Take Me Back To The Sixties is a look back at a time when the values I learned from '50s TV were still in force. Enjoy the presentation!
Life was simpler then. Percy Faith's "Theme from a Summer Place" was ubiquitous on the radio. Everyone listened to the same three stations, heard the same songs on the car radio as they drove around on 31-cent gas. The car, if it was a brand new Chevy, cost about $2,500. You didn't have to lock its doors, and everyone picked up hitchhikers.
TV shows were not afraid to portray strong parental role models. Movies had heroes, not antiheroes.
To borrow language from postmodern philosophy, we all believed in one overarching meta-narrative, whose sub-themes included the victories to be won by individuals of conscience who stand up to the bitter end for what they believe in. Reluctant warriors all, there were in the movies of the era secular heroes (Shane, 1953; Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men, 1957), religious heroes (A Man for All Seasons, 1966), and heroes who were somewhere in the middle (Christopher Plummer as Baron von Trapp in The Sound of Music, 1965, who led his Nazi-menaced family to a Catholic abbey for sanctuary).
The meta-narrative was straight from the Bible: goodness defeats evil, with all but the truly lost redeemed in the end.
Most Americans were quietly religious. No matter your creed or denomination, you believed in the good-defeats-evil master narrative — that it was somehow able to shape outcomes in this world. Even if you were not religious, for that matter, you still tended to believe that.
You may or may not have recognized the fact, if you were around back then, but our various enemies — first the Nazis and then the Communists — were tuned into one and the same meta-narrative: totalitarianism. According to their story line, justice and individual conscience were opposed. Justice was collective, imposed on unruly individuals from the top down. So the time-honored Judeo-Christian belief in freedom of conscience and in the independence of the personal soul was anathema to totalitarians.
Our heroes never put a foot wrong in serving their overarching meta-narrative ... but we as a country did exactly that when we got in too deep in the Vietnam War. Billed as a necessary war against Communist evil, it did little to hurt the enemy, even as it was undermining our own faith in truth, justice, and the American way.
The year was 1968. The two national leaders who had the best chance of changing Americans' minds about Vietnam without compromising their idealism were both assassinated within months of one another: Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Riots broke out in major cities after King was shot, and not long after the RFK killing cynical radicals turned the streets of Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was being held, into a playground for chaos.
The antiwar movement became a demonic parody of itself, as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the rest of the Chicago Seven, put on trial for organizing the violent DNC protests, turned the courtroom proceedings into a mockery. Judge Julius Hoffman (no relation to Abbie) was ridiculed as a "fascist dog," a "pig," and a "racist" by co-defendant Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers ... when he wasn't doing his best to turn the courthouse into a circus, that is.
It was as if these radical leftists were saying that the powers that be had played our Western, Judeo-Christian, quintessentially American meta-narrative so false, in pursuing an unjust war and in making second-class citizens of black Americans, that all bets were now off. Henceforth, there would be no controlling meta-narrative whatsoever, no master story whose flag we all would salute with pride, in the name of human progress.
It was their nihilism that ushered in the cynicism that still besets us today. That's why I say, too, "Take me back to the Sixties" — to a time before the wheels came off the cart of heroism, idealism, and the dictates of personal conscience in 1968.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Marketplace of Incivility
Check out Ellen Goodman's recent Marketplace of Incivility column at The Boston Globe. Ms. Goodman's response to the Don Imus flap is right on. She says the Rutgers basketball players whom Imus dissed as "nappy-headed hos" are "canaries in [a] cultural mineshaft," and that "the official name over the mineshaft is incivility."
She goes on: "Sociologists talk about the disinhibitors, the factors that lower control of behavior. In some places the controls are permanently off." Blame the Internet, blame shock-jock talk radio, blame whatever you want — the dominant attitude today is that "civility is [only] for face to face."
Actually, as you can tell from my previous post, Getting the Joke, I myself blame the demise of "meta-narrative," in what philosophers call postmodernism, for the decline of civility.
Let me lay my thinking out in detail. As Ms. Goodman indicates, the lack of civility in our culture parallels the loss of "old-time intimate communities":
In my estimation, the cement to hold communities together in happiness and civil moderation has always been their meta-narratives. Meta-narratives are grand, surpassing story arcs: sin giving way to redemption, from a Christian perspective, or the ceaseless march of progress, from a secular one.
Some of these master plots are not as global as others. "The South shall rise again!" is certainly less than universal. Yet it indubitably has served one particular community as a basis for continued hope and fellow-feeling.
When I say I oppose and resent the demise of meta-narrative, I do not mean to imply that all meta-narratives are created equal. Those that include by excluding — "The South shall rise again!" implicitly excludes blacks — deserve to die.
In my view, however, meta-narratives that are sufficiently universal and all-inclusive can be just what the doctor ordered. (Remember when you could say "just what the doctor ordered" and everyone knew what you meant?) To the extent that I call myself a Christian, what that means to me is basically this: I treat the Christian meta-narrative of sin and redemption — of Christ's saving all humans from the fires of hell by his heroism on the cross — as a metaphor for the same values that are enshrined in the secular story of unceasing progress about which today's postmodernists are so incredulous.
If meta-narrative needs resuscitating, we had better be careful which meta-narratives we resurrect. I admit that. Nazism and communism had their versions of the grand narrative, as does Islamic (not to mention Christian) fundamentalism today. When meta-narrative metastasizes into ideology, watch out.
I believe the Christian meta-narrative, properly understood, avoids that pitfall. Only problem is, a lot of Christians have a different meta-narrative. Those devotees of the "Left Behind" novels who believe the world is coming to an end, if only Israel can hold onto the Holy Land until Jesus returns, are telling a different tale entirely.
Still, I'm more than eager to undertake the risk of reviving meta-narrative in our culture. I think it's the antidote to a lot of society's ills. Think of it this way. If we are today as self-centered and narcissistic as Catholic News Service columnist Therese Borchard says we are in this recent column, what can get us working together again for the common good? Well, what better than thinking of ourselves as, each of us, a member of the cast of a play?
The high school musical, as everybody knows, is where the same "obnoxious teenagers ahead of me in line at Starbucks," as Ms. Borchard puts it, come together on stage in some sort of docility and fellowship to present to their community a ... yes, a narrative or story line for the entertainment and edification of all.
Maybe today we need a little less of "life is a beach" and a lot more of "life is a high school musical." Maybe that's what we so desperately need to make us all more civil.
She goes on: "Sociologists talk about the disinhibitors, the factors that lower control of behavior. In some places the controls are permanently off." Blame the Internet, blame shock-jock talk radio, blame whatever you want — the dominant attitude today is that "civility is [only] for face to face."
Actually, as you can tell from my previous post, Getting the Joke, I myself blame the demise of "meta-narrative," in what philosophers call postmodernism, for the decline of civility.
Let me lay my thinking out in detail. As Ms. Goodman indicates, the lack of civility in our culture parallels the loss of "old-time intimate communities":
In the real life communities of the past, says [P.M. Forni, who co-founded the Civility Project at Johns Hopkins University], "we acted as though we were trustees of one another's contentment, happiness, well-being. Since you wanted to keep your friends and couldn't replace them, you treated them with moderation. You had a stake in their lives and they in yours." Today? More of our interactions are faceless, anonymous, disconnected.
