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A recent article in USA Today captures the essence of present discontent in the United States. It laments: “In poll after poll, two-thirds or more of Americans say the country is on the wrong track.

Oil prices are near an all-time high. The president’s popularity hovers near record lows over a deeply unpopular war. Millions of homeowners are in danger of losing their houses to foreclosure. And many more Americans fear the loss of their jobs” (Thomas Hine, “How to Tackle America’s Familiar Funk,” Jan.

The article goes on to compare the country’s plight today with its tumultuous national picture in the 1970s: “Americans were shocked by the ’70s. We seemed to be running out of everything: oil, beef, even toilet paper. Prices were rising, and so was unemployment. Both the president and vice president resigned from office. The long struggle in Vietnam ended in a desperate retreat from Saigon by helicopter.” Comparisons with recent history can be very instructive, but we should not ignore ancient times.

The biblical “song of Moses” also invites historical perspective. It reaches down through the generations and suggests meaningful comparisons with the past: “Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he will show you; your elders, and they will tell you” ( Deuteronomy 32:7 Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask your father, and he will show you; your elders, and they will tell you., emphasis added throughout). If young and middle-aged Americans were to ask the country’s “greatest generation” of World War II what they thought of our current cultural behavior, what would the answer be? Would they be full of praise for our national conduct? Are they pleased with what passes for entertainment on television during the evening of their lives?

Would they not think that what’s really wrong with the nation is its steep moral decline over the last half century? A half century of American television Growing up in a small town in southern Texas, I well remember the sitcoms of the 1950s: Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, I Married Joan, My Little Margie. Although these programs didn’t always perfectly exemplify biblical standards, they weren’t immoral or suggestive. They were usually just relatively harmless entertainment about family life, and they always had a good ending. Fast forward to the late ’70s and the ’80s. Soap operas had normally been consigned to afternoon TV viewing.

Hunter x hunter wonder adventure english iso free programs. But programs like Dallas and Dynasty (really just soap operas) hit prime time and proved to be highly profitable, long-running shows with vast audience numbers. These programs normally depicted the upside-down lives of greedy, power-hungry top business executives who broke every rule of proper family life and reaped “their just rewards” with dysfunctional, mal-adjusted offspring who regularly had to be bailed out of crisis situations.

But even these programs and their spin-offs eventually proved too tame for jaded audiences who demanded even more salaciousness. In the decades that followed, producers gave them what they wanted: Sex in the City, Desperate Housewives, The Jerry Springer Show, to name a few. The saucy, sexed-up dramas offered today have hit new lows. As one writer put it before the start of the latest TV season: “Traditional appeals to family values find no resonance beyond the religious and conservative base. This has so emboldened America’s TV executives, desperate to staunch the hemorrhaging of audiences to the internet, that the autumn schedules [of 2007] offer such an orgy of sexually explicit programming, even [Janet] Jackson will be blushing” ( The Sunday Times Magazine, Aug. Since the contents of the four main U.S.