IF FDR, OBAMA & TONY CURTIS MET FOR BREAKFAST

Lately, Americans have this cable-news fixation about connecting-the-dots. Sounds so smart and pundit-like. Sometimes, though, disparate dots simply don't connect. Unless maybe you force the fit...!

Dot #1:
American cities have been rated by Men's Health Magazine according to the amount of sexual activity (eg. condom sales, sex-toy sales, birth rates, STD rates). Seven of the top 15 cities were in Texas

Dot #2:
According to an ABC News poll, only 50% of Americans still believe in the American Dream that anyone can succeed with enough work and effort. 43% added that the Dream was once true, but no more

Dot #3:
Hollywood legend Tony Curtis dies at age 86.

With a little fudging and forcing, here's how these three fit. One of film-land's sexiest stars. who lived out the American Dream, has left the rest of us -- well, at least me -- to wonder. How different was Tony's America to our own? Having lived in both, my best dot-connecting sense is that we are extraordinarily different.

No surprise there. It's a given that nations and cultures keep changing. However, the question is: Why so extraordinarily? Celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead answered it this way: "The world has changed more in the 50 years since WWII than it has in the preceding 50 centuries!"

Currently, it's fashionable to express Mead's idea by the way the media continually compare our times with the Depression of the 1930s. Back where Tony grew up dreaming the Dream. If you put 20 scholars in a conference room, they'll come up with 21 versions of why his America and ours are so spellbindingly different. But not to get lost in a thicket of stats, one simple one between his world and ours stands out. He said it himself in an interview when he was asked about how many Americans are today walking away from their mortgages:

"My Old Man could have been on his knees, but still wouldn't pull that crap!" Neither would mine, Tony, neither would mine.