In my estimation, the cement to hold communities together in happiness and civil moderation has always been their meta-narratives. Meta-narratives are grand, surpassing story arcs: sin giving way to redemption, from a Christian perspective, or the ceaseless march of progress, from a secular one.
Some of these master plots are not as global as others. "The South shall rise again!" is certainly less than universal. Yet it indubitably has served one particular community as a basis for continued hope and fellow-feeling.
When I say I oppose and resent the demise of meta-narrative, I do not mean to imply that all meta-narratives are created equal. Those that include by excluding — "The South shall rise again!" implicitly excludes blacks — deserve to die.
In my view, however, meta-narratives that are sufficiently universal and all-inclusive can be just what the doctor ordered. (Remember when you could say "just what the doctor ordered" and everyone knew what you meant?) To the extent that I call myself a Christian, what that means to me is basically this: I treat the Christian meta-narrative of sin and redemption — of Christ's saving all humans from the fires of hell by his heroism on the cross — as a metaphor for the same values that are enshrined in the secular story of unceasing progress about which today's postmodernists are so incredulous.
If meta-narrative needs resuscitating, we had better be careful which meta-narratives we resurrect. I admit that. Nazism and communism had their versions of the grand narrative, as does Islamic (not to mention Christian) fundamentalism today. When meta-narrative metastasizes into ideology, watch out.
I believe the Christian meta-narrative, properly understood, avoids that pitfall. Only problem is, a lot of Christians have a different meta-narrative. Those devotees of the "Left Behind" novels who believe the world is coming to an end, if only Israel can hold onto the Holy Land until Jesus returns, are telling a different tale entirely.
Still, I'm more than eager to undertake the risk of reviving meta-narrative in our culture. I think it's the antidote to a lot of society's ills. Think of it this way. If we are today as self-centered and narcissistic as Catholic News Service columnist Therese Borchard says we are in this recent column, what can get us working together again for the common good? Well, what better than thinking of ourselves as, each of us, a member of the cast of a play?
The high school musical, as everybody knows, is where the same "obnoxious teenagers ahead of me in line at Starbucks," as Ms. Borchard puts it, come together on stage in some sort of docility and fellowship to present to their community a ... yes, a narrative or story line for the entertainment and edification of all.
Maybe today we need a little less of "life is a beach" and a lot more of "life is a high school musical." Maybe that's what we so desperately need to make us all more civil.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Getting the Joke
This squib appeared recently in the Washington Post Magazine. It seems, the squib says, that Carol Burnett, one of the doyennes of the now-outdated '50s TV culture (which managed to remain the norm during her tenure on CBS from 1967-78), is suing the Fox network over an insulting reference, broadcast on "The Family Guy" in 2006, to one of her signature comic characters.
"Burnett is angry about an 18-second blip in an episode from a year ago, which showed her trademark 'charwoman' janitor mopping up in a porn shop, aped the theme music from her hit '70s comedy show, and made a vulgar reference to Burnett's signature ear tug," the article says.
The writer of the article, Hank Stuever, thinks Burnett is just being, like, "I'm old, and I don't get it, and I sure don't dig it."
When I read that, I wondered what it is that Burnett (and myself) are too superannuated to get.
Meanwhile, the Don Imus blowup was about to happen. As the whole world knows by now, in the brief time since Easter Sunday, 2007, the talk-radio mainstay has rightfully had his show canceled for referring to the African-American women on the Rutgers basketball team as "nappy-headed hos."
David Steele of The Baltimore Sun today filed this column on the controversy. He correctly bemoans the tendency of many observers to lose focus on the fact that the Rutgers women were dehumanized by Imus for being black, female athletes. That's the main point here, I fully agree.
But there's another point, too, which is that some have been accusing the Imus-bashers of (in Steele's words) "not getting the joke."
Not getting it — there's that phrase again!
It's as if we are living in a world in which anyone can say or do anything ... as long as it can be (however remotely) construed as a "joke."
When the writers and producers of "Family Guy" trash Carol Burnett's charwoman, it's a "joke."
When a shock-jock trashes the Rutgers hoopsters on the air, it's a "joke."
When Michael "Cosmo Kramer" Richards uses the N-word while doing standup at the Laugh Factory, it's a (bad) "joke." When he apologizes later, he says he was simply trying to shut up his black hecklers by being even more "outrageous" than they were. Being "outrageous" is the new name for humor. And, as everyone knows, there is such a thing as "humorist's license," after all.
The essence of humor is to detach briefly from whatever part of the world is being laughed at. To denature it. To (if it is a human being) dehumanize it.
But if the humorist goes too far — as the "Family Guy" folks did, as Don Imus did, as Michael Richards did — the result isn't funny; it's a Mel Gibson moment.
For some reason today, people are always trying to get right up to the proverbial line on the other side of which is "too far." Maybe that's because we're so postmodern these days, we no longer believe in rules of courtesy and civility.
An op-ed piece by Reza Dibadj in The Sun asks whether postmodernism can save the world. That philosophical movement, Dibadj says, enshrines "incredulity toward meta-narratives." With that quote from Jean-François Lyotard does Dibadj finally explain postmodernism to me in a way I can understand.
A "meta-narrative," I assume, is a sort of master story, a template for the unfolding of a plot in a novel or movie or whatever: one that implicitly is understood in the same way by the audience as by the author. As, for example, "the butler did it" in a mystery, which we all understand to be a case of "the least-obvious suspect" who is actually, deep down, fated to be the true culprit.
If such narratives' "fatedness" reflects something deeply true about the reality of our world, then we should all be anything but incredulous about the validity of meta-narratives. But if fatedness is basically just a literary convention, and nothing more, then we ought to "deconstruct" it and become thereby incredulous toward it. That is the postmodern mantra.
Once we become thus immunized to meta-narratives, we can get about the serious business which is (to borrow the words of Dibadj) "to forge our own localized stories."
All this stuff about who does and does not "get the joke," it seems to me, is really a way of saying that the "joke" is what sometimes happens, by accident, as we struggle to "forge our own localized stories." Sometimes when we improvise, we cross the proverbial line. Ha ha. The "joke" may be on us ... but that's all it is: a "joke."
"Jokes" are what happen when the serious business of becoming postmodern goes temporarily awry. To which I say, bring back the meta-narrative.
"Burnett is angry about an 18-second blip in an episode from a year ago, which showed her trademark 'charwoman' janitor mopping up in a porn shop, aped the theme music from her hit '70s comedy show, and made a vulgar reference to Burnett's signature ear tug," the article says.
The writer of the article, Hank Stuever, thinks Burnett is just being, like, "I'm old, and I don't get it, and I sure don't dig it."
When I read that, I wondered what it is that Burnett (and myself) are too superannuated to get.
Meanwhile, the Don Imus blowup was about to happen. As the whole world knows by now, in the brief time since Easter Sunday, 2007, the talk-radio mainstay has rightfully had his show canceled for referring to the African-American women on the Rutgers basketball team as "nappy-headed hos."
