Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Past Spoiled the Present
One would think growing up in the shadows of memories that never belonged to them might grow up to feel jaded. I remember watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the family room of my parent’s house as a kid (reruns — I was a Reagan baby). The opening sequence of Mary Richards driving into Minneapolis, the Sonny Curtis lyrics backed with a simple, optimistic tune that matched Mary’s anticipation as she embarked on a new city, a new job, and a new life — still stirs the same hope that a young lady with as much eagerness as naivete could have, and I wish still had.
I didn’t have any remarkable childhood; I just loved it. I grew up watching John Wayne storm the beaches and round-up outlaws. I spent most summers working, swimming, and biking to Dairy Queen. Our family had a local pizza place that showed Looney Tunes cartoons I know by heart and served malts with the extra tin cup. It was simple. It was more Leave It to Beaver than Rebel Without A Cause.
I grew up thinking the world was probably like Happy Days but without the jukebox, which was funny because I ended up working at a sandwich shop that had one (Roger Miller’s King of the Road was in regular rotation). But I looked forward to an adult world in which America was still the stuff of dreams. Merit was as good as one’s reputation to unlock the door of opportunity. Men knew what chivalry was and women didn’t scoff at it. There were Little Black Dresses and kitten heels, tailored trench coats, and rubber overshoes. Picture windows were dressed in thick heavy floral drapes and kids in OshKosh B’gosh. Married couples slept in separate beds and Joe Friday was always serious.
There was a morality to be seen without hearing. I look back and see a future I wish I grew older in. It wasn’t the neat storylines that fit into half-hour packages, or the wondering how Lucy was going to get out of trouble this time, or that maybe the castaways from the S.S. Minnow would be rescued next time, but that everything was so wonderfully, easily, enjoyably simple. Every question had an answer, every villain was known and ultimately defeated, and the good fought for the innocent and vulnerable against the encroaching threat trying to take it all away.
But I grew up. And the world wasn’t turned on by my smile. Not everyone thought of John Wayne as a hero. My nostalgia was what was wrong with America. I was too Donna Reed and not enough Hill Street Blues. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. Where once we could decide on a set of values and agree with them to such effect as to put them on television sets for millions of viewers and families every night but are now seen as “problematic” is…well, the problem. Sure, it’s a good thing for pop culture to reflect the demographics of America; frankly, it’s done pretty well for the military for decades — until one segment was suddenly deemed “problematic.”
So the tea-length skirts and teased hair over polite smiles and warm handshakes, men in loafers and socks and a straw fedora at the Tiki-themed neighborhood barbeque admiring the new charcoal grill breathing in the night air mingled with lighter fluid, charred hamburger, and a lit cigar; porcelain ashtrays with smoldering cigarettes between couples talking closely tucked into the vinyl booths at Nye’s; ladies chit-chat under domes of electric dryers and the turning magazine pages flutter in time with the excited chit-chat of ladies whose hair is drying beneath the great glass electric dome dryers…
But it was too simple, too easy, too pleasant. I’m not arguing for erasing history — or whitewashing as seems to be said amongst the fashionable set. People couldn’t really have been this content! Families were little hives of prejudice, conformity, and oppression! Suburbs were merely cookie-cutter type-cast Stepford-wives enclaves! Too materialistic! Too intolerant! Too closed-minded!
No, it’s so much better today, when our kids are indoctrinated in government schools; teen angst is encouraged to be expressed as a child’s true identity (without a parent’s knowledge, natch); technology companies regulate speech and thought; colleges and universities are mandating racial segregation.
America’s past belongs to moments of shame and triumph, but the shame doesn’t invalidate the triumph. If anything, doesn’t it make our success, our survival, our ceaseless cause for freedom and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that much more remarkable? When did it become so terrible to strive for an ideal for every American — or at least the opportunity to try — and so fist-pounding compulsory to tell us why this idealism is wrong?
I’m not saying I’ll take a stroll down Nicollet Mall and with a wide smile toss my tam o’shanter high into the Minneapolis sky. But it might be nice to live in a time where I could.
Jenna, thanks for the response.
I may have been unclear in my Thought #1. I’m actually in favor of indoctrination of the young. I think that it is obviously necessary. We have to teach them what to think, to teach them right from wrong. I think that we used to indoctrinate children into a certain set of values — essentially a Protestant Christian morality, and faith, coupled with a sort of reverence for the founding principles of our self-governing Republic.
I think that things went wrong when, for whatever reason, a generation or two lost cultural self-confidence. They seem to have decided that “liberty,” and the alleged foundation of our country on the basis of “Enlightenment reason,” meant that everyone needed to figure these things out for themselves. Empirically, I think that we can see that following this approach, people end up disagreeing about just about everything. Everyone thinks that they have a reasoned argument for their position, though in my view, they generally have a rather weak rationalization.
