My grandfather visited me recently. He dropped by in the middle of the night, which is a little weird because, technically speaking, he hasn't been alive for 25 years.

He checked in to see how things are going down here at the end of another year. He was a salt-of-the-earth man who braved the Depression, played semipro baseball, raised a family in a house he built with his own hands and was a career high school teacher and coach for $100 a month. He said to me:

How on earth are things going at the end of 2008?

Well, Grandpa, we elected a new president. The leading candidates were a woman, an old man, a black, a Baptist minister and a Mormon, which sounds like the start of a joke. Nobody cared one whit about sex or race, but they drew the line at having a Mormon in the White House. Barack Obama — he calls himself a "mutt" because he's half white and half black — will take office next month.

I got a glimpse of your TV and saw four men sitting around singing about something called Viagra. What is that?

It's medicine for, um, male problems, and thanks for bringing that up, as it were. It's pretty much no holds barred nowadays. No one is embarrassed about anything. There's a new Arby's commercial that uses its logo as a phallic symbol. I'll never be hungry enough to eat there. In one TV ad, women discuss their herpes as if they're talking about a cold. Are you OK, Grandpa? You look ill.

What is Proposition 8?

It's a law that defines marriage as being a union of only a man and a woman.

You need a law for that? I mean, what else is there?

Now marriage can be between a man and a man, or a woman and a woman. Look, maybe you'd better sit down.

Well, that can't work! They can't have babies!

Sure they can; they adopt.

You mean kids grow up without both a mom and a dad?

It's complicated. Everything's complicated now.

What else happened this year?

Gas was $4 a gallon. It's weird — we can build rockets, but we can't create a practical car that runs on something other than fossil fuel, which is produced by the Middle East, which means we fund the enemy.

Continue.