"(President Trump is widely known to have venerated Hugh, but the feeling isn't mutual: 'We don't respect the guy,' says Cooper [Hefner]. 'There's a personal embarrassment because Trump is somebody who has been on our cover.') Cooper, sounding a lot like Dad, explains, 'Yes, there are lifestyle components to Playboy, but it's really a philosophy about freedom. And right now, as history is repeating itself in real time, I want Playboy to be central to that conversation.'"
From "The Next Hef: Hugh's 25-Year-Old Son Reveals Plan to Remake Playboy 'For My Generation'" (in Hollywood Reporter).
I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years. I don't know if Playboy can help. It seems absurd. And yet Playboy had a role to play back then.
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२२८ टिप्पण्या:
228 पैकी 1 – 200 नवीन› नवीनतम»I find it hard to believe that he can believe this.
It is the sort of opinion that can exist only by ignoring all evidence.
Or it is, as usual, entirely disingenuous, a lie.
"I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years." To me this is absurd. This is a serious event and deserves some proof rather than a bald statement. For example, you could quote the number of young people who have stricter views on abortion. And counter with the number of young people who are not getting married. OTW, I call bullcorn.
Where do you see us reverting to "a reactionary moral conservatism?" How do you define that phrase?
I can't wait to see Laslo's comment.
Some perspective from the other side...
The 15 Worst Things Playmates Have Said About Life in the Playboy Mansion
Squalor of the Playboy Mansion: Hugh Hefner, 89, lives in decaying house of damp rooms and stained mattresses where there are more nurses than bunny girls
I Went to the Playboy Mansion (and It Was Kinda Depressing)
If Cooper Hefner is 25, that means Hef was nailing someone when he was EW! EW! EW!
"reactionary cultural conservatism" seems a bit harsh coming from Ann, but when you consider how we have been dragged into worrying about transgenders, who to make wedding cakes for, or being forced against religious belief to provide services to people, perhaps it can be viewed as long overdue. Most folks were pretty well centered during the Eisenhower years. There were standards and there were expectations to be met. When the department of Defense is more worried about gender issues than war fighting capabilities it is definitely time for an "attitude adjustment".
Althouse was only 10 when the Eisenhower administration ended; I was almost 18. I can assure you that the culture of that era was not remotely similar to the culture we enjoy (or endure) today. Even the Playboy of that era was tamer than a lot of mainstream movies and television today. Not to mention what's available on the internet.
"I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years."
Are you making a joke?
Nothing says feminine equality like being printed naked into a centerfold. Or wearing bunny tails and ears. Oh, wait...or like the pussy hats!
"I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years."
If only this were true!
The cultural morality pendulum always swings back and forth between extremes. These things are, like climate, cyclical in nature.
Hefner should move back to Chicago. Running the gauntlet every day will make the staff tough, and better ready to do battle with the conservatives.
Beverly Hills has no credibility. They don't even have real mammaries.
Looks like the magazine will be folding soon, if that's the perspective and business plan of its new manager.
Some of that reactionary conservatism is on the feminist Left, interestingly. There's a school of thought on the Left that men are programmed to take advantage of women, and therefore women who want to succeed in public life need constant supervision, mentoring, protection, etc. Because of toxic masculinity and privilege and all that. Women, of course, are programmed to be meek and accommodating.
It's Victorian times all over again.
Hefner is a Lefty. Trump is not. Hefner will say anything to get the Left back in total control.
I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years.
Why?
What evidence is there of this?
It appears to me that the culture is becoming ever more radical Leftist.
Kid was probably the result of premature ejaculation, according to the grocery store magazines. Now he want a seat at the table in DC.
Sure kid...
"The Next Hef: Hugh's 25-Year-Old Son Reveals Plan to Remake Playboy 'For My Generation'" (in Hollywood Reporter).
What is his plan? Start having tranny centerfolds? Every other issue's centerfold will be a dude that used to be a hot woman?
It appears to me that the culture is becoming ever more radical Leftist.
That's what the Leftist Media wants you to think so that you will stop fighting.
AA is "making a joke and challenging us to be critical" again.
