Great, now I’ve got a Three Dog Night earworm. It’s enough to launch me upon a jeremiad at ya.
Well, it’s good to know everyone isn’t blinded by nostalgia. On the other hand, it’s disappointing to know that I may never reach an age where I can make bizarre claims about the past and act like they’re absolute truths. Damn.
The problem with Starving Artists idyllic past is twofold: 1) it probably never existed, and 2) even if things were great for some, they genuinely sucked for others. He claims that the country was great at educating students back then - I don’t believe education was actually better, but even if it was, it was only better for rich white males. Sure, maybe a few people learned the three Rs a little better, but there were lots of people who didn’t get to have an education at all. Sure, there were jobs aplenty for clean-cut young men, but women typically didn’t get to work at all, and even if they did it was only in a few professions (teachers, nurses, secretaries). Sure, there was prosperity for some, but others lived a desperate, hand-to-mouth existance, devoid of social programs and social justice.
I think I’ll stick with the ‘liberal era’, thanks.
The women’s rights thing, of course, puts the lie to his entire philosophy. You had HALF the population with limited opportunities for self-development. HALF, people. Without even considering racial and cultural minorities, that’s an enormous injustice.
Sure there is. You just need to be the last one standing. So, make sure you’ve got good insurance and then do your best to repeal everyone else’s.
-Joe
So much nonsense, so little time.
I’ve been fighting the urge to get back into all this as I have lots of work to do, but your post may have finally overcome my resolve. Unfortunately I don’t have time right now to explain the many ways you’re wrong, but lest anyone be inclined to accept it all and still think it’s better to have a drug-and-crime-ridden culture full of functionally illiterate high school graduates and millions of kids growing up virtually unsupervised and undisciplined in single-parent homes and facing utterly bleak futures which will undoubted be replicated in their own children is better than one in which women primarly took care of the kids (and could still find employment easily if they wanted it) while the husband was saddled with the pressure and responsiblity of providing for all of them, I am posting this much at least so as not to make it appear you actually know what you’re talking about.
Crime rates have not risen since the 50s or 60s in most places, and in many places they were higher in the 20s and 30s than they are now. Your contention that crime and drugs are more a part of society is more due to changes in peoples attitudes - we feel freer to discuss reality, and movies and television also make crime ‘realer’ to us. High school graduates are not ‘functionally illiterate’ on the whole - sure a few are (and a few always were), but education is overall higher.
Sure women took care of the kids and men worked - that was the only model that was considered acceptable. Few talked about interracial marriage, same-sex relationships, domestic abuse, child abuse, etc, etc, etc, but those things damn well existed. Do you think we just invented them? I personally would rather we live in a world where reality is acknowledged, and either dealt with or accepted (depending on subject), rather than a world where all of this is kept behind closed doors and whitewashed over.
Oh, and by the way - just because you grow up in a single-parent home does not make your future ‘utterly bleak’.
Might I suggest that all responses to any SA post that doesn’t include a cite for his claims (in other words, ***ANY ***SA post), be restricted to “Please post a cite. Otherwise, shut the fuck up.”
Seriously, why do people insist on treating his misty watercolored memories as worthy of debate?
That’s just the way we … … are.
You’re welcome. 
Kids! You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
Kids!But they still just do what they want to do!
Why can’t they be like we were,
Perfect in every way?
I have never before read SA’s posts in Paul Lynde’s voice. Now I will never be able not to.
Oh what’s the matter with kids?
What’s the matter with kids?
What’s the matter with kids
TOOOOOOODAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYY!!!
Yep, that’s what made the Dark Ages of Europe dark. Science. Not religion, the plague, lack of bathing, and malnutrition. Science. There aren’t enough :rolleyes:'s in the world for the likes of Tony Blankley.
Don’t worry, I’ll save us by renewing the fashion for illuminated manuscripts.
Great. Now I have a mental image of Thomas Kinkade in a monk’s robe & tonsure, hunched over a page from the Book of Kells. Thanks a lot.
BTW, since I outrank both SA and ETF in the age department, I feel entitled to flap my jaw a bit regarding the “golden age” that SA remembers so fondly. Except that it wasn’t exactly golden (more like brass-plated). I grew up in the same neighborhood as Beaver Cleaver, and like most of my peers was “protected” from the unpleasantness on the other side of the tracks. But there was a difference in my case: a Jesuit education from people who didn’t particularly care to perpetuate illusions about the world (religion is another story). As a result, by the time I finished high school I had come to realize that there was a whole 'nother world out there — and it wasn’t nearly as pleasant as I’d been brought up to believe. SA can fulminate to his little(!) heart’s content about how much better things were back then (and they were, for him . . . and me); I’d rather live in a society that, however seemingly dysfunctional, is less inclined to sweep its problems under the proverbial rug.
I have to say this is genius! After reading this I went back to his last post and read it again, hearing the dulcet tones of Paul Lynde as I did so. It worked so well I’m considering this just may have been the most elaborate whooooosh ever.
