"I mean isn't that what's the matter, when you get right down to it? I mean even more than the profit motive or the loss of spiritual values or the fear of the bomb or any of those things? Or maybe it's the result of those things; maybe it's what happened when all those things start working at once without any cultural tradition to absorb them. Anyway, whatever it's the result of, it's what's killing the United States. I mean isn't it? This steady, insistent vulgarizing of every idea and every emotion into some kind of pre-digested intellectual baby food: this optimistic, smiling-though, easy-way out sentimentality in everybody's view of life?"
-- Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, 1961.