Playboy back then was all "Joe College" naughty. Supposedly it went radical after a Chicago cop smacked Hefner across the kidneys with his baton in the 1968 riots, but it really was when Bob Guccione started "Penthouse" and began eating into his revenues that it went raunchy for real to compete.
I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years.
How?
We are a long way from "Eisenhower Years" if anybody is listening to what a Hefner says.
reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism
I don't see that. It seems strange to me that a lot of people on the left believe that the culture is suddenly moving strongly to right. What I see is a very aggressive Left that's attempting to forcefully assert their ideology upon the right, and the right is responding to that in different ways.
Here are some things I see:
Recently there's a fairly substantial cultural movement around removing statues and artwork associated with the Confederacy. True, there's a lot of reactionary pushback against it from a lot of people on the right, but at the very least it has got a lot of people thinking about an issue that wouldn't have even been entertained a few short years ago. Whatever you're position is on this issue, you have to concede that the Left is the cultural attacker here.
I see what's been going on in College campuses, how they're becoming less and less tolerant of differing viewpoints to the point of violent protests breaking out when particular speakers come. The Left is the aggressor here.
I see endless protests from leftwing organizations like BLM and AntiFa. Many of these protests become violent. After months and months of these things, an idiot white nationalist with deep anger management issues snaps and commits a horrible act. The entire left leaning media proceeds to go on a 2 week campaign blaming all this on a President who didn't apologize for somehow being responsible (in their minds) for all this.
I see a more and more aggressive left throwing bigger and bigger temper tantrums because they didn't get their way last November. And a president who continues to rub salt in their wound.
Having been a teenager at the end of the sixties, my recollection is that, aside from the beautiful naked women, Playboy was decidedly uncool. Their idea of relevance was to own a Porsche, wear turtlenecks and listen to jazz on your Macintosh stereo. Jazz. They certainly tried to be cool, but wearing porn-star mustaches and interviewing John Lennon didn't cut it. They never changed after that. I'll enjoy watching Cooper's fantasy fold.
I think reverting (advancing!) to a reactionary cultural conservatism is an overstatement, but there are a lot of instances in which people out on the bleeding edge of progressivism are trying to enforce norms that 10 or 20 years ago would have been denounced as comically racist and sexist, and that .
For example, the theory of "stereotype-threat" has at long last provided segregationists with the "scientific" support they needed for why Blacks should be educated separately from Whites. And indeed you see some college campuses that are deliberately segregating dorms and other aspects of college life by race.
And then with concerns about "cultural appropriation" you have progressives enforcing a norm of racial-cultural essentialism.
And all the fear-mongering about sexual assault and rape on college campuses is basically pointing (though it hasn't quite yet reached its logical endpoint) towards chastity and chaperoning, while promoting a neo-Victorian norm of female fragility.
And there are progressives today expressing anxiety about racial purity.
And of course, there are many progressives perfectly happy to enforce norms against blasphemy (against Islam) and free speech in general. I was going to put lese majeste here, but that's not quite right. Not yet at least. They edged towards it when Obama was in power, but that's highly situation-specific, not general.
Now, not all those are "conservative" stances. But they're all stances that, when stripped of all their progressive ideological superstructure, a lot of progressives would denounce as culturally conservative.
I am afraid to post my thoughts on this matter here because I don't consider this particular technical platform to be friendly to my views, but I hope at least I can agree with Althouse that we are seeing a reactionary movement. I would just ask in reaction to what?
Who reads playboy anymore? Internet porn should have killed it off 20 years ago.
Unlike most young men, I didn't read Playboy for the articles. I always thought the articles were weird. Here was a magazine aimed at straight men, with pictures of nude women, yet their political articles were always written by Leftists with a pro-feminist slant. Why would I read a 2nd rate New Republic?
BTW, Hugh Hefner always struck me as incredible smarmy. I find it hard to imagine anyone thinking he was "cool". The 50s really,really, must have been 'square'.
For anyone interested, here is a dialogue between Buckley and Hefner on Firing Line from 1966.