David Steele of The Baltimore Sun today filed this column on the controversy. He correctly bemoans the tendency of many observers to lose focus on the fact that the Rutgers women were dehumanized by Imus for being black, female athletes. That's the main point here, I fully agree.
But there's another point, too, which is that some have been accusing the Imus-bashers of (in Steele's words) "not getting the joke."
Not getting it — there's that phrase again!
It's as if we are living in a world in which anyone can say or do anything ... as long as it can be (however remotely) construed as a "joke."
When the writers and producers of "Family Guy" trash Carol Burnett's charwoman, it's a "joke."
When a shock-jock trashes the Rutgers hoopsters on the air, it's a "joke."
When Michael "Cosmo Kramer" Richards uses the N-word while doing standup at the Laugh Factory, it's a (bad) "joke." When he apologizes later, he says he was simply trying to shut up his black hecklers by being even more "outrageous" than they were. Being "outrageous" is the new name for humor. And, as everyone knows, there is such a thing as "humorist's license," after all.
The essence of humor is to detach briefly from whatever part of the world is being laughed at. To denature it. To (if it is a human being) dehumanize it.
But if the humorist goes too far — as the "Family Guy" folks did, as Don Imus did, as Michael Richards did — the result isn't funny; it's a Mel Gibson moment.
For some reason today, people are always trying to get right up to the proverbial line on the other side of which is "too far." Maybe that's because we're so postmodern these days, we no longer believe in rules of courtesy and civility.
An op-ed piece by Reza Dibadj in The Sun asks whether postmodernism can save the world. That philosophical movement, Dibadj says, enshrines "incredulity toward meta-narratives." With that quote from Jean-François Lyotard does Dibadj finally explain postmodernism to me in a way I can understand.
A "meta-narrative," I assume, is a sort of master story, a template for the unfolding of a plot in a novel or movie or whatever: one that implicitly is understood in the same way by the audience as by the author. As, for example, "the butler did it" in a mystery, which we all understand to be a case of "the least-obvious suspect" who is actually, deep down, fated to be the true culprit.
If such narratives' "fatedness" reflects something deeply true about the reality of our world, then we should all be anything but incredulous about the validity of meta-narratives. But if fatedness is basically just a literary convention, and nothing more, then we ought to "deconstruct" it and become thereby incredulous toward it. That is the postmodern mantra.
Once we become thus immunized to meta-narratives, we can get about the serious business which is (to borrow the words of Dibadj) "to forge our own localized stories."
All this stuff about who does and does not "get the joke," it seems to me, is really a way of saying that the "joke" is what sometimes happens, by accident, as we struggle to "forge our own localized stories." Sometimes when we improvise, we cross the proverbial line. Ha ha. The "joke" may be on us ... but that's all it is: a "joke."
"Jokes" are what happen when the serious business of becoming postmodern goes temporarily awry. To which I say, bring back the meta-narrative.
Monday, March 12, 2007
A Body Is a Body Is a Body ... ?
Kathleen Parker is my new favorite op-ed columnist. Today's column in The Baltimore Sun, "Today's youthful indiscretions can come back to haunt you," captures my sentiments exactly.
Ms. Parker's topic is how recent college grads are being turned away as job applicants because they have posted stuff about themselves — nude pictures, etc. — in the Internet's "high-tech, freewheeling, sexually explicit environment where porn is the new risque and everybody's gone wild."
One female student who is part of the freewheeling set says, "A body is a body is a body, and I'm proud of my body, and why not show my body?" This person is co-founder of a "user-friendly porn" magazine at Boston University. Thinks she, "It's not going to keep me from having a job."
To which Ms. Parker says, "Famous last words, perhaps."
Part of the deal at "gossip and graphics" websites like AutoAdmit.com where college types like this student might go to schmooze is, Ms. Parker says as well, that "postings can be anonymous. And vicious."
Vice and viciousness go hand in hand in "today's uncivil society [where] the stakes are high and the rules are low." About which climate Ms. Parker comments, "Invite anonymity into the mix and hostility finds release in the vacuum created when shame went missing."
Thus, the fate of "the generation that was serenaded by Madonna and marinated in sexual imagery." This generation may be so far gone that Ms. Parker's advice — "If you can't imagine your mother or father doing something, you probably shouldn't do it either" — will probably fall on deaf ears.
We are a long way from the 1950s through the early 1970s, a golden age in which a good moral rule of thumb was, "If Ben Cartwright wouldn't do it, you shouldn't either." The patriarch of Bonanza's Ponderosa Ranch and the widower father of Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe, if he were real and alive today, would gasp with incomprehension at clueless pronouncements such as "a body is a body is a body." Not even the loutish rabble that weekly threatened order and civility in the Cartwrights' vicinity would ever have mouthed such balderdash.
You know exactly what I'm talking about when you consider this classic exchange from the series:
And maybe it explains why we seem to be having such trouble today with thinking and common sense — see Robert Hardi's kvetch, "Gimme That Old Can-Do-Spirit," in last Sunday's Washington Post. Hardi feels we've replaced self-reliance based on common sense — the Ben Cartwright ethic — with self-protection based on bureaucratic rule following. Dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and no one can blame you if things go wrong.
On the one hand, we're without shame in the sense of being shameless. On the other hand, we're without shame in the sense of being blameless. It's a killer combination.
Ms. Parker's topic is how recent college grads are being turned away as job applicants because they have posted stuff about themselves — nude pictures, etc. — in the Internet's "high-tech, freewheeling, sexually explicit environment where porn is the new risque and everybody's gone wild."
One female student who is part of the freewheeling set says, "A body is a body is a body, and I'm proud of my body, and why not show my body?" This person is co-founder of a "user-friendly porn" magazine at Boston University. Thinks she, "It's not going to keep me from having a job."
To which Ms. Parker says, "Famous last words, perhaps."
Part of the deal at "gossip and graphics" websites like AutoAdmit.com where college types like this student might go to schmooze is, Ms. Parker says as well, that "postings can be anonymous. And vicious."
Vice and viciousness go hand in hand in "today's uncivil society [where] the stakes are high and the rules are low." About which climate Ms. Parker comments, "Invite anonymity into the mix and hostility finds release in the vacuum created when shame went missing."
Thus, the fate of "the generation that was serenaded by Madonna and marinated in sexual imagery." This generation may be so far gone that Ms. Parker's advice — "If you can't imagine your mother or father doing something, you probably shouldn't do it either" — will probably fall on deaf ears.
We are a long way from the 1950s through the early 1970s, a golden age in which a good moral rule of thumb was, "If Ben Cartwright wouldn't do it, you shouldn't either." The patriarch of Bonanza's Ponderosa Ranch and the widower father of Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe, if he were real and alive today, would gasp with incomprehension at clueless pronouncements such as "a body is a body is a body." Not even the loutish rabble that weekly threatened order and civility in the Cartwrights' vicinity would ever have mouthed such balderdash.
You know exactly what I'm talking about when you consider this classic exchange from the series:
Adam: Let's go back to the Ponderosa, Pa. This isn't any of our affair.Or this:
Ben: We can't ignore the rest of the world. We're the only stabilizing influence in the country.
Ben: You and your education ...If education is naught but "progress," then maybe that fact explains why we find "user-friendly porn" magazines at Boston University and elsewhere in academe today.
