#82 Obnoxious Oughts

They used to come up with great phrases for previous decades in history, like “the Roaring Twenties” and “The Dirty Thirties” and “The Nifty Fifties.” This decade’s a little harder. Especially since we have to think up a name for the span of ten years itself. The “zeros” don’t work, and it’s not the “teens” yet. How about dusting off an old word for zero? “Oughts.” Yeah, I like it. Then car dealers could offer “ought-percent financing.”
And we could call this decade “The Obnoxious Oughts.” Cause future historians will surely conclude that the biggest engines of cultural commerce were two very obnoxious things in particular, the cellphone and Viagra.
The cellphone is a slam-dunk for obnoxiousness. We’ve all experienced, on freeways, in theaters, and in churches, the annoying consequences of allowing people to be in communication with each other at any moment. Some people just can’t be out of touch. But wake up. I’ll grant, when cellphones were new, that you could forget you had one when you went into the movie house or the church. But the message is out there. Turn the damn things off. The other night at one of my kid’s music concerts at the high school, the conductor wasted three minutes reminding people nicely to turn off their damn phones. And these were presumably parents who came to see their own kids play. Although I’ve been to enough of these things to note that if it’s multiple groups playing, and the current group playing doesn’t include their kid, those same rude parents talk to each other even without phones. So maybe obnoxiousness doesn’t require electronic assistance. Guns don’t kill people, as they say, though they sure make it easier for some idiot to do so.
Our other cultural obnox-ification comes from that little blue pill, Viagra. Granted, it solved a problem. But it created a whole new one. No, I’m not talking about recent reports that taking Viagra makes you go blind. What research came up with this by the way? And has that research stood up to rigorous analysis? Or was it supplied from the International Order of Fifth Grade Schoolmarms? Cause it seems to me they used to warn us that something else associated with that area made you go blind as well. Is there a blindness center down there that science has yet to uncover? But that’s not the new problem I’m talking about. No, the problem is that Viagra created a whole new genre of advertisements I really wasn’t quite ready for in the middle of the Superbowl. Please. Give me a flash of Janet Jackson before I have to sit there, my mouth full of popcorn, and listen to another ad about “lasting quality” and “being ready when you are.” Sheesh. You’d think I had nothing better to do than have sex all the time. I got phone calls to answer you know...
America, ya gotta love it.