Today?s proposition is that we are living in a world shaped by the generation that was shaped by The Sound of Music and its musical lessons.

[How do you solve a problem like] Maria is a nucleus from which has been built entire lessons about how cool it is to treat authority with irreverence, and how that is okay as long as you mix your joie de vie with personal integrity and beliefs. Dilbert is nothing but Maria with cynicism added.

These are a Few of My Favorite Things transformed an entire generation into the consumer culture that you see today. The song leads to a shift away from the sixties focus on interrelationships and the search for global meaning. Instead, ?when the dog bites, when the bee stings, I simply remember my favorite things and then I don?t feel so bad?; things like brown paper packages tied up with strings and copper kettles and ponies. Shopping therapy as an analgesic.

Climb Ev?ry Mountain, ford every stream, etc etc. Underneath the uplifting message of our American sense of empowerment and the freedom we gain from lacking a sense of class restrictions (cf Bill Gates) is a sinister subtext. No wonder we are walking roughshod over the environment.

The Lonely Goatherd is a song just creeps me out. I guess it is supposed to be about love, but I do not want to hear the love songs of lonely people who smell like goats. Maybe this song presages internet dating and maybe it doesn?t, but either way I do not want to talk about it. Icky gross yodeling goat sex.

And then, of course, there is the title song, The Sound of Music, which led to an entire outdoor industry, vanguarded by REI (see previous consumerism imprinting), being born with the promise that being outdoors will cure all your ills and heal your soul.

Heralding the return to family values, quality time, and playdates, Something Good taught the lesson that love is more important than work, than your nunly vocation, anything. A careful and reasoned response to The Protestant Ethic it is not, but you cannot sing along to Weber, so Julie Andrews wins. And after all, who wants to work so hard? What is the point of being a superpower if you have to fritter away your life with work work work?

So Long, Farewell demonstrates the now accepted truth that any deception or flight from consequences is acceptable as long as it is done with style and you can embed something catchy like ?so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye? (or ?I have no recollection of that?, or ?I am not a crook?) into the national consciousness. The triumph of form over substance. Enron is vile not because millions of people were swindled out of hundreds of billions of dollars, but rather because Enron failed to do it with sufficient panache.

On the other hand, it is impossible to listen to the paternalism and sexism of Sixteen Going on Seventeen without hearing Charmian?s wide-eyed naivet‚ as an ironic and mocking ?oh poor helpless me? joke. It might be revisionist, but you know she cannot possibly be taking him seriously.

But really, that seems the exception that proves the rule that we are living in a world molded by a Rodgers and Hammersteinian musical morality.