Cherished oddities...............................

     This is odd.  Popular culture is supposed to describe popular reality.  The reality of American families is one of a mostly successful search for conventional happiness.  Most men and women are quite boringly heterosexual and are not very promiscuous except for perhaps a relatively brief period in youth, and most find lasting love,
     Most husbands and wives love one another.  Most of them consider one another best friends; most of them are faithful, or at least mostly so (neglected housewives who startle house painters with indecent proposals are as rare in life as they are common in Penthouse).  Most husbands never batter their wives, and most wives never remove parts of their husbands with household cutting instruments, nor do they set their beds afire.  Most parents would rather die than sexually abuse their own, or any, children.  Most children grow up to honor their parents, and most parents grow old in the comfort that they have, in the raising of their children, created something of irreplaceable value.  It's a wonderful life, and art used to imitate it.
     Why doesn't it anymore?  At the bottom, the fault lies in the nature of modern intellectualism, which has as its core the adolescent notion that conventional lives of conventional values are somehow wrong:  that they are not merely politically improper but are, worse, uncool - not worth living, or at least not worth examining. Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina one of the great founding untruths of the intellectual age, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  This was exactly, entirely wrong.  Happy families are all idiosyncratic, each with its own unduplicable history, each with its own cherished oddities.  Very nearly every unhappy family is very much alike, the same tedious, awful story of selfishness and dead love and the destruction wrought by the fall of one or another family member into the grip of one or another vice.
-Michael Kelly, as excerpted from his essay "Family Wealth" from his collected writings