Are there actually people out there who think Bucky Covington can sing? You can almost hear the pitch correctors grinding on this recording.

Thank you for your more measured response than the acidic “Wendy.” I can appreciate what you’re saying as it relates to the concept that everyone wants to look back on older times and think of them as simpler. But in this case, it is actually true.

Don’t get me wrong — there was nothing simple about Vietnam, the era that I grew up in. Reality for those days was also coming home and watching Walter Cronkite provide the body count for the day. For those families with a body in the count, nothing was simple. I agree totally with you that Bucky’s age and his inability to have lived those lyrics creates a creative credibility issue….but by pointing it out, you bring up an entirely new line of thought, one that no one could have imagined this American Idol wannabee generating.

This young man recorded the song because the age-biased bastards in Nashville wouldn’t let the writer himself record it — I can almost guarantee you that, without even knowing who the writer is. The writer was undoubtedly old enough to write it, but Nashville closes the door on any male singer over 29 unless he is the member of a group.

That having been said, what you and other commenters need to be asking about the mini-controversy around this song is: What DID stimulate the writer to write the song? From what emotion or perception did he source it?

One guess of mine is that he among those who are weary of the political climate today that has to legislate, regulate, adjudicate and eradicate all things familiar, comforting and pleasurable. Liberals want to tax fattening food because it contributes to obesity. They want to tax cigars $10 apiece, all in the name of health care that ironically depends on the sale of products that no one in government wants anyone to use anymore!

If a child slides down a slide the wrong way in a playground, and gets hurt, instead of saying, “Oh, goodness, he had an accident, but he’ll be okay,” lawyers line up to sue whoever owns the playground and, before you know it, the slide (and the fun that goes with sliding down it) is gone.

Everyone loves DVDs and Blu-Rays and home theatre sound systems with their big screen LCD high definition televisions. But nothing about them can ever replace the feeling of going to a drive-in movie theatre, eating popcorn and fighting mosquitos on a summer night. Technology — and climbing property taxes — took all of that away from us, along with distributors who made single screens unprofitable for exhibitors.

Wendy made a big brohaha about the attention-grabbing reference to “penis sucking,” but at the base of it all, I come from a train of thought that says “being gay” is defined by what you do, not by what you are. No one “is” gay, but rather, is someone who performs certain acts. I don’t hate anyone. A tiny few of my past and present friends identify themselves as “gay,” and I look on it much in the same way as wishing that they didn’t smoke. Smoking is an unnatural act — breathing smoke always is — just as being drawn to perform sexual acts with someone of your own gender.

But do I hate the gay people I know? No more than the smokers. It’s something, in both cases, that they DO and I wish (for their own sakes) that they didn’t do it, whatever “it” is. Do you agree? Do you disagree? You’ll do one or the other, but it won’t change my mind.

The point of the songwriter is this: That world that he describes wasn’t filled with the angst that Wendy feels, because we didn’t have a politically charged media pounding us daily with issue after issue about the way we live. Is it safer to ride a bike without a helmet? I don’t ride without one today, but I loved the days that I didn’t as a kid. Is it safer to wear seat belts? Sure it is. But many of my happiest childhood memories were had playing in the back seat during a long drive to Missouri without a seat belt in site.

And like the songwriter says, I turned out alright. Not true of everyone, but it never is. Much of our freedom has been lost in the course of regulation aimed at making us safer. But people still die in car wrecks. This is about those of us that don’t.

It’s also about a time when we didn’t turn the TV on and hear about the next ten things that are going to make us sick, or what new special interest group wants its “rights” next. Here in Arkansas, famous for the Central High crisis of 1957, we have a black majority school board completely out of control, who just ejected a qualified, dedicated BLACK superintendent who wouldn’t kiss their rings, or put black children above white children. They bought him out for $650,000, crippling the district budget and guaranteeing future lawsuits.

In turn, they WON a court decision declaring the Little Rock School District to be “unitary” (which means black and white are taught the same), releasing us from federal court monitoring. What did the black majority school board do? They REJECTED the court findings, and voted to MEDIATE with a self-appointed civil rights (black) attorney, John Walker, keeping millions of dollars flooding into his coffers, while jeopardizing a $15 million loan forgiven by the state they are going to rebill to the district.

Seems that civil rights and even winning court cases didn’t wake some black folks up. They’re too busy being “victims.” LRSD parents are slowly coming around to vote the black majority OFF the school board, and MOST of these parents are BLACK!!

Sorry, David, but at 52, I’m going to vote for that simpler time that some say never existed. For me, it did. I don’t miss the smoking, but I do miss not being scared of everything, or of worrying about kids playing with Mattel toys made in China that need to be recalled. I miss not being scared of riding a bike without a helmet, which I did all through my childhood, playing in the back seat unbuckled on a long trip, eating ice cream without a diet expert telling me that I was going to have blocked arteries someday. I miss eating oysters on the half shell without worrying about food poisoning.

I miss those drive-ins, vinyl records with fold-outs, lyrics you could read, and even posters, and dart guns with solid (not foamy) darts. I miss laughing at knocking things off the dining room table with my Agent Zero-M Sonic Blaster before it became the first toy taken off the market by child toy safety laws.

I miss playing on playgrounds before the lawyers drove the cost of insurance so high that many property owners just skipped out on having them. I miss the days when we didn’t have “gay pride” parades, millions of abortions, and most of all, I miss the days BEFORE rap “music” which, of course, isn’t music at all but just violent poetry set to pathetic instrumentation, “performed’ by known thugs, murderers, and “gangstas” who advocate violence toward women and law officers. No wonder that several times a year, we read of another “rap” star who was capped in a drive-by, or who was charged with murder or drug possession.