Adam: Education is progress! Now what have you got against it?
Ben: I don't have anything against education — as long as it doesn't interfere with your thinking!
And maybe it explains why we seem to be having such trouble today with thinking and common sense — see Robert Hardi's kvetch, "Gimme That Old Can-Do-Spirit," in last Sunday's Washington Post. Hardi feels we've replaced self-reliance based on common sense — the Ben Cartwright ethic — with self-protection based on bureaucratic rule following. Dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and no one can blame you if things go wrong.
On the one hand, we're without shame in the sense of being shameless. On the other hand, we're without shame in the sense of being blameless. It's a killer combination.
Friday, March 2, 2007
Bring Back Daddy
My original thought in this blog was to extol the entire value system represented on TV in the 1950s.
That quickly morphed into the realization that what we have lost since then has been, most of all, the father figure. In the 1950s, even TV comedies whose stars portrayed un-fatherly figures — such as the eponymous lead character of "The Jack Benny Program," played by Jack Benny, natch — were surrogate fathers to their retinues of satellite characters.
Imagine my surprise, then, at this synchronicity: today's column by Kathleen Parker in The Baltimore Sun is about daddies. (The column can be read online here.) Parker's topic is the recent finding by the American Psychological Association that girls in America are overly "sexualized," meaning that their self images depend too heavily on their self-perceived attractiveness to the opposite sex.
Parker writes, "We can now assert with confidence that most of the primarily girl pathologies — eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression — can be linked to an oversexualization that encourages girls to obsess about body image and objectify themselves."
Think of it. In the wake of feminist advances rooted in the notion that girls and women should never be taken as sex objects comes a culture in which girls and women objectify themselves.
What can have gone wrong? I blame, in part, feminism's deconstruction of male gender roles, particularly that of the father.
Parker notes that "missing from the report" issued by the APA is
We have such a big problem here, in my humble opinion, that almost no one wants to talk about it as such — with rare exceptions such as Ms. Parker.
Part of the size-of-the-problem issue is that the humongous lump of the problem has metastasized into smaller tumors in a huge variety of our cultural organs and tissues. A lot of us have vested interests in various of the tumors. As Parker herself notes, for instance, oversexualization affects — hurts — not just girls but also boys, men, and even women ... but even so, "there seems to be an unspoken sense that males are getting what they want with 24/7 sex messaging." Well, I admit it: I am clearly one of those males.
Meanwhile, feminists have also been getting a lot of what they want in terms of women's liberation from traditional gender, marital, and childbearing roles. I admit I simply don't have a clue as to whether, or how, the father figure might be resuscitated without imperiling those advances.
And it scarcely needs to be said that money interests are getting what they want, selling expensive attire and unnecessary cosmetics to underage "tartlets" and purveying "bling" to slightly older female victims of oversexualization. The ridiculous extent to which sexualization affects the world of grownups, meanwhile, is manifest during every television commercial break. The images of bodily allure used to sell everything from soap to bras to exercise equipment would never have been allowed on '50s TV, when brassieres could not be shown on live models unless there was another article of clothing between the bra and the skin!
How things have changed, and how all of them form a constellation around the black hole of the erstwhile father figure, would seem to be Topic #1 of this blog.
It doesn't seem to me to be a stretch to identify the cultural cancer of the demoted, debunked, and deconstructed father figure with societal problems such as the number of abortions performed annually. Reports have it that unmarried women facing unwanted pregnancies are being pressured by their boyfriends and families — yes, including their fathers, when not absent — to opt for surgical termination. It's my belief that these women have been placed in double jeopardy.
First, their sexualization by the prevailing culture has led them to express their erroneous self-image too often and too inappropriately, engaging in the wrong acts at the wrong times for the wrong reasons with the wrong "significant others."
Then, when nature takes its course and they wind up "in the family way," they face the ignominy of being disowned by the people they are closest to, unless they fulfill their own objectification by remedying the one condition that can put the lie to being naught but sex objects: expectant motherhood.
How grisly is that double whammy?
I bring this up not because I think abortions ought to be made illegal again — I'm presently in the midst of reevaluating my stance on legal abortion — but because I believe wholly discretionary abortions ought to be rare, even if they are legal.
If we in our culture were somehow able to resuscitate Daddy — the father-ideal of so recent fond memory — I believe the tumor of the voracious sexualization of girls would shrink and disappear, and with it the commonness of discretionary abortion.
That quickly morphed into the realization that what we have lost since then has been, most of all, the father figure. In the 1950s, even TV comedies whose stars portrayed un-fatherly figures — such as the eponymous lead character of "The Jack Benny Program," played by Jack Benny, natch — were surrogate fathers to their retinues of satellite characters.
Imagine my surprise, then, at this synchronicity: today's column by Kathleen Parker in The Baltimore Sun is about daddies. (The column can be read online here.) Parker's topic is the recent finding by the American Psychological Association that girls in America are overly "sexualized," meaning that their self images depend too heavily on their self-perceived attractiveness to the opposite sex.
Parker writes, "We can now assert with confidence that most of the primarily girl pathologies — eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression — can be linked to an oversexualization that encourages girls to obsess about body image and objectify themselves."
Think of it. In the wake of feminist advances rooted in the notion that girls and women should never be taken as sex objects comes a culture in which girls and women objectify themselves.
What can have gone wrong? I blame, in part, feminism's deconstruction of male gender roles, particularly that of the father.
Parker notes that "missing from the report" issued by the APA is
... the single factor that seems most predictive of girls' self-objectification — the absence of a father in their lives. Although the task force urges "parents" to help their daughters interpret sexualizing cultural messages, there's little mention of the unique role fathers play in protecting their girls from a voracious, sexualized culture.
Fathers, after all, are the ones who tell their little girls that they're perfect just the way they are; that they don't need to be one bit thinner; and that under no circumstances are they going out of the house dressed that way.
It can't be coincidence that girls' self-objectification — has risen as father presence has declined. At last tally, 30 percent of fathers weren't sleeping in the same house as their biological children.
We have such a big problem here, in my humble opinion, that almost no one wants to talk about it as such — with rare exceptions such as Ms. Parker.
Part of the size-of-the-problem issue is that the humongous lump of the problem has metastasized into smaller tumors in a huge variety of our cultural organs and tissues. A lot of us have vested interests in various of the tumors. As Parker herself notes, for instance, oversexualization affects — hurts — not just girls but also boys, men, and even women ... but even so, "there seems to be an unspoken sense that males are getting what they want with 24/7 sex messaging." Well, I admit it: I am clearly one of those males.
Meanwhile, feminists have also been getting a lot of what they want in terms of women's liberation from traditional gender, marital, and childbearing roles. I admit I simply don't have a clue as to whether, or how, the father figure might be resuscitated without imperiling those advances.
And it scarcely needs to be said that money interests are getting what they want, selling expensive attire and unnecessary cosmetics to underage "tartlets" and purveying "bling" to slightly older female victims of oversexualization. The ridiculous extent to which sexualization affects the world of grownups, meanwhile, is manifest during every television commercial break. The images of bodily allure used to sell everything from soap to bras to exercise equipment would never have been allowed on '50s TV, when brassieres could not be shown on live models unless there was another article of clothing between the bra and the skin!
