Taking the best of both sides of the culture war.

David Brooks is writing again. I always get distracted by the prose. "Acres of exposed pelvic skin." That is supposed to be a sexy image. "Acres" sounds morbidly obese. And "pelvic skin" makes me stop and spend about five minutes trying to think of other parts of the skeleton and whether we'd say they had their own skin. Do we call the skin on thighs "femoral skin"?

But let's get past that and look at the theory: "American pop culture may look trashy, but America's social fabric is in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair." Brooks notes a lot of evidence that younger Americans, for all their exposure to raunchy pop culture, are just enjoying the music, and not acting out the words. He concludes that the young have adopted the best of both sides of the culture war: the outward, broad expressiveness of the left, and the morally constrained private life of the right.

I hope that's true. Think how much better it is that the opposite: prissy, priggish public expression and sinning like mad privately.