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“Operator”
I heard a great song in my car yesterday – “Operator,” a 1972 folk/love song by Jim Croce. It’s a simple, beautiful song about a man’s effort to recover from a breakup with his girlfriend. What makes it so wonderful is that everyone can identify with the message. Everyone. Right? But then I started to wonder what someone would think of that song if they were under, say, 40 years old.
First of all, they would wonder, what the heck is a pay phone? Why would you need a dime to make a phone call? What is an operator? And why would you need the assistance of that person (or anyone else) to make a phone call? Ever heard of speed dial? Heck, just tell your phone to make the call and it does it on its own, right? And then, he can’t read the number on the matchbook because it’s old and faded. OK, so what is a matchbook, why would you be carrying one around, and why would you use that as a filing system for contacts? Many young people have forgotten the time when basically everybody smoked. Restaurants had complimentary matchbooks and ashtrays at the tables. And before cell phones, a matchbook might be the most convenient way to jot down a quick note, like a phone number. Lots of important information was written in matchbooks in those days. But there is something else in that song that I think many young people today would have difficulty identifying with:
The sense of longing. The pain of separation. Today, the guy in the song would be on his ex-girlfriend’s Snapchat and Instagram and he would rarely go more than a few hours without a running commentary of her current activities, in real time, complete with photographs. They would be texting, and maybe even FaceTiming and so on. It’s hard to miss someone when they don’t really leave.
I have three teenage daughters. They get nervous if their boyfriend doesn’t return a text within a certain amount of time. I’ll say, “Relax – he’s probably busy.” She’ll respond, “He posted on his Instagram 18 minutes ago. He’s on his phone, but he’s not responding to me. Something’s wrong.”
I can’t imagine dating in this environment. If one of us was busy, I would go days or weeks without seeing my girlfriend. And that was probably good. It gave us both a break. And a chance to think about things. No male can think with a pretty girl nearby.
Now, the availability and expectations of perpetual contact have had a profound impact on courting. I think it adds a lot of pressure, especially for the boyfriends. Lord help them.
Missing out on that sense of longing, to me, is really too bad. I think that how you handle being apart is a good indicator of how you’re likely to do together. But I sometimes think that it’s more than the sense of longing that today’s youth don’t fully understand.
I’m not convinced that they really understand love. Actual, true love. I suspect that some young people now would hear “Operator” and think to themselves, “What the heck? Has that dude never heard of Tinder?”
As the left has spent the last several decades successfully attacking traditional family structure and the role of men and women in that structure, they have also been promoting free love. Once the pill came out, and we dispensed with most of the restrictive religious and ethical limitations on sex, then relationships became more about sex than they are about the search for a lifetime soulmate.
In my view, the women’s liberation movement was really the men’s liberation movement. No more rules. If it feels good at the time, do it. Why not? If a woman won’t have sex with you, she’s not being sensible or selective, she’s just being a prude. Go find someone who will make you feel good. Because that’s what it’s all about. So girls start competing with one another not with beauty or personality, but simply with willingness to perform sexual favors for nearly anyone. This race to the bottom diminishes everyone involved.
Our obsession with sexual pleasure has led to neglect of other, more important things. Like love. Devotion. Longing. Sacrifice. All the things that make life truly beautiful.
All the things that make life truly beautiful.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when you watch movies, love stories rarely involve pornography, and pornography rarely involves love. We can see that in the dating scene now. Love can be difficult and painful, so it’s better to just stick with casual sex. That, at least, is fun. Less potential for emotional complications. And if it doesn’t work out, you haven’t really lost anything.
Of course, that also means that you really didn’t have anything to begin with. But, whatever.
So how does this end? We don’t know. It may be generations before we see the end result of our loss of interest in love. But I find it terrifying. One reason that human societies tend to be so violent is that, in my view, hate is a stronger emotion than love. This is especially true if we diminish the role of love in our lives. One might expect such a society to become more hateful, bitterly divided, and violent. So our disinterest in love is scary.
And sad. I miss beauty. The beauty of real, true love. Love – real, true love – is beautiful. It’s meaningful and real.
I only wish my words could just convince myself that it just wasn’t real.
But that’s not the way it feels.
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I am old enough to get the song, and like it enough to have learned to play it on guitar. But I need some help with the old Hank Williams song “Mind Your Own Business” with these lyrics:
“Oh the woman on my party line’s a nosey thing, she picks up her receiver when she knows it’s my ring, why don’t cha mind your own business . . .”
Why is this bothersome guest, at Hank’s party no less, answering his phone?
Serious question? You don’t know what a party line is? It’s a phone line shared by multiple households. The call would go through an operator who would put it through to the person being called by ringing an appropriate number of rings. But anyone on the party line could pick up and listen in.
“Here’s a quarter. Call someone who cares.”
Having unmarried adult children is hard. My kids who are just a bit older (later 30s) got married in the usual way (I’m a Croce fan as well)… but these in their 20s now, it’s harder. My kids do want it the old way, but finding others that want that as well is the problem. Commitment is really hard to come by now, shared goals, putting marriage and family above career is almost not done anymore and they find it constraining and even immoral. And too scary truthfully.