How things have changed, and how all of them form a constellation around the black hole of the erstwhile father figure, would seem to be Topic #1 of this blog.
It doesn't seem to me to be a stretch to identify the cultural cancer of the demoted, debunked, and deconstructed father figure with societal problems such as the number of abortions performed annually. Reports have it that unmarried women facing unwanted pregnancies are being pressured by their boyfriends and families — yes, including their fathers, when not absent — to opt for surgical termination. It's my belief that these women have been placed in double jeopardy.
First, their sexualization by the prevailing culture has led them to express their erroneous self-image too often and too inappropriately, engaging in the wrong acts at the wrong times for the wrong reasons with the wrong "significant others."
Then, when nature takes its course and they wind up "in the family way," they face the ignominy of being disowned by the people they are closest to, unless they fulfill their own objectification by remedying the one condition that can put the lie to being naught but sex objects: expectant motherhood.
How grisly is that double whammy?
I bring this up not because I think abortions ought to be made illegal again — I'm presently in the midst of reevaluating my stance on legal abortion — but because I believe wholly discretionary abortions ought to be rare, even if they are legal.
If we in our culture were somehow able to resuscitate Daddy — the father-ideal of so recent fond memory — I believe the tumor of the voracious sexualization of girls would shrink and disappear, and with it the commonness of discretionary abortion.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
Demise of the '50s-TV Father Figure
I guess the most profound change in our cultural values since the 1950s has been the demise of the father figure. How, exactly, was that late lamented father figure represented on '50s TV?
Anyone remember the Sunday night schedule on CBS in the mid-'50s? A half-hour time slot was shared on an every-other-week basis by "The Jack Benny Program" and "Private Secretary," starring Ann Sothern.
Both were comedies. Jack Benny was one of the most popular comedians in America, having been a mainstay in vaudeville and radio before moving to TV. On his show he played ... wait for it ... "Jack Benny," a professional comedian who was famously a tightwad, self-styled ladies man, perennial 39-year-old, and the world's lousiest violin player. Each show depicted a day in the life of "Jack," along with his coterie of regular supporting characters. They included his sometime girlfriend and foil, Mary, played by Mr. Benny's real-life wife, Mary Livingstone; his valet-chauffeur, Rochester, played by Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, and a host of others.
"Jack Benny" on CBS was, like the real Jack Benny, a performer on radio and TV, so the plot of each TV show revolved around his life in the on-the-air and Hollywood set. He had his announcer, Don Wilson, over to his house regularly, and also his show's singer, Dennis Day. Though "Jack Benny" was a bachelor who was always wooing famous actresses like Barbara Stanwyck, his coterie was nonetheless much like a regular family, with him as the father.
It didn't matter that "Jack" was a vain, silly guy, forever being taken down a notch by those who knew his foibles all too well, forever living down his own foolishness. Rochester, his manservant, who was impersonated by one of the few black actors with a regular gig on '50s TV, clearly had more sense than his employer, but from him it was always "Yes, Mr. Benny" and "No, Mr. Benny." Always droll, never disrespectful, Rochester's wide-eyed deportment toward his boss was a highlight of the show.
The same was true of the character of Mary, who was officially something like a script girl in the Benny on-the-air "family." Mary was frequently snide to "Jack" ... but never outright snarly.
The lesson to this roughly 8-year-old viewer was this: "Jack Benny" may not always have known best, but, as the family's father, he still warranted deference and respect.
Ann Sothern had been a well-known star in B-movies in the 1940s, known best for her recurring role as the brassy Brooklyn burlesque dancer Maisie O'Connor at MGM. I, of course, was unaware of that when I watched her as Susie McNamara on TV's "Private Secretary" in the middle '50s. Susie was aide and general factotum to the head of a talent agency, Peter Sands. Her mission in life was to make things go smoothly for Mr. Sands, her father figure. Instead, her initiatives on his behalf usually just managed to skirt disaster. Good fortune always came along to rescue her by the final fadeout, or it would surely have been curtains for her and her TV pseudo-family.
Mr. Sands was the image of probity and respectability, which meant he would never sully his hands with the rough-and-tumble of the theatrical business or stoop to deceiving his agency's prime competitor, Cagey Calhoun, who ceaselessly tried to steal Mr. Sands' clients. Not so, Susie. Susie would resort to any sort of chicanery to keep International Artists flush and its clients happy. Susie, I'd say today, was the image of the Irish brawler, female-style.
Again, to the child that was me back then in the good old days, it didn't really matter if the Mr.-Sands-qua-Mr.-Sands character was something of an ineffectual cipher. Mr.-Sands-qua-father-figure clearly merited Susie's unstinting loyalty and support.
Fast forward to the early 1970s and "The Mary Tyler Moore" show. The show's perky star played Mary Richards, working girl. Mary worked as assistant producer in the newsroom of a Minneapolis TV station. Her "Mr. Sands" was the program-within-a-program's producer, Lou Grant. But in her case, this boss was no father-ideal.
Lou was surly, short-sighted, sexist, and occasionally downright mean. Most of his bad qualities were presented as the necessary evils of being an aggressive newsman in a cutthroat business. In other words, what made him a good news hound was precisely what made it impossible for him to act as Mary's surrogate father.
Then there were the other men on the staff: on-air personality Ted Baxter, too stupid, too vain, and too self-obsessed to be Mary's surrogate father; and head writer Murray, too much of a milquetoast.
Seen in this light, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was all about debunking — nay, deconstructing — the '50s-TV father figure!
Look, too, at "M*A*S*H," a program contemporary with "MTM," and like "MTM" vastly popular in the 1970s. "M*A*S*H" narrated the exploits of "Hawkeye" Pierce, played by Alan Alda, a draftee surgeon in the Korean War who with his fellow medicos patched up the wounded as they poured into the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.
The comedy was about as dark as was permissible on network TV in the '70s. As the show evolved, it got darker and darker. In its original conception, many of the gags centered around the commanding officer, Lt. Col. Henry Blake. Colonel Blake was the epitome of self-seekingness, if there be such a word. He knew he was in over his head, and his main goal in life was to prevent anyone else from finding that out. Not much in the way of a father-ideal there.
None of the other male characters in the original television cast lineup even came close to serving as the ersatz "father" of the 4077th. "Trapper John" McIntyre, Hawkeye's best buddy, was if anything more cynical than Hawkeye, and cynicism is not a fatherly trait. Major Frank Burns was a crybaby, a sneak, and a snitch. Corporal "Radar" O'Reilly was an overgrown child in an adult uniform.
Interestingly, the "M*A*S*H" creators were forced by the departures of the actors playing Col. Blake and Capt. McIntyre to recast several of its principal roles over the course of two successive seasons early in the show's long run. Enter Hawkeye's new best buddy, B.J. Hunnicutt. B.J. was conspicuously an uprooted family man, one of whose primary agonies was not being able to be present for the birth of his child. Enter, also, the new C.O., Colonel Sherman T. Potter, who for once gave the warped denizens of the 4077th M*A*S*H a paternal figure to watch over them.