J. Farmer - thanks for the link. Very informative.
Here is a followup to my post in case anyone has similar concerns with reactionary censorship.
http://www.wikihow.com/Back-Up-Your-Gmail-Account
This link will show you how to backup all your data from the oppressive tech giant. This includes mail, blogs, drive and everything else they track. You can similarly do this with Facebook, and I assume twitter as well.
Gab.ai had been removed from the play store, and is not being allowed on Apple. Keep this in mind when we are told about reactionary extremism on the right. As they say, you want more Trump? This is how you get more Trump.
They deleted my son's homeschool blog which contained a lot of information that was of emotional value to me. I was teaching him research and scientific skepticism, but I do not think they have much interest in those topics.
Back up your data. This is good advice no matter what side of the political spectram you are on.
I support everyone's right to speech, even the silly Garage Mahal.
"The cultural morality pendulum always swings back and forth between extremes."
I don't think so. This assumes that there is a way back from degeneracy.
There is no way back. The pendulum swings, but then falls into the pit (E.A.Poe ref.).
conservative - holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.
----------------
Remove political parties and I can see reactionary conservative movement from both left and right. Feminists paint females as weaker sex who need help like Balfegor mentions, colleges and their safe spaces and minority only dorms is separate but equal policies, majority of Americans don't want monuments torn down, left wingers would take people back to before electricity and use wind mills instead ..... other than trans movement, liberalism has not been doing too well recently.
Let me get this straight: the Boomer hippies of the 60's successfully destroyed the stable Eishenhower square culture of the 50's and ushered in those wonderful 1970's...so now that the Left completely rules pop culture and has almost total control over all mass Media outlets there's somehow Millennial nostalgia for that square-destroying fun and you're all excited about that?
How much lower can pop culture go, do you think? Is it Trump's election that you guys imagine is some sign of a reversion "to a reactionary cultural conservatism?" As no one tires of pointing out Trump is a bombastic vulgarian and a product of the debauched pop culture machine himself. As an avatar for 50's normalcy he's a weird fucking choice!
I think it was in the context of making fun of the Handmaid's Tale hoopla/adoption by the Left, but someone said today's Progressives are more afraid of Ward Cleaver than they were of Osama Bin Laden.
Look, you Leftist already won--you annihilated conservatives in the culture wars and you've spent the last decade or so bayoneting the survivors (bake the fucking cake!, etc). What more could you possibly have to win? I thought the fixation on transgenderism was mostly due to a lack of other targets--transgender people are a tiny % of the population but get like 5% of the "news" coverage (and characters in TV shows, movies, etc).
But now you're saying you see some resurgent conservative culture movement (apparently invisible to the rest of us) that the cultural descendants of the 60's hippies/Left are going to bravely ride out to fight...is that it? Just bizarre.
You people already destroyed traditional American culture. It's still destroyed. You've been busily importing millions of foreigners and making sure "assimilation" as an ideal is widely despised, and you frequently talk about how great it is that people who believe in traditional American culture (mainly old white people, naturally) are dying off and being "replaced." You've already won; there's no one really fighting back! What's your goal now, just to make the rubble bounce?
I see a more and more aggressive left throwing bigger and bigger temper tantrums because they didn't get their way last November.
Yes. I was in college in the 50s and this is nothing, absolutely nothing, like that.
In fact, aside from McCarthy and a few college politicians who imitated him, it was a wonderful time.
Didn't get laid much.
I've been telling my friends that Donald Trump, with all his faults and my dislike of him, is still on track to be the best Republican President in my lifetime. Althouse can't say that, she has Eisenhower.
And who is the best Democratic President in my lifetime? Barack Obama, hands down.
Oh, dear. This just more of the épater les bourgeois sensibility. That's what people mean when they say things like "reactionary cultural conservatism," especially when spoken alongside "Eisenhower" or "Boomers."
"The cultural morality pendulum always swings back and forth between extremes."
Buwaya contends: I don't think so. This assumes that there is a way back from degeneracy. There is no way back. The pendulum swings, but then falls into the pit (E.A.Poe ref.).
There have been periods--and places--in history where degeneracy exceeded even our own. But there have also been periods of relative decency. Society periodically pulls itself out of the pit only to fall into it again. This is because of the degeneracy of human nature being tempered from time to time by moral conscience.
