Tag: 1950’s

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Suburbia

I just read an article by Judith Warner in the New York Times that noted how often movies depict the lifestyle of 1950’s suburbia as a hellhole of emotional privation and spiritual desiccation. There are a long list of movies that fit the bill, from “The Hours” and “Far From Heaven” to “Edward Scissorhands” and “Revolutionary Road”, of course. How about “Hairspray”? Andy Warhol’s “Bad”?

She didn’t think it was quite fair. I’m not sure if she actually admired those mythical moms who spent their days cooking and cleaning and plucking their eyebrows and showing up at school “perfectly coiffed” to pick up their children– maybe she should– but she seems to think it’s unfair that we castigate a lifestyle that provided stability, security, and happiness to most people. The movies never tire of ridiculing suburbanites, whether they’re manicuring their hedges or swathing the house with Christmas lights.

The audiences for these films live in suburbs, where they manicure their hedges and put up Christmas lights. And go to movies that ridicule them.

Having acknowledged a measure of hypocrisy in the near-universal (among liberal intellectuals) condemnation of 50’s conformity and materialism, I’m not sure this (Warner’s diatribe) isn’t just another case of the a writer acting as if she had just discovered something that the writers she criticizes had always known and took for granted: that there was indeed a trade-off, and that the material comforts of suburbia are… just what they are: material comforts. Warner acts as if an entire generation has forgotten about how nice it is to have a warm, clean home and meals. Artists, don’t you know, sacrifice these things for the purity of their “art”. But of course, we are only ever shown the successful artist, for whom, we conclude, the sacrifice was worth it. How would it look if, instead, the movies showed us the dismal, depressing lives of the vast majority of wood-be artists, living in poverty and deprivation, for nothing more than the, assumed, personal satisfaction of creating great art?

And she’s right about the note of hypocrisy among the swaths of young, urban professionals who choose to live in the suburbs for the material comforts while entertaining quiet delusions about soulfulness and authenticity being smothered by the spirit of conformity.

Why You Want a War

Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. …Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Hermann Goring

Why You Don’t Want a War

“The drive-through, which accounts for 60 percent of the chain’s business in the United States, was reconfigured to become more efficient.” NYTimes (January 10, 2008)

I didn’t know McDonald’s does 60% of their business through idling carbon emitters. We have a problem. McDonald’s chief executive (Jim Skinner, who looks like a McDonald’s customer) eats at McDonald’s every day.

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Our Moral Decline

Would you be surprised to find that, in the view of this website, public morality is in decline? What? Again? It is? Oh my goodness! Whatever will we do?!

www.holybible.com is a fairly representative Christian commentary on our day and age, our times, our era, our epoch, our cultural milieu. (It even, of course, like almost every other “Christian” website in the world, has a pitch for your money on the main page, for a CD or worship of songs, though I should acknowledge that it’s a relatively low-key pitch for the genre).

Or, like me, would you be more inclined to think about just how shocked you would really be if you ever happened to stumble into a website somewhere, by a Christian journalist or pundit, that expressed the thought that public morality was improving?

Seriously. I thought about that a lot. Why would it seem totally weird to read a comment like, “it is clear that our society is less sinful now than it was 50 years ago”? But you know that you are never going to hear that from a Christian journalist or pundit. Not in your life.

If virtually every single Christian commentator thinks the world is getting worse, not better, they must be right– right? They can’t all be wrong.

But if society is in decline, when, according to these punsters, was it ever in incline? It must be declining from somewhere. It must have improved, from the barbaric ages, at some point. Say, the 1950’s. The America of Ozzie and Harriet and the Beaver.

Do they have a picture in their minds of rural villages dotted with white churches, milk-maids tending the cows and baking apple pies, young boys fishing at the creek, fathers mowing the hay?

That’s nostalgia. That’s sentimentality masquerading as social conviction. Even a cursory survey of the real historical record reveals that the 1950’s was actually an age of profound immorality. Racism was not only tolerated, it was accepted. Sexism was embedded in the infrastructure of the workplace. Materialism and conformity were promoted as “healthy” social values. Sexual abuse was ignored, if even reported. And it was the official policy of the U.S. government that, if necessary, 100s of millions of people would be killed to stop the Soviets.

You would think that Christians would be among the first celebrate the achievements of the civil rights era, or the accomplishments of U.N. peace-keepers, or the land-mine treaty, or democracy in the Soviet Union, the disarmament movement, equality for women, peace. Nyet. Doesn’t matter. Has no importance. The important thing is that 13-year-old girls use the f-word in movies. That’s it! It’s the end of times!

This is all a bit like the “values” argument conservatives love to wave around. We poor liberals believe in diversity, tolerance, progress, human rights, community, the environment, and equality. It’s such a shame we don’t have any values. Hey bubba– lets get a six-pack and some buckshot and drive your Hummer down the back roads of Idaho so we can shoot some helpless furry creatures and talk about values. Right, Bobby-Bob– like the sanctity of the right to own guns, and the sanctity of the right to pay our employees a low minimum wage? And the sanctity of the right to send people to jail for 99 years for stealing a cell phone? Damn right we have values…

I frankly believe that even if 90% of the population stopped fornicating and drinking beer and thinking kind thoughts about minorities and the poor and suddenly decided to go to church on Sunday instead… even if all of that happened, the Christian commentators would continue to tell you that the world is in moral decline…. because that’s what they do. That’s their bread and butter. That’s their mental frame-work, their cache, their frame of reference. They could not do without it, and they would not feel powerful and mighty without that cudgel with which to whack you in the face: listen to me, or you will burn in hell.

Why is it so illogical to constantly, consistently, always proclaim that public morality is declining? If it doesn’t already seem absurd to you, here’s why. Suppose that your salary were declining every year, year after year, without fail? How much salary, exactly, would you now have?

If you started at, say, $30,000 in 1970, and your salary declined continuously since then, you would have almost none of it left. But that’s silly. Nobody’s salary declines like that.

In the same way, public morality cannot be in constant decline. But have you ever heard any of these pundits that morality ever improved in any particular year? No, and you never will: where’s the money in that?