By the way, one of the other regulars was a father, in the Roman Catholic sense of the word. Fr. John Patrick Francis Mulcahy, the unit's chaplain, was presented as a sympathetic character whose simple faith usually did not jibe with the sardonic, blood-soaked consciousness of the hospital mainstays. "M*A*S*H" presented old-style religion as quaint and out-of-date, and Fr. Mulcahy was portrayed as (sadly) disqualified, by his personal naiveté as much as by his Roman collar and priestly vestments, from acting as true father figure to the 4077th.
So "M*A*S*H," taken all in all, was ambivalent about father figures. The most you could hope for was this: that very, very occasionally, there may come along a man like Col. Potter who, by dint of his steel and personal integrity, deserves the respect once accorded automatically to any man who was, actually or symbolically, the "father" in a "family."
You can accordingly see, in retrospect, what a beating the father figure on TV took in a matter of two short but eventful decades from the 1950s to the 1970s. It's my belief that we are all worse off because of it.
Anyone remember the Sunday night schedule on CBS in the mid-'50s? A half-hour time slot was shared on an every-other-week basis by "The Jack Benny Program" and "Private Secretary," starring Ann Sothern.
Both were comedies. Jack Benny was one of the most popular comedians in America, having been a mainstay in vaudeville and radio before moving to TV. On his show he played ... wait for it ... "Jack Benny," a professional comedian who was famously a tightwad, self-styled ladies man, perennial 39-year-old, and the world's lousiest violin player. Each show depicted a day in the life of "Jack," along with his coterie of regular supporting characters. They included his sometime girlfriend and foil, Mary, played by Mr. Benny's real-life wife, Mary Livingstone; his valet-chauffeur, Rochester, played by Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, and a host of others.
"Jack Benny" on CBS was, like the real Jack Benny, a performer on radio and TV, so the plot of each TV show revolved around his life in the on-the-air and Hollywood set. He had his announcer, Don Wilson, over to his house regularly, and also his show's singer, Dennis Day. Though "Jack Benny" was a bachelor who was always wooing famous actresses like Barbara Stanwyck, his coterie was nonetheless much like a regular family, with him as the father.
It didn't matter that "Jack" was a vain, silly guy, forever being taken down a notch by those who knew his foibles all too well, forever living down his own foolishness. Rochester, his manservant, who was impersonated by one of the few black actors with a regular gig on '50s TV, clearly had more sense than his employer, but from him it was always "Yes, Mr. Benny" and "No, Mr. Benny." Always droll, never disrespectful, Rochester's wide-eyed deportment toward his boss was a highlight of the show.
The same was true of the character of Mary, who was officially something like a script girl in the Benny on-the-air "family." Mary was frequently snide to "Jack" ... but never outright snarly.
The lesson to this roughly 8-year-old viewer was this: "Jack Benny" may not always have known best, but, as the family's father, he still warranted deference and respect.
Ann Sothern had been a well-known star in B-movies in the 1940s, known best for her recurring role as the brassy Brooklyn burlesque dancer Maisie O'Connor at MGM. I, of course, was unaware of that when I watched her as Susie McNamara on TV's "Private Secretary" in the middle '50s. Susie was aide and general factotum to the head of a talent agency, Peter Sands. Her mission in life was to make things go smoothly for Mr. Sands, her father figure. Instead, her initiatives on his behalf usually just managed to skirt disaster. Good fortune always came along to rescue her by the final fadeout, or it would surely have been curtains for her and her TV pseudo-family.
Mr. Sands was the image of probity and respectability, which meant he would never sully his hands with the rough-and-tumble of the theatrical business or stoop to deceiving his agency's prime competitor, Cagey Calhoun, who ceaselessly tried to steal Mr. Sands' clients. Not so, Susie. Susie would resort to any sort of chicanery to keep International Artists flush and its clients happy. Susie, I'd say today, was the image of the Irish brawler, female-style.
Again, to the child that was me back then in the good old days, it didn't really matter if the Mr.-Sands-qua-Mr.-Sands character was something of an ineffectual cipher. Mr.-Sands-qua-father-figure clearly merited Susie's unstinting loyalty and support.
Fast forward to the early 1970s and "The Mary Tyler Moore" show. The show's perky star played Mary Richards, working girl. Mary worked as assistant producer in the newsroom of a Minneapolis TV station. Her "Mr. Sands" was the program-within-a-program's producer, Lou Grant. But in her case, this boss was no father-ideal.
Lou was surly, short-sighted, sexist, and occasionally downright mean. Most of his bad qualities were presented as the necessary evils of being an aggressive newsman in a cutthroat business. In other words, what made him a good news hound was precisely what made it impossible for him to act as Mary's surrogate father.
Then there were the other men on the staff: on-air personality Ted Baxter, too stupid, too vain, and too self-obsessed to be Mary's surrogate father; and head writer Murray, too much of a milquetoast.
Seen in this light, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" was all about debunking — nay, deconstructing — the '50s-TV father figure!
Look, too, at "M*A*S*H," a program contemporary with "MTM," and like "MTM" vastly popular in the 1970s. "M*A*S*H" narrated the exploits of "Hawkeye" Pierce, played by Alan Alda, a draftee surgeon in the Korean War who with his fellow medicos patched up the wounded as they poured into the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.
The comedy was about as dark as was permissible on network TV in the '70s. As the show evolved, it got darker and darker. In its original conception, many of the gags centered around the commanding officer, Lt. Col. Henry Blake. Colonel Blake was the epitome of self-seekingness, if there be such a word. He knew he was in over his head, and his main goal in life was to prevent anyone else from finding that out. Not much in the way of a father-ideal there.
None of the other male characters in the original television cast lineup even came close to serving as the ersatz "father" of the 4077th. "Trapper John" McIntyre, Hawkeye's best buddy, was if anything more cynical than Hawkeye, and cynicism is not a fatherly trait. Major Frank Burns was a crybaby, a sneak, and a snitch. Corporal "Radar" O'Reilly was an overgrown child in an adult uniform.
Interestingly, the "M*A*S*H" creators were forced by the departures of the actors playing Col. Blake and Capt. McIntyre to recast several of its principal roles over the course of two successive seasons early in the show's long run. Enter Hawkeye's new best buddy, B.J. Hunnicutt. B.J. was conspicuously an uprooted family man, one of whose primary agonies was not being able to be present for the birth of his child. Enter, also, the new C.O., Colonel Sherman T. Potter, who for once gave the warped denizens of the 4077th M*A*S*H a paternal figure to watch over them.
By the way, one of the other regulars was a father, in the Roman Catholic sense of the word. Fr. John Patrick Francis Mulcahy, the unit's chaplain, was presented as a sympathetic character whose simple faith usually did not jibe with the sardonic, blood-soaked consciousness of the hospital mainstays. "M*A*S*H" presented old-style religion as quaint and out-of-date, and Fr. Mulcahy was portrayed as (sadly) disqualified, by his personal naiveté as much as by his Roman collar and priestly vestments, from acting as true father figure to the 4077th.
So "M*A*S*H," taken all in all, was ambivalent about father figures. The most you could hope for was this: that very, very occasionally, there may come along a man like Col. Potter who, by dint of his steel and personal integrity, deserves the respect once accorded automatically to any man who was, actually or symbolically, the "father" in a "family."
