Our Crumbling Society: Sexy Nurse Edition

If Jon Basso should be under attack, it's for the fat content of his food, not the skin content of his waitresses' uniforms. But it's the skimpy nurse costumes at his Heart Attack Grill -- home of the Bypass Burger and Flatline Fries -- that has caught the wrath of the humorless and politically correct.

Let's get this over with. Here's rather conservative example of a Heart Attack Grill nurse uniform (there are skimpier):

I'm a big fan of pretty women, but not of Hooters-type uniforms that exploit their sexuality -- and that's something Basso's pushing to an exploitative limit.

He probably thinks he's quite creative with his entire restaurant concept, and the part of it that mocks health concerns does have a creative flair. But to dress young women in costumes like this reveals more than thigh and cleavage -- it also demonstrates a lack of creativity, a falling back to the tried, true and tawdry, a sign that perhaps his burgers aren't tasty enough to make it on their own.

However, I'm not seeing Nurse Betty in the photo as the reason for putting this story in the Our Crumbling Society chronicles. No, that's the result of Sandy Summers of the Center for Nursing Advocacy, who's quoted in today's LAT:

"The endless association of sex and nurses leads people to believe that maybe nurses really are available to provide for the sexual needs of patients and physicians. It degrades the professional image, it demoralizes practicing nurses and drives any self-respecting person away from considering the profession."

For Political Correctness to survive, the perpetrators must feel themselves superior and the people of America inferior. There's no one who can't see Heart Attack Grill's waitresses as a gag. People may see the uniforms as an indication that waitresses may be available for sex, and it may drive some people away from waitressing, but "any self-respecting person" who leaves nursing because of a waitress in white stockings and pink pumps doesn't have enough smarts to respect hereself.

Summers even has demanded, among other things, that Basso make it clear his waitresses are not real health care professionals -- one of the only things she's requested in a long-running fued that Basso's complied with, since it points out how ridiculous Summers and the entire PC movement is.

Basso and his sort are certainly signs of our crumbling civilization themselves, but its Summers and the legions she represents -- not of nurses, but of humorous, self-righteous idiots -- that led to this post. To her, a rotting laurel wreath as a demigod of our crumbling times.

Related Tags: Heart Attack Grill, Center for Nursing Advocacy, Sexual exploitation, Political correctness, PC