A reading of Romans I will tend to support this.
I see no evidence of a resurgent reactionary cultural conservatism. None whatsoever.
And who is the best Democratic President in my lifetime? Barack Obama, hand's down.
Maybe in yours but I would choose Truman over Roosevelt, although Roosevelt did well with the war.
Bill Clinton was not a bad president in many ways. He is certainly a good politician, although a liar and pussy grabber.
The absolute worst was Johnson who may have succeeded in killing off the Republic with the uncontrollable debt.
He was an awful man, as well.
Hefner's been delusional for years. He's always been a big supporter of "liberal" causes, apparently under the illusion that we can expand the State forever and forever without any chance of Big Brother wanting one day to tell us what to read.
I was born during the Truman administration but was too young to remember it. Having read a few biographies of Truman I'd say there was more good than bad about his Presidency. So I would rate him the best Democratic President of my lifetime.
Most of what I've read of Eisenhower was his wartime persona. Ike, whom I barely remember, seemed the ideal peacetime President. He was no activist, no ideologue. Just a well-respected figurehead with common sense. I seem to recall that my parents supported Adlai Stevenson.
I enjoy it so much when I see people who are able to see the positive in both sides as well as the negative. Obviously this is why I enjoy the articles on the blog. Althouse is very good at critical examination of the issues and creating fairly balanced critiques of the issues.
I can be positive as well. My favorite thing about Clinton was his responsiveness to the polls. All the politicians have major flaws which are rewarded by the system. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, we need to find ways to encourage the wrong people to do the right things. Bill Clinton seemed to be very responsive to public opinion, which I believe is a great characteristic to have in a politician.
Actually, it's been progressive (i.e. monotonic change). We have reopened abortion chambers to deny lives deemed unworthy, inconvenient, or profitable (e.g. Planned Parenthood) under a layer of privacy. We reestablished institutional bigotry under offices of diversity that discriminate between individuals based on their color and sex. We have instituted political congruence modeled on the "=" movement, which is notably Pro-Choice in that it distinguishes between transgender/homosexual and other transgender orientations. We now carry out social justice adventures that include elective wars, elective regime changes, and "clean" wars that force CAIR. Women have been reduced to the their external gender physiology, womb banks, and monolithic minds (i.e. class diversity) under the direction of female chauvinists. We have a national Obamacare scheme that forces millions of people to pay a protection tax and millions more who fall in the gap between expanded Medicaid and affordable health care. We are forced to subsidize low-density, intermittent quasi-green energy converters -- the "green" blight. We have the most expensive education system in the world and a progressive product to show for it.
I bet a week's pay he completely misidentifies the source of the reversion.
"This just more of the épater les bourgeois sensibility."
The problem with this is that the bourgeois (in that sense) no longer exist.
What is an artist, or an art, without an audience? Not an art and not an artist.
Maybe the idea of a President no longer makes sense for the US.
Let the 50 State Senators rule by 60% majority vote.
As America waxes nostalgic for the 50's this comes to mind:
Hustler went pink,
Playboy went red.
Matters little, I think,
Now that pubies are shed.
"The cultural morality pendulum always swings back and forth between extremes."
I don't think so. This assumes that there is a way back from degeneracy.
There is no way back. The pendulum swings, but then falls into the pit (E.A.Poe ref.).
I agree with this. We're in for a big, and probably bloody, social "reset" which will rationalize the Lysenkoisms of our day.
Clinton was the best Democrat politician of my life time for reasons stated by others. Reagan was the best Republican, hands down. The only Presidential candidate I enthusiastically pulled the lever for. Everyone politician since has been some manner of disappointment all the way to just holding my nose and trying to pick the lesser of two evils...
More like 1692 Salem than 1952 Omaha to me. My impression is thay Gladys Kravitz has become the new role model.
Hugh Hefner, 89, lives: That's the important part.
mockturtle said...
I was born during the Truman administration but was too young to remember it.
According to the internets, 94% of everybody was too young to remember being born.