You can accordingly see, in retrospect, what a beating the father figure on TV took in a matter of two short but eventful decades from the 1950s to the 1970s. It's my belief that we are all worse off because of it.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Welcome to the "Values from '50s TV" Blog
Hi, I'm a dinosaur! Welcome to my blog about the values I imbibed from the tube when I was growing up.
I'm old enough to have developed my lifelong value system by watching, as a child, the TV fare of the 1950s. Everything from "I Love Lucy" to "Dr. Kildare," "Dragnet" to "Maverick," "The Lone Ranger" to "Watch Mr. Wizard," and "Father Knows Best" to "Ozzie and Harriet."
There were Perry Mason, "The Defenders," and even, though set in an earlier era, "Sugarfoot," to guide otherwise blind Justice and to keep the forces of law and order on the up and up.
There were Paladin of "Have Gun Will Travel," Josh Randall of "Wanted, Dead or Alive," and Johnny Yuma's "The Rebel": true knights-errant of the Old West.
There was Alfred Hitchcock, presenter of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," subverting week-by-week the sanctity of corporate sponsorship and the sanctimony of much else besides.
There were the Cartwrights of "Bonanza" — brothers Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe, and father Ben — to teach us the values of masculine honor and family responsibility.
"Dragnet": Sergeant (later Lieutenant) Joe Friday showed us how it is hard, self-effacing work by individual citizens — as a police officer, in his case — that best serves the public weal.
"Maverick": Bret, along with Brother Bart and countless other siblings and cousins whose names all began with "B," taught us how a self-seeking, individualistic card-sharp often finds himself making common cause with partners of yet shadier mien — not to mention some pretty liberated ladies, considering the tenor of the times — just to thwart the schemes of the really bad folks.
I could go on and on. The values that informed 1950s TV, and thus America, were a far cry from what we see today. There was no sex, beyond an occasional smooch. There was no violence for its own sake; the Lone Ranger would simply shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand, and the fight would be over. There was no cussin', no scraggly beards (except on bad guys), no "wardrobe malfunctions" or indecent exposure. Even the "darkest" protagonists — Josh Randall, Ben Casey, Paladin, Johnny Yuma, U. S. Marshal Matt Dillon of "Gunsmoke," etc. — were unfailingly polite, civil, respectful, and clean-living. You could rely on it: if a television character was in any way coarse or rude in his outward behavior, he was bad through and through.
Some of the shows still managed to be subversive, fostering sober skepticism of entrenched power structures: the established cattle barons of the Old West, rather than the newcomer sheepherders; the criminal justice system of the modern day, when it tramples the rights of the weak and powerless; the stupid rich, perennial targets of the heroes of "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and "Zorro."
How all that has changed! Nowadays, the current generation of 18-to-25-year-olds — "Generation Next" is their appellation — list getting rich as their topmost or second most prominent goal in life. (See this poll-based portrait of Gen Next.) Where every family on '50s TV went to church as a matter of course — so much so that it rarely needed to be mentioned on the air — today about one in five Gen Nexters has no religion at all. Where casual sex, binge drinking, illegal drug use, and person-on-person violence were once taboo, "large majorities of today's young adults believe that [all of these] are more prevalent among young people today than was the case 20 years ago."
Back then, to judge by TV, there were seemingly little nonmarital sex, few unwanted pregnancies, few abortions. Abortion was illegal, and in some states, so were certain kinds of sex. On TV, these subjects rarely came up, and when they did, it was made clear that no decent person would voluntarily break the sexual codes of the day.
On occasion, on "serious" shows like "The Defenders," there would be plots in which an unfortunate woman (often, in her teens) had been raped or was the victim of incest, became pregnant — a word that was itself taboo throughout much of the decade — and had to decide what to do. If she went to an abortionist, this was presented as a bad-but-understandable choice, given the circumstances. Far worse was the rapist, the perpetrator of incest, or the crude, money-grubbing abortionist.
There was never any suggestion, however, that every woman is entitled to what we today refer to as discretionary abortion, or abortion-on-demand.
For that matter, there was never any suggestion that people of either sex are entitled to much of anything. Americans have developed their vaunted "sense of entitlement" since the 1950s. Back in that world, you had to earn what you get. Even Ozzie Nelson, he of the perpetual cardigan-sweater-wearing day off, was understood to have some kind of job, somewhere, doing gainful work.
The importance of education was implicit on '50s TV. The protagonists were often doctors or lawyers. Even Sugarfoot, nominally a saddle tramp, was trained as a lawyer, and Johnny "The Rebel" Yuma was conspicuously a highly literate keeper of a personal journal. Even the television news if the day was saturated with images of Negroes (as African Americans were then called) being barred from schoolhouse doors by irate white muckety-mucks. (And, by the way, I include in "'50s TV" much of the stuff that was on the air in the early-to-middle 1960s, before the culture began to change radically.)
So this blog will be dedicated to looking back at a bygone age that, though it wasn't without its blemishes and warts, was better at instilling "good" personal and communal values than is the culture of the present day.
Although it is admitedly not all that apparent from the above, my overriding intent is not so much to chide or nag as to inquire as to how such idealistic values as were portrayed on TV in the '50s could be replaced so rapidly by values that seem diametrically opposite to them. I am not so much interested in discussing values as in discussing what I call "metavalues." For example, it looks to me like we as a society have nurtured, as a "metavalue," a radical resentment of standards in general. Anything which smacks of a set of values being imposed on groups or on individuals — no matter how gently or indirectly it is done — is bad. We as a society have developed a bad case of "standards phobia," and I am curious as to how and why.
Obviously, if our metavalues have spun on a dime since the 1950s, when it was tacitly assumed that all decent folks could agree on basic matters of right and wrong, an important question becomes: Can it be reversed? Can we get back to expecting "right behavior" of each other? Can we get back to sharing a common sense of what that right behavior is?
Another question that is important to me has to do with the prevailing cynicism of the present day. Which came first, the abandonment of "old-fashioned" standards of behavior and belief or the cynicism about the willingness and ability of people in general, and especially people in positions of power, to live by them?
Through it all, I hope the posts I make in this blog will address the overarching issue of what needs to happen in the popular culture to "take back the night," values-wise. It is my belief that most people still do the right thing, most of the time. The "bad" behavior we see around us, especially from sports stars and celebrities, is, I think, partly the result of living in a culture that does not instill in us mental images of self-control. When situations arise that tax our human kindness and charity, we are simply too brittle. We snap. Then comes the need to apologize in the media. How often do we hear, "I just don't know where all that came from. That wasn't me"?
It's a lot easier not to lose control and destroy our personal image in responding threatening situations if our culture acts, as it were, as "Styrofoam," encasing our outward behavior and softening the blows we might otherwise receive from selfish people and from hostile situations. The Styrofoam of the kinder, gentler culture of yore has melted. We need to make new Styrofoam containers in which each of us has our own little compartment and in which we can all be comfortably well-behaved.
