat is married to one of the Kagan brothers, major backers and architects of the Iraq disaster. In fact, like Hollywood, the neocon elite of D.C. has become one of the greatest corrupting influences of our generation.