Anyway, doing the Paul Lynde voice while reading SA should be a new pit rule.
DianaG, may I suggest you actually read my post and click on my signature? Any nonmasochists are cordially invited to follow suit.
Seemingly disfunctional? Seemingly disfunctional?
Do you call high school graduates who are functionally illiterate and can’t figure how to make change seemingly disfunctional? Do you call a society in which one in four high school girls has an STD seemingly disfunctional? Do you call a society that boasts a high school in which one of every eight girls is pregnant seemingly disfunctional? Do you call a society that glamorizes and promotes street corner drug sales and vulgarity and misogyny and gunplay and makes heroes of dealers because they survived five gunshot wounds seemingly disfunctional? Is a society in which literally (not figuratively but “literally”) millions of lives have been ruined or lost due to drugs seemingly disfunctional? Is a society that has literally has millions of its kids growing up in single-parent homes - homes in which the one single parent often has no clue of how to raise a child and is likely working two jobs anyway just to pay the rent and put food on the table - and growing up in an environment where learning is scoffed at, crime and drugs are everywhere, and facing a life of either prison or poverty or both seemingly disfunctional? Do you call a society in which many in its minority communities find it all but impossible to live without the fear that drugs, thugs, gangs, or drive-by shootings are going to kill someone in their family seemingly disfunctional?
I don’t harp on some lost “golden age”. What I say is that those days only seem golden because of how fucked up things are now. Racial equality, women’s rights, and whatever other worthwhile goals that people may have felt needed to be reached could have been accomplished without destroying practically everything that was good about life in this country at that time.
I’ll say this again for what is likely the millionth time: ***Race and women’s rights had nothing to do with the counter-culture revolution! ***
The counter-culture revolution was about nothing but indulging in pleasure and avoiding responsibilty and consequence. It was driven by a bunch of naive, immature twenty-year-old college students and their dropout friends, and it centered primarily on music, drugs and sex - with the Vietnam war thrown in for good measure because being sent off to war interfered with indulging in music, drugs and sex.
And thanks to the relatively nascent electronic media young people all across the country got to join in the fad and a movement was born, a movement that was immature, irresponsible, selfish and foolish and which has very predictably brought us to where we are today.
Anyone with half a brain and an ounce of maturity knows that you don’t do a child any favors by passing him from one grade to another even though he isn’t learning anything simply because failing him will make him feel bad about himself. And anyone with half a brain knows that by doing so you will ultimately create a person who feels much worse about himself because he can’t hack it out in the real world where he needs to actually know something. And they know that dumbing down the curriculum to make it “fair” for urban kids with poor study habits who are suddenly bussed in to suburban schools is going to have the same result.
And they know that if you create an environment where sex is everywhere and condoms are being given out in schools that kids are going to start screwing like rabbits and pregnancies and STDs are going to explode.
And they know that if you utterly blow off marriage and the idea of a strong family unit and start bed-hopping and bailing on the children you’ve created, kids are going to be growing up with virtually no adult supervision and are going to find themselves doomed to lives of crime, misery and privation.
So, how do the good liberals of the Straight Dope view all this? Why, as the rantings of a geezer! And they claim, if you can get them to admit anything is actually wrong, that is - that it was all necessary to fight racism and so women could get jobs.
Well, it wasn’t necessary in order to fight racism and/or to achieve women’s rights. Somehow women got the right to vote without turning society upside down, and demonstrations and important civil rights legislation somehow got passed and racism more or less defeated without turning society upside down.
So we’re back again to the fact that the counter-culture revolution was not about women’s rights or civil rights, but about the right to live freely and irresponsibly, indulging in sensory pleasures in the form of music, drugs and sex, and without the constraint of conventional societal mores.
So in closing I’ll ask you to do some searches of my posts and try to find some where I talk about an idyllic golden age where nothing was wrong. I can tell you right now you’ll never find any. What you’ll find are posts where I’ve stressed how screwed up things are now and compared them with the one-hundred-and-ninety-years or so of this country’s history where the things that have become screwed up were not screwed up. And you’ll find posts in about a 15:1 ratio claiming it was all necessary to fight racism and sexism and a host of other “isms”. And oh, yeah, that Starv wants everybody to get off his lawn.
What you won’t find is justification for drugs, crime (and if it’s true that crime rates are lower now than they were then, imagine how much lower they’d be now without drugs and gangs - hell, who knows, we might even be able to go back to leaving our homes and cars unlocked again), teenage STDs and pregnancy rates, and you’ll hear no mention or concern whatsoever about all the lives that have been lost or utterly ruined in the wake of these harmful changes in society that liberalism has wrought in this country over the last forty years.
If you guys weren’t corrupt, effete liberals you’d think Wilford Brimley, when he’s doing his hard-headed, no-nonsense kind of guy shtick.