I’ve recently found Yoram Hazony’s work in this area instructive, though I had been having similar thoughts myself before discovering his work. The idea that our nation was founded on “Enlightenment reason” seems to have been a quite recent invention, spreading in the early-to-mid 20th Century. Older sources are far more focused on faith, from the statements of both Washington and Adams, to the Federalist Papers, to leaders who relied explicitly on Scripture like Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln.
My view is probably best described, today, as Christian Nationalism. Historically, it seems to accurately describe the first 100-150 years of our nation’s existence.
I have the impression that Charles Beard and John Dewey were major figures in the philosophical and cultural developments that changed that view, though I have not yet studied their work sufficiently to be sure of this.
Between that and “hot tub rendezvous” just about ends the discussion, don’t you think? But really I do agree. There is a long path between independent (or independent-minded) and the radical feminism we see today and one that cannot even bring itself to defend women accept in cases where they want to kill their babies, and if anything there is an underlying current throughout the show about the human attraction to stable, healthy relationships. Now I just have to find my brain bleach…
I find it so interesting how we often talk about the slow march towards ruin and yet upheavals seem punctuated by short bursts of radical change. 1965-1969 and possibly 2017 through COVID? Maybe the important thing now is making sure history is written accurately for future generations.
I meant, be a prude except in this case, of course. The hot tub reference goes back to a Playboy cartoon contemporary with the Mary Tyler Moore Show. The trauma has not yet passed, but it appears I can still share.
This is great stuff, Jenna, and I’m with you all the way. And yet something snags my sleeve.
Happy Days was set in the idealized 50s / early 60s, part of the early 70s nostalgia trend that looked back to a simpler, happier time. It portrayed a time whose virtues the present supposedly lacked; it had fun music, retro fashions . It was a sanitized, episodic version of American Graffiti, which had suddenly made everyone 1973 interested in the bygone days of . . . 1962.
This would be like people today getting ga-ga over a movie about 2011. We can’t imagine such a thing, because 2011 seems a lot like 2022, with slower internet, but not that much slower. Our architecture, music, fashion, design, politics, all seem like an ongoing remix of the same thing, as if the world stopped evolving when we all decided to bend our heads down and look through the world through the magic glowing glass rectangle in our hands. But 1962 was a foreign country in 1973. I saw Graffiti in the theater, and it was like looking at another world. Even by ’73, the world it depicted – rumbly classic cars, busy downtowns, women in skirts – was a romantic remote paradise on the other side of some high, thick wall.
There was a vitality in those images that seemed lacking in our times. By the time Happy Days came around, malaise had set in; the uglification of the physical world was underway, with trends that were banal, boring, brown, unkempt, inept. But. The old America was there in reruns, in the syndicated shows that ran in the afternoon. The TV still pumped out the old dogmas, feeding them to an audience that would grow up seeing them through the prisms of cynicism and irony. How could they not? Modern TV comedy, in the Norman Lear model, was relevant, realistic, and made space for occasional tragedy. It may have been a downer sometimes, to use the lingo, but it made the shiny happy solved-in-26-minutes 50s sitcoms look like broadcasts from a parallel world where Father did, in fact, always know best. (The intentional irony of that title, of course, escaped us at the time.)
But. We knew there was something in those old stories, anyway. Something was behind it all, something solid. We saw it in the ads when we looked at old magazines, felt it in the songs, knew it when Joe Friday clicked on the cuffs. There was a solidity our own era lacked.
Right? Yes. And no. I’ve always said that trying to reconstruct an era from its advertising is like trying to reconstruct a snowflake from a drop of melted water. We can see what they wanted us to believe, or what they thought would appeal, and yes: the confidence and solidity and cheer of the great post-war ads is a testament to the Don Draper theory of advertising, that it tells you you’re okay, everything is okay, you’re going to be fine, and it’s good. Then you run into a newspaper story or two or six that use the same phrases about the 50s: The Nervous Fifties. The Age of Anxiety.
It’s never one or the other.
What fascinates me about the 50s are the dichotomies. It’s modern California architecture, the ramblers colonizing all the suburban potato fields; it’s old cities rotting with tired old buildings. It’s scary new Rock and Roll, and it’s middle-brow middle-aged hi-fi records with swank lush strings. It’s the Beaver, and it’s the Juvenile Delinquents, sarcastic nihilists who must have seemed inexplicable to their parents: we went through a Depression and WW2, and you’re complaining?
All the storm and drang of the day boils away in the end, and we’re left with TV shows, newspapers, movies, songs. (Books too, but no one reads them.) It’s our jobs as adults to understand how we were lucky to grow up as we did, but realize that we were fed fictions. Good ones; well-meaning; helpful, instructive. But nothing like the whole story.
