Madonna was a virgin in the land that made me me...

So, last night my father, a man with a PhD who should know better, sent me a stupid, retro-philic piece of @#$% forward in bad verse called "The Land That Made Me Me." It begins:

> Long ago and far away, In a land that time forgot, Before the days of
> Dylan, Or the dawn of Camelot.
>
> There lived a race of innocents, And they were you and me, Long ago and
> far away In the Land That Made Me Me.

Pathetic imagery, to be sure, but wait for it... Tales such as these can only spiral downward. Crinolines laid out to dry upon lawns, crap about Frankie Avalon and Annette F. being dreamy, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera… Just throw a slide in of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on the backs of a hundred buck-toothed, long finger-nailed, braid-headed "Asiatics" in straw hats, and you'd have the willfully ignorant imagery down pat. And then:

> For youth was still eternal, And life was yet to be, And Elvis was forever
> In the Land That Made Me Me.

So, we're talking pre-war Elvis, right? 'Cause the guy who came back post-binge, Brittany Spears-like in the '70's wasn't exactly a catch, nor did he smell of anything but peanut butter (much less forever). And eternal youth? Have you ever SEEN what people looked like in the '50's? Butterballs, one and all. Good skin, yes, but look at 'em now. Further down:

> We'd never heard of microwaves, Or telephones in cars, And babies might be
> bottle-fed, But they weren't grown in jars.

Wrong decade, dumbasses. Jar babies first happen (to my knowledge,) in a novel from the '30's. Brave New World, indeed. And microwaves existed in the '40's under the marketing name of 'radar ranges.'

> And pumping iron got wrinkles out, And "gay" meant fancy-free, And dorms
> were never coed In the Land That Made Me Me.

That 'gay' bit really did it for me. I sent Dad the most acerbic one-lined e-mail ever, then thought better of it and sent an apology with a reasoned argument about why I thought this was the most appalling thing ever coming from a man who certainly has his own personal prejudices, but never lets them show in his dealings with others. I love my father because, though he is hot-headed, he is a very public person, with very much in the way of restraint and TOLERANCE where it's necessary. You couldn't ask any more from a person, especially one who I know, privately, to be most uncomfortable with certain ideas. He wrote back that he had taken no offence, and was sorry if he'd made me mad. I think that's the most positive, telling interaction I've ever had with Dad as an adult. Weird.