Philadelphia Story, 2014 ???

[GrandviewGloria]

Forget Katharine Hepburn & Cary Grant types, witty debutantes living on equestrian estates, and the "Station Wagon Set". That was then. This, apparently, is NOW: the misbegotten hoodlums of the Stolen SUV Set.

http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/...268610032.html

http://6abc.com/news/reward-of-$110000-after-3-kids-killed-by-carjacked-suv/219477/

I remember, about two decades back, when a couple of new people from Philadelphia showed up at our temple in Mississippi. They were young, and "looking for a place with a growing economy". Philadelphia, according to them, was dying/imploding/stagnant. We were quite perplexed. Plenty of us were in the Financial Sector, and knew the numbers in Pennsylvania still beat the numbers in Mississippi by a wide margin. I think, though, that our new congregants were just too politically-correct to actually tell us that scenes like the above were why they were looking for better places to begin their working lives and start families.

Really a tragic story, and so telling of what life is like in a dying American metropolis. A few decent people struggling to make things better, squashed, while trying to do good, by problematic males, of the usual varieties. So sad.

I don't approve of all the smoking and drinking and slapping in this movie. And the WASPs I know say that this film was created by non-WASPs in Hollywood, both to defame them, and to corrupt their young people. I would tend to agree: it is defamation of the most insidious and effective sort, and the degenerates among Ole Miss/Vanderbilt/Sewanee/SMU/Duke/Princeton Crowd definitely have used this movie, ever since it came out, as a template for their rather louche behavioral repertoire. Too, haute WASPs find the house's decor, and the clothes, to be a bit crass and "Hollywoodian". Still, it looks a lot better than today's Philadelphia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffVd_UtLoJU

[2nd trick op]

This isn't about race, and it isn't about class, either. And it most certainly isn't about feel-good "noblesse oblige", dressed up under the sham called Political Correctness. It's about irresponsible behavior, escalated into a criminal act.

And the unfortunate fact is that there are any number of self-appointed moralists and would-be "spin doctors" who will seek to hijack this tragedy to suit their agenda.

But it's worth noting as well, that this sad event took place in an ordinary community, in a city inclined toward neither cosmopolitan pretensions, nor (at least as vicious a degrree, it seems) of the polarization that destroyed Detroit and is threatening Chicago. Hopefully, there are a few people out there who can turn the aftermath into something beyond simple finger-pointing and a call for settling old scores.

We can do little more than clean up the mess, remember the positive aspirations of the victims, and move on.