I’ve spent a lot of time recently collecting and studying TV commercials of the 80s. At the time I rolled my eyes at all of them – stupid cheerful upbeat claptrap, with their massed anonymous choruses singing the corporate tagline, the vegetables flying through water, the spandex’d lasses with headbands gratefully quaffing Crystal Light, the endless fast-food iterations, the happy families in brown kitchens, the wry moms and harried dads, the inevitable neon-and-saxophone car or beer ads. From the perspective of now, it seems like a remarkable age, and it has the same sense of cultural cohesion. I was there, and I know that it was not cohesive. I know these ads are not reality. I know that the 80s were also an era of anxiety and cultural flux, the last decade before the Internet changed everything, a time when the networks ruled and dictated the discussion, but also a time when cable was rewriting those terms. I know it wasn’t paradise, but I also suspect that someone in their 20s discovering these ads today would look back on that time the way we looked back on American Graffiti. They wouldn’t be right. But they wouldn’t be wrong, either.
She was Rob Petrie’s wife, and was defined entirely by that. It was a good marriage, yes, but she existed in a permanent state of House Inhabitant, her world prescribed by the kitchen, the living room, and the chaste Marital Chamber with its separate beds. Mary Richards, as others have noted, was single and content, but hardly fish-bike; the problem was the pool of suitors. It made for better episodic TV to keep her single. In the last season she actually had a boyfriend who lasted two episodes, but alas for her it was Ted Bessel, late of “That Girl,” and also gay.
She was not the heroine of the newsroom. The writing played off a variety of characters who had strengths and faults working in comedic collision. Murray was not clueless; he was vain about his abilities, overestimated his role in the world, but was right about good writing. Gordy the Weatherman was solid. Lou Grant was a rock, an exemplar of old values. Ted Baxter was indeed an idiot, but he ended up doing the right thing over and over again. He abandoned his playboy ways for marriage (and while Georgette came off as daft and dim, she had had Ted’s number, and cut to the pith in a way none of the other characters could), he adopted a son, and he had the professional chops to keep his job after everyone else was fired.
There were two other married couples: Lou Grant and Murray Slaughter. In a pitch for “relevance,” the writers had Lou’s wife Edie divorce him because she wanted to find herself in late middle age, and despite the writer’s best efforts she comes across poorly, because Asner played the character’s quiet despair so well. Murray almost cheated on his wife once, but the audience was glad he didn’t, because his wife was Joyce Bulifant, and everyone in the 70s liked her.
At the end of the series, we see that Mary has given everything to her job, and when she loses it, she loses her entire social structure. That may not be the message the series intended, but that’s what it was. On the other hand, she’s still better off than Laura Petrie might have been if Rob divorced her, or he died of a busted liver, and she was thrown into the world with no resume.
@jameslileks “And yet something snags my sleeve.”
A very large, justified “but.” And it’s a wonderful gift. Perhaps what’s creeping around the edges that I missed is we just want things to be simpler. We look back to whatever golden age that is always insulated from the impending ruin we’re teetering over at the current moment with wistful longing because we edited out that time’s impending ruin. Humans (or at least me!) have a keen ability to make complex, immediate crises out of The Latest Thing, anxieties that absorbed our attention but faded in the harsh glare of the sun. Advertisements seem to accomplish this in real time. (Except life insurance ads, in which impending doom is exactly the aim).
Thank you, James.
How could you ‘hate’ JCM? And Pink Houses is the Ain’t That America song.
In the end love conquers all. And you’re right about the song. My apologies to you and Mr. Mellencamp.
I think the Reagan campaign actually did use it, then pulled the ad when Mellencamp objected. Decades later, Republicans still make this kind of mistake. You would think they would have long ago learned that most entertainers are Democrats, and Republicans better get permission before using music. What’s even more embarrassing is when they use a song that is actually a repudiation of America, thinking it is a patriotic song, like Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA.
No apologies! Thank you for the awesome post Jenna!
James, you remember Mary Tyler Moore far better than I. I do have a thought about the end of your comment, though:
Was Mary better off than Laura actually was, in the shows? Why would Rob have divorced Laura, or died of a busted liver? I have to admit that I watched Dick Van Dyke even less than Mary Tyler Moore, but I don’t recall anything that would suggest that their family was about to self-destruct, or that Rob was an alcoholic.
At some point, the TV shows transitioned to portraying a different way of life. Successful, traditional family was de-emphasized, and other things were emphasized, especially single career women and divorce. Different role models lead to a different society, I think.
Stories reflect cultural aspirations, rather than the culture as it is.
All well and good until the story-tellers are serving themselves rather than the culture.
Hollywood, and the education system are in a position to tell stories without the usual feedback from the country at large, and they use their stories to shape the populace towards their vision.