OP: Talk to any of your elderly relatives. Or watch them interact with one another. You’ll be appalled. Or more like, given your explanation of your limitations, you’ll be unable to see what’s happening at all.
*Nobody *raised in the early 20th Century says what they mean, especially not amongst family. It’s 100% coded messages, innuendo, and meaningful silences. And woebetide the person who can’t read the code.
Sister A talks to Brother B about topic C entirely for the purpose of communicating relationship nuance D to cousin E who’s not even present and may never hear of the A-to-B conversation at all.
Given your mentality you would *hate *to have lived through that. You’d probably have ended up a hobo or institutionalized, not a successful member of some imaginary society of straight talkers.
I don’t know if he’s that wrong. Rules regarding social conduct were much stronger and more imperative. You dressed this way, behaved that way, etc… It might be that having clear rules to follow in most circumstances, knowing what to expect exactly from other people would be a relief for some. There are people who love rules and are at a loss when left to fend for themselves and decide for themselves what they ought to do.
IME, the '80s were worse than the '50s when it came to a conform-or-die attitude. A lot of social change was bubbling under the surface in the '50s. Civil rights, beatniks: not everyone was content. In the '80s, TPTB were determined not to let the '70s happen again. I know for a fact, because we went to the same schools, that I and my classmates were treated much more harshly in the '80s than my sisters and their classmates were in the late '60s and early '70s.
And it trickled down to the students themselves. Notice how few movies and TV shows are built around '80s nostalgia, as opposed to '50s, '60s and '70s? Because it’s creative types who make movies and TV, and the '80s are not a time creative types want to relive.
Cronkite and Carson were only one part of the picture even back then. Compare them to Laugh-In, The Smothers Brothers, the first season of Saturday Night Live, or New Yorker cartoons. There was plenty of satirical comedy when I was growing up, even before David Letterman.
I forgot to add Mad Magazine, one of my primary training grounds for satirical humor. I knew someone who had every issue going back to the fifties. In fact, much of what I learned about the fifties came from Mad’s unique perspective.
I can only confirm what the previous posters have said. But one point has to be made. It was not a time to be gay. Transsexuals didn’t exist. Things were really repressive in those days of the 1950s. The days of the Organization Man.
