Give Me Your Stoned, Your Slobs, Your Wal-Mart Masses, Yearning to be Totally Naked In Public!

With apologies to Emma Lazarus for defling her beautiful sonnet of yesteryear.

We see them everywhere— the invasion of The Wal Mart People; as the author of an excellent article I will be discussing put it:

Pajama- and lingerie-wearing customers used to appear mostly at the lowest-end Walmarts and convenience stores. But this summer, it’s looking like the People of Walmart crowd has dramatically increased.

They’re at Target, at Sam’s Club, in the malls. They’re at Trader Joe’s, hip little trans-friendly burger shops, and the farmer’s market. To anyone hitting the beach this summer, have you noticed there, too, what seems like a dramatic increase in whole naked butt cheeks and antisocial narcissists blaring their music?

In starting this discussion, I must most emphatically distance myself as far as possible from the inane elitism of Peter Sztrok and his snark about “smelling” the Trump supporters in a Wal Mart as that kind of mindset is the farthest thing possible from the point I hope to discuss.

What does it mean when large portions of the population of a Nation slowly, but surely, become so slovenly, unkempt and carelessly “dressed” that they obviously no longer care how they appear in public? I’m no social scientist, far from it, but I do have some fairly strong opinions about this issue, as I do about a number of problems, some downright existential, facing America today. And in my opinion, informed by personal observation and recent readings on these issues , what these seemingly spreading problems indicate is a population which increasingly no longer has any pride or self-respect in itself, ergo, a population which does not care enough about their Nation or their community - or themselves- to get off the couch and participate in the great experiment in self-governance the world knows as the United States of America.

I do not pretend to be a fashion plate, although it has become a common occurrence for me to be the only man in a restaurant wearing a jacket and collared shirt— it’s hard to shake habits of a (long, Thanks be to God) lifetime, I guess. I must note as well that we now live in one of the most informal areas of the country and the dress tends to be much more relaxed here in Florida. However, that is also beside the point when it comes to the growing portion of the population on weed every day, discussed below, and the large segment of American society which goes out in public in varying degrees of slovenliness and dissaray— “The Wal Mart People.”

The article referred to above, Have You Noticed A Lot More Americans Look Like A Hot Mess?, by Joy Pullman, helpfully provides a few photos of that special species and, as many who read this will be - or once were before I subjected them to this indignity! - friends, I am only selecting a few as they truly are not for the faint of heart":

There is no faster disincentive to enjoying a lovely - and more and more prohibitively expensive- dining experience than having a couple seated next to your table with the man wearing a “wife-beater” undershirt, shorts and flip-flops and the woman wearing as little as possible over what was, not all that long ago, considered to be her “private” areas (in quotes as the word is becoming almost archaic in our times).

The author in the piece linked above notes that in her town, “it looks like public slovenliness and disarray have become more of a norm than a subculture.” She then explores the probable root causes of this societal collapse, looking, first and most obviously, at the recent insanity which ruled our nation for several years under the rule of petty little tyrants like His Lordship Fauci and his sidekick, The Scarf Queen, but also notes that many of these disorders were there before the pandemic:

Family chaos as measured by broken or never-formed marriages was at historical highs. So was the number of American adults taking medication for mental illnesses. In fact, in 2020, nearly one-quarter of all Americans — including some babies — were taking psychiatric medications. In the late-aughts, the latest data available, American women were trending dramatically less happy than in the 1970s.

Of course, many factors go into making much higher proportions of Americans a hot, sad mess. But it’s obvious lockdowns accelerated, and likely amplified, terrible preexisting trends. It will take years to quantify the damage, but just go outside and look around. It’s visible in Americans’ bodies, in their clothing, in their behavior, and in their faces.

“… and in their faces” — that phrase really struck a chord with me as I so often see people — even young people who should have so much to live for and so much to look forward to — slouching through their day like zombies. Is it just me? I find myself fighting the urge to go over and tell them something in the nature of an old military-style admonition like “ straighten up and shape up!” and am constrained by the good, solid common sense of My Lady from doing so.

