Light On Dark Water

Talk of the English Reformation reminded me that a few days ago my web wanderings (which I really need to cut back on) brought me to this interesting post by a blogger who calls herself Neo-neocon. She's recently compared the 1970 BBC series "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" to a Showtime series about the Tudors. (Not sure if Showtime is U.S.-only–it's a cable tv channel.) I haven't seen the latter, but I remember the former vividly (though surely it was 1971, at least, when I saw it). You need only look at the graphics for the Showtime series to guess what it's like; personally I find the smarmy show-biz dude who plays (I assume) Henry to be comical, looking more like a mediocre rapper than a king, though I suppose women may disagree. A commenter on that post probably sums it up pretty accurately:

As someone who works in that industry (not the programming side, thank heaven), take it from me: no one involved in making ‘Tudors’ is the least bit interested in history, much less an accurate portrayal thereof. It is — as you say — soft core porn — as is about 90% of pay cable (the rest is gratuitous violence); they simply use Tudor-era trappings as gilded backdrop. There are, after all, only so many ways you can dress up meaningless sex; randy royals were just next in line.

I must admit  that some cable shows, of which The Wire comes first to mind, are extremely good. But I don't subscribe to those channels, and watch the good shows on dvd, so maybe that 90% figure is accurate. And Showtime and Cinemax do seem to have a reputation for having a really high proportion of glossy trash. 

A couple of weeks ago Jesse Canterbury and I had a back-and-forth (I think it was in the comments on this post) about the level of sex-and-drugs on college campuses, and I, somewhat reluctantly, had to say "you don't know what it was like before." Jesse is young enough to have grown up after the sexual revolution became institutionalized, while I'm old enough to remember what it was like before (and to have been, to my bitter regret, among the revolutionaries). Though the sexual revolution in the broad sense had been in progress since the early 20th century, there really was a dramatic change in the latter half of the 1960s. Not that things were wonderful before, but they were certainly different.

Yes, there have been changes for the better since 1965 or 1970. What worries me is that the changes for the worse have attacked such fundamental things that the benefits of the positive changes have been greatly undermined. Well, such is human progress.