The old order passeth …

… About Last Night | All together then. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I miss the slow-moving America of my small-town youth, back when the word “everybody” was more than an abstraction. Red Skelton and Carol Burnett, Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, What’s My Line? and I’ve Got a Secret: All are gone and few remembered, and none has been replaced. TV has become yet another instrument of social fragmentation, an anteroom to the World Wide Web in which we sit in separate cubicles, sovereign monads reigning over gated communities of the mind. Intelligent people who call themselves conservatives tell me this is progress, and I might believe them if I believed in progress. Instead, I surf the Web in search of tiny firms that sell flickering kinescopes of old game shows, and note with sadness the passing of the long-forgotten giants of the small screen. I wonder, too, what future encounters with their multicultural pasts will cause my brightly ironic Gen-X friends to suddenly start thinking of themselves as Americans. Will they remember Seinfeld the way I remember David Brinkley? Somehow I doubt it.

My sentiments exactly.