The author introduced me to another phrase which fits like a glove some of the grotesqueries we see in public nowadays - “saturated ugliness.” In this part of her discussion, she makes the point that the far-left Marxists, but I repeat myself, have made this part of their campaign to destroy the country they hate more than any other on the face of the planet — their own.

This is not an accident, it’s cultural warfare. As Chris Rufo explained earlier this year, leftist academics have created an entire thoughtworld celebrating grotesqueness for ideological ends. They openly aim “to displace the old society with what might be called a ‘queer-normative society,’ a ‘fat-normative society,’ a ‘mental-illness-normative society.'” The ultimate goal is an “anti-normative society.” 

The goal is to achieve an inversion and the hegemony of a non-normative ideal, which you see valorized in the academic literature on all these different axes — gender, sexuality, body type, or psychological health.

…We might categorize this new ideal as a “gender-neutral, non-binary, obese, mentally disturbed, ‘they/them’ pronoun user, operating as a radically autonomous individual that is totally disconnected from any of the traditional bonds, relationships, and constraints.”

In closing this part of the discussion, I cannot recommend too highly a thorough reading of Ms Pullman’s thoughtful, albeit not a little disconcerting, piece. She closes with this 100% spot on indictment of the Marxist cultural warriors:

Increasingly, though, it’s not just Walmart. It’s everywhere. The “let them eat cake” ruling class doing this to America doesn’t deserve to be in charge of anything,

The article referenced in Ms Pullman’s piece, while not directly relevant to this discussion, is worth noting briefly as it pertains to a looming movement not entirely recognized by most Americans but which is potentially extremely destructive of everything our Nation stands for. The article is entitled The Anti-Normative Society and the following paragraph neatly sums up the, as the author refers to it, “self-devouring” nature of the movement:

… the new ideal functions almost entirely on the process of negation: dissolving, attacking, dismantling, and deconstructing.

Again, I highly recommend a careful study of this most vauable work — but not if you’re having a good, happy, rewarding, productive and satisfying day. Save it for the other kind as that is where you will wind up after reading about the depth and reach of the cultural warfare we are involved in.

America the Stoned is the title in a recent post at the excellent blog site The Free Press and although the major portion of the content is behind the paywall, the opening is quite dramatic as to the high (no pun intended) number of Americans who are on weed every single day of their lives:

More states are legalizing weed every year. An estimated 13.2 million Americans use the drug every day. So why is it starting to feel like a bad idea?

Over 13 million Americans spending every single day of their lives stoned seems to this simplistically oriented mind as a terrible tragedy for our country at a time when we need every funcitioning citizen on deck and contributing toward the recovery of our Nation from the ravages of the disorders with which we are faced.

More details on just how far America has become “America the Stoned” are found in the article entitled After a Decade, Marijuana Legalization Is Not Going Well; here are a few highlights:

The marijuana industry, which has spent billions lobbying elected officials and bankrolling legalization referendum campaigns, has genetically engineered its products to provide users with a higher "high," for higher profits.

As a result, more people are using marijuana and they are using it more heavily. In 2021, 52.5 million Americans over the age of 12 used marijuana at least once in the past year, more than doubled from two decades ago. There were 13.2 million daily users of THC products in 2021, compared with 5.4 million in 2012 and 3.1 million in 2002.

Today, more Americans are using THC daily than drinking alcohol daily. In 2021, 25.3 percent of THC users were daily users, a higher percentage of frequency than for cocaine, crack, heroin, and meth.

The industry's contention that THC is non-addictive is a lie. Marijuana use disorder for 12-to-17-year-olds is up 145 percent since 2018.

More and more Americans are stoned, slovenly, unkempt, lacking self-respect or self-control, resulting, at least in part, in lower and lower numbers of citizens actively engaged in the responsibilities of citizenship. These are not just the grumblings and complaints younger generations come to expect from their elders but are very genuine concerns about trends, backed up by statistical analyses, which, to put it mildly, bode ill for the future of our Republic. To borrow from Ms Pullman’s conclusion, perhaps the “let them eat cake” elite is relying more and more on a modern version of Marie Antoinette’s famous (infamous?) adage: let them stay stoned so they won’t notice the freedoms we are stealing from them, gradually and then, as the Hemingway character put it: suddenly.