I suspect that the writer of “A Different World” would agree with me, but you are obviously a gentleman and we will agree to disagree. I see your points, but I also see what this writer was trying to say. I wish you as happy a life as I had, and continue to have, whatever your age is.

I’m not condoning the drinking, smoking, beating, etc — but it does happen and amazingly some great kids still come out of less than perfect families.

I didn’t personally get the belt, but my Dad would have spanked us if we deserved it … and gained a heathly respect for parental authority. I NEVER questioned my Dad’s authority and he always had my repect and my 3 brothers as well.

Most of the very successful people I know had a strong father in their lives, whether he used a belt or a spanking or just strong words or authority.

I think what I love most about this song was that many of us really did do most of these things … and turned out just fine and you must admit that many kids these days do NOT respect their parents, their teachers, their elders (grandparents) like they should … and thats why most of us preferred our older, simplier world we grew up in.

A world that was based more on reality than false perceptions created by today’s mass media and the internet. It was a simple world.

With all the media coverage today, we forget what the real dangers in our lives really are. We hear constantly about “bear attacks” and “mountain lion attacks” …. and think these are really seriously things to worry about on a daily basis, when its really still “car accidents” that kill, but are under-reported … vs. the more sensational “bear attack”, which is super rare and we shouldn’t keep our kids inside because of a dateline story …. you get my drift.

I do think Bucky might not have experienced all this stuff — but he’s just singing a song somebody else wrote … and doing it very well.

His deliverly on this song is great. I think it could go to #1 because people like me (age 39) can REALLY relate to it.

I do like what you say about simpler times. I don’t think any period is simpler than any other–different, to be sure, with different stresses, but not simpler. However, people do deal with changes and new stresses by longing for the old ones which at least had the benefit of familiarity. As for the good old days being a time where we had more freedom…that really seems counter intuitive to me–those pre civil rights, pre gay rights times you point to were ones where people had far less freedom than they do today. Your obsession regarding those who suck penises, as you put it, seems telling in this regard: Gay men and women were only “the worse for it being out in the open” because out in the open they risked being ostracized or getting the shit kicked out of them. They still do, I’m afraid.

The lyrics, while Bucky is definitely too young to sing most of them, reverberated immediately with me. The images that were called up have less to do with “mothers who smoked,” in that no one will argue that there was anything good or healthy about prenatal smoking.

What David didn’t get, I will do my best to explain…..

Mothers who smoked and drank…..cribs covered in lead based paint…..child proof lids, seat belts in cars…..bikes with no helmets…..three TV networks, no video games or satellites…..the Pledge of Allegiance and school prayer, winners and losers with no whining.

There is an admitted mix of good and bad here. But without getting into the health issues, safety issues, political correctness issues or tech issues, what is being missed here is a WORLD WITHOUT ISSUES. What I felt myself missing as I heard this song for the first time was a world with innocence and ignorance of dangers. It was slower. It was easier. Even if it wasn’t safer or politically correct, you had time to smell the flowers and you felt a lot more free. You knew a cigarette could eventually hurt you, but you got to CHOOSE.

Abortion was a disgrace. And despite David’s concern over kids thrown into walls — something that will ALWAYS HAPPEN, UNLESS WE OUTLAW PARENTHOOD — most of us got a judicially issued spanking, knew we deserved it, and felt like better people for having gotten it.

This song appeals to people old enough to remember a time, not when we engaged in practices that were risky or politically unviable, but when we didn’t know any better, David might argue that we’re safer now that parents know not to smoke around pregnant people, or to smoke themselves, that multinationals are more comfortable in classrooms where prayer is prohibited (along with the one or two atheists present), or that digital television’s 250 channels and iPhones are a wonderful thing.

I would have to respectfully disagree. I don’t regret a single moment I spent “unsafe” at the top of a tree that I climbed. I don’t regret a single open prayer or Bible verse read in my grade school classrooms. Television had a lot more impact, and demanded more quality, with only three channels to choose from. I wouldn’t care if Animal Planet or Spike TV vanished tomorrow.

That “different world” Bucky sings of seemed to have a lot more possibilities and a wider range of freedom. We weren’t wagged back then by every special interest, and civil rights weren’t defined by whether or not you sucked penises (there, I said it) under the guise of an “alternate life style.” If you did that, you hid it, and we’re the worse for it being out in the open. Most of us belong to religions that teach that it’s a sin, and we’re not too keen on the idea of liberals redefining Bible scriptures as “hate crimes.”

It’s not enough that people can do things openly that they used to hide. They want them LEGALLY ENDORSED, and anyone who objects to be held guilty of a crime, of denying them their “civil rights.” They want the law bent in such a way that it forces the rest of us to shut up and redefine right and wrong.

If any of you saw the Brady Bunch movies, especially the first one, you noticed a sneaky subtext. On one side of the fence, it was Astroturf and blue skies. On the other side, it was punks hocking up loogies with pins through their cheeks while grunge songs screamed obscenities through the radio.

You started out in those movies ridiculing the Bradys, but by the time the end rolled around…..you found yourself wishing it could be that way again.

It was a world with fewer lawyers, and most of them were subdued. Like Bucky sang, it was a different world — and it was one I loved better.