Awesome post; thought-provoking and elegiac.
It occurs to me that your above list could also include ‘trust’, which develops, muscle-like, with use.
I wonder if there are statistics for how quickly a person who has been dumped from a monogamous relationship has sex with a new person. Male society tends to encourage it, but technology has made it easier to accomplish. Did Rhonda really ever help one “git her outta my heart”?
That’s a joke right? Cuz you never know.
It’s hard to find songs that are even songs and not just chanting anymore, they must have singing voices, but they don’t use them.
Agreed. People raised above a basic income level only marry now if it doesn’t interfere with college and career plans.
I once tried to describe this to my daughter when she was in high school. I can still remember the look of abject horror on her little face when I got to the part where when you’re away from home, you’re incommunicado.
Beautifully written song… beautifully written article. Croce is one of my favorite listens.
I was born in ’82, but still remember using a payphone to call my parents to come get me from high school extracurriculars… and the rotary phone at my grandparents!
You’re absolutely right, though, there is a certain nostalgia that I have for simpler times… I couldn’t imagine dating today – people rarely meet naturally anymore, and romance has gone by the wayside.
That’s because they haven’t reached marriageable age yet. I got invited to a wave of weddings once my friends and co-workers started hitting 30. When I was in my 20’s, I can’t recall a single married couple in my age group.
Exactly, the prevailing attitude is you finish college and grad school, get established in your career, and only then do you start to think seriously about marriage.
That is actually a somewhat traditional view; don’t marry until you can provide.
Traditional for men, yes. Applying it to women as well is the novelty here.
The world has not been made a better place for it.
Also, if a man waited to marry until he had a job, that generally meant he was 18-20 years old. Now it means he’s in his early 30’s. And so is his girlfriend. So couples don’t marry and work their way up together. They work their way up, then get together. This is different.
It’s been my observation that, throughout history, cultures, social classes, and whatever, people generally married (both male and female) when their educations, sufficient to their place in life, were complete. For most people (including virtually all females) throughout all of history, that education ended quite early – it doesn’t take that long to learn how to drive a plow, make and mend clothes, take care of children, etc., especially when you practice nearly all day long. The upper-class males might take longer, because their livelihoods took more education (maybe even reading and numeracy!), but the females didn’t; which is why you have things like late-20’s-early-30’s men marrying teenage girls, and no one thinking anything of it (fertility also has a lot to do with it, of course).
Nowadays, “provide” means more than “not starving to death”. It often means “living as good as it was at Daddy’s house,” or “as good as it is now (single life)”. If Daddy’s House wasn’t that great to begin with, maybe marrying earlier isn’t so bad. But for the middle class and above, where Daddy (and/or Mommy) have had decades to establish their career, get raises, etc., getting married to some kid so the new family doesn’t even make 60k/yr combined…why even bother? Like, you can’t even do regular European/exotic vacations on that! Especially with kids! So, everyone thinks they need more education, because they’ve all been sold the malarkey that More Education Means More Money. And that drives marriage age up, which for various reasons often means fewer get married in the first place, and that fewer marriages last.
And that’s of course not going into the modern idolatry that are the worship of Love and Romance. (By modern I mean the last 200 years or so.)
Specifically the experience of “falling in love,” which is quite different than love as “willing the good of the other.”
The OP lead me to youtube to hear “Operator” and a few more songs. I found a clip in which he explains his inspiration for “Leroy Brown” who he’d met at Fort Dix. Croce described him as “not made to climb the tree of knowledge.” I’d never heard that delightful description before.
The other (or another, at least) “Operator” by the Manhattan Transfer is pretty good too. It’s a tad more uplifting than Croce’s “Operator”:
I enjoy explaining references to things before her time to one of my 19-year-old daughters, when she’s receptive to it. She’ll surprise me sometimes, too, by knowing about something I wouldn’t think she would.
I love it when it goes the other way ’round; I’ve heard of something they believe to be to hip for me.
Oh so do I. I remember one time when she was so surprised I’d even heard of whatever she was talking about, like I’m Grandma Moses or something, and I finally told her, “Listen. Anything you’re doing or thinking of doing, I’ve already done it twice.”
When I moved to New Orleans in 1974, a pay phone case a nickel. I’m not sure why, but it always made me smile when I used the pay phone to think I was paying the same rate Sam Spade did in The Maltese Falcon when he called Effie.
Then of course there was the poor befuddled Clark Kent, played by Christopher Reeve in Superman (1978), who discovers phone booths are a thing if the past.
An unconditional commitment to the good of the other without regard to the cost to the self is one o the best definitions of love I know.
There was a local bar band in Madison named Max Voltage and the Resisters.
I have a couple albums from a (Phoenix? Albuquerque?) band named Chuck Wagon & The Wheels.
Forefathers by Dan Fogelberg doesn’t make me cry, but it does choke me up.
I found a stack of letters from when he was in college in my Dad’s footlocker some years ago (after he died).
When I told my mom about them she told me not to read them until after she died.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s5ntDL0Tic
The best band name I’ve ever heard was “Free Beer.” They split up, and one of the members wound up starting a new band with a couple of other Newfies called, “Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers.” Talk about old technology…