For I think that, at the bottom of the "culture of few ideals" that we have today, is the assumption that each of us has that unless we stand ready to assert ourselves (violently, if necessary) and take what we each feel entitled to, we will wind up "losers" in the game of life. Our cynicism is that deep. Meanwhile, our veneer of civility has grown correspondingly shallow. We all need to go back and spend some time watching '50s TV, if only we could.
I'm old enough to have developed my lifelong value system by watching, as a child, the TV fare of the 1950s. Everything from "I Love Lucy" to "Dr. Kildare," "Dragnet" to "Maverick," "The Lone Ranger" to "Watch Mr. Wizard," and "Father Knows Best" to "Ozzie and Harriet."
There were Perry Mason, "The Defenders," and even, though set in an earlier era, "Sugarfoot," to guide otherwise blind Justice and to keep the forces of law and order on the up and up.
There were Paladin of "Have Gun Will Travel," Josh Randall of "Wanted, Dead or Alive," and Johnny Yuma's "The Rebel": true knights-errant of the Old West.
There was Alfred Hitchcock, presenter of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," subverting week-by-week the sanctity of corporate sponsorship and the sanctimony of much else besides.
There were the Cartwrights of "Bonanza" — brothers Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe, and father Ben — to teach us the values of masculine honor and family responsibility.
"Dragnet": Sergeant (later Lieutenant) Joe Friday showed us how it is hard, self-effacing work by individual citizens — as a police officer, in his case — that best serves the public weal.
"Maverick": Bret, along with Brother Bart and countless other siblings and cousins whose names all began with "B," taught us how a self-seeking, individualistic card-sharp often finds himself making common cause with partners of yet shadier mien — not to mention some pretty liberated ladies, considering the tenor of the times — just to thwart the schemes of the really bad folks.
I could go on and on. The values that informed 1950s TV, and thus America, were a far cry from what we see today. There was no sex, beyond an occasional smooch. There was no violence for its own sake; the Lone Ranger would simply shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand, and the fight would be over. There was no cussin', no scraggly beards (except on bad guys), no "wardrobe malfunctions" or indecent exposure. Even the "darkest" protagonists — Josh Randall, Ben Casey, Paladin, Johnny Yuma, U. S. Marshal Matt Dillon of "Gunsmoke," etc. — were unfailingly polite, civil, respectful, and clean-living. You could rely on it: if a television character was in any way coarse or rude in his outward behavior, he was bad through and through.
Some of the shows still managed to be subversive, fostering sober skepticism of entrenched power structures: the established cattle barons of the Old West, rather than the newcomer sheepherders; the criminal justice system of the modern day, when it tramples the rights of the weak and powerless; the stupid rich, perennial targets of the heroes of "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and "Zorro."
How all that has changed! Nowadays, the current generation of 18-to-25-year-olds — "Generation Next" is their appellation — list getting rich as their topmost or second most prominent goal in life. (See this poll-based portrait of Gen Next.) Where every family on '50s TV went to church as a matter of course — so much so that it rarely needed to be mentioned on the air — today about one in five Gen Nexters has no religion at all. Where casual sex, binge drinking, illegal drug use, and person-on-person violence were once taboo, "large majorities of today's young adults believe that [all of these] are more prevalent among young people today than was the case 20 years ago."
Back then, to judge by TV, there were seemingly little nonmarital sex, few unwanted pregnancies, few abortions. Abortion was illegal, and in some states, so were certain kinds of sex. On TV, these subjects rarely came up, and when they did, it was made clear that no decent person would voluntarily break the sexual codes of the day.
On occasion, on "serious" shows like "The Defenders," there would be plots in which an unfortunate woman (often, in her teens) had been raped or was the victim of incest, became pregnant — a word that was itself taboo throughout much of the decade — and had to decide what to do. If she went to an abortionist, this was presented as a bad-but-understandable choice, given the circumstances. Far worse was the rapist, the perpetrator of incest, or the crude, money-grubbing abortionist.
There was never any suggestion, however, that every woman is entitled to what we today refer to as discretionary abortion, or abortion-on-demand.
For that matter, there was never any suggestion that people of either sex are entitled to much of anything. Americans have developed their vaunted "sense of entitlement" since the 1950s. Back in that world, you had to earn what you get. Even Ozzie Nelson, he of the perpetual cardigan-sweater-wearing day off, was understood to have some kind of job, somewhere, doing gainful work.
The importance of education was implicit on '50s TV. The protagonists were often doctors or lawyers. Even Sugarfoot, nominally a saddle tramp, was trained as a lawyer, and Johnny "The Rebel" Yuma was conspicuously a highly literate keeper of a personal journal. Even the television news if the day was saturated with images of Negroes (as African Americans were then called) being barred from schoolhouse doors by irate white muckety-mucks. (And, by the way, I include in "'50s TV" much of the stuff that was on the air in the early-to-middle 1960s, before the culture began to change radically.)
So this blog will be dedicated to looking back at a bygone age that, though it wasn't without its blemishes and warts, was better at instilling "good" personal and communal values than is the culture of the present day.
Although it is admitedly not all that apparent from the above, my overriding intent is not so much to chide or nag as to inquire as to how such idealistic values as were portrayed on TV in the '50s could be replaced so rapidly by values that seem diametrically opposite to them. I am not so much interested in discussing values as in discussing what I call "metavalues." For example, it looks to me like we as a society have nurtured, as a "metavalue," a radical resentment of standards in general. Anything which smacks of a set of values being imposed on groups or on individuals — no matter how gently or indirectly it is done — is bad. We as a society have developed a bad case of "standards phobia," and I am curious as to how and why.
Obviously, if our metavalues have spun on a dime since the 1950s, when it was tacitly assumed that all decent folks could agree on basic matters of right and wrong, an important question becomes: Can it be reversed? Can we get back to expecting "right behavior" of each other? Can we get back to sharing a common sense of what that right behavior is?
Another question that is important to me has to do with the prevailing cynicism of the present day. Which came first, the abandonment of "old-fashioned" standards of behavior and belief or the cynicism about the willingness and ability of people in general, and especially people in positions of power, to live by them?
Through it all, I hope the posts I make in this blog will address the overarching issue of what needs to happen in the popular culture to "take back the night," values-wise. It is my belief that most people still do the right thing, most of the time. The "bad" behavior we see around us, especially from sports stars and celebrities, is, I think, partly the result of living in a culture that does not instill in us mental images of self-control. When situations arise that tax our human kindness and charity, we are simply too brittle. We snap. Then comes the need to apologize in the media. How often do we hear, "I just don't know where all that came from. That wasn't me"?
It's a lot easier not to lose control and destroy our personal image in responding threatening situations if our culture acts, as it were, as "Styrofoam," encasing our outward behavior and softening the blows we might otherwise receive from selfish people and from hostile situations. The Styrofoam of the kinder, gentler culture of yore has melted. We need to make new Styrofoam containers in which each of us has our own little compartment and in which we can all be comfortably well-behaved.
For I think that, at the bottom of the "culture of few ideals" that we have today, is the assumption that each of us has that unless we stand ready to assert ourselves (violently, if necessary) and take what we each feel entitled to, we will wind up "losers" in the game of life. Our cynicism is that deep. Meanwhile, our veneer of civility has grown correspondingly shallow. We all need to go back and spend some time watching '50s TV, if only we could.
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