Speaking of Bunnies -
"The Constitution does not say that a person can shout…yell 'wolf' in a crowded theater. If you are endangering people, then you don’t have a constitutional right to do that," Pelosi said
I'm pretty sure it's OK to yell "wolf" as long as you don't yell it across a state border.
You have to be trolling. In this cultural moment in America, people are free to do anything they damn well please without criticism (except, ironically, to be a reactionary cultural conservative).
"I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years."
Back to the good old 1950's when gay people were arrested and abortion was back alley and women were told to stay in the kitchen. Yes they want to take the country "back".
Reactionary cultural conservatism? I hope so. Hefner promoted irresponsibility for men and helped to normalize the idea of sex outside of marriage, to the great detriment of the family and the relationship between men and women. Any cultural reaction against the so-called Playboy philosophy is due to people realizing the destruction it has wrought.
"except, ironically, to be a reactionary cultural conservative"
We have to read our De Maistre and Unamuno inserted into other books.
And, if physical, to keep them in plain brown wrappers.
"I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years."
"If only this were true!"
How were gay people treated during the Eisenhower years? You have said you were gay in past comments. Has that changed, did you go straight?
"women were told to stay in the kitchen. Yes they want to take the country "back"."
Inga, you are showing your prejudices and lack of knowledge of history.
My mother was born in 1898. She graduated from a "business college" about 1916 and worked a legal secretary. She could type so fast that I could dictate my high school term papers to her at a normal conversation rate.
She went back to work when I was in 8th grade and worked until she was 77. The company she worked for in Chicago told her, after my sister got married, "Ruth, no one knows how old you are but everyone who worked here when you began in the 1930s has retired or died. You have to be over 65 and we are going to get in trouble with the union health plan. She finally admitted she was 75 but she was actually 77. Nothing had her correct age on it. She was older than my father by 5 years and he never knew.
She had worked there and ran half the warehouse business. She took off to have her children and went back when we were old enough. She didn't have to work. She was independent all her life.
She died in 2001. She lived in her own apartment until three months before her 100th birthday.
You just have no idea.
"How were gay people treated during the Eisenhower years?"
Not very well in public but there was no AIDS epidemic.
I knew people who were gay, except they didn't call it that.
Gay bathhouses once they were completely open almost wiped them out.
"She had worked there and ran half the warehouse business. She took off to have her children and went back when we were old enough. She didn't have to work. She was independent all her life."
That's nice Michael K, but she was the exception.
Puritanism is alive and well, but today's puritan's are to be found on the Left and they aren't puritanical about the same things. They're prudish about anything that can be construed as remotely "offensive" to any of the Left's favored victim groups, and they're prudish about health. Thus women can walk around naked in Times Square without consequence, but if they started lighting up cigarettes progressive New Yorkers would complain.
ESPN not letting an Asian sports reporter report on a Virginia game because his name happens to be Robert Lee is as absurd as - well, I would say "I Love Lucy" showing Ricky and Lucy sleeping in twin beds, but it's worse than that. It's like Victorian ladies referring to piano legs as "limbs" because the word "legs" was considered vulgar.
Same bluenose, censoring instinct - different object.
"What is an artist, or an art, without an audience? Not an art and not an artist."
We don't have art anymore. We have entertainment and PC approved propaganda.
"I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years."
Mainly white homogeneous areas are. Mixed multi-cultural city-state areas eg. LA, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Houston and others are all doing very well.
Multi-cultural city states in the UK, Europe, Canada, Asia, Australia and others are also doing very well.
The answer to mainly white discontent? Either move to city-states or start copying the city-states. The future is already being made without you.
Trump is the last howling cry against change that has already happened and is accelerating.
"That's nice Michael K, but she was the exception."
Michael, it was so bad even actresses were really men in drag.
Gays were tolerated in the 50s as long as they didn't scare the horses. There were plenty of "confirmed bachelors".
Its much healthier now that Gays feel they come out of the closet without any repercussions. OTOH, "tolerance" seems to have morphed first into "approval" and now into "Bake my cake or I'll ruin you".
Reminds me of the Joke:
“I've just flown in from California, where they've made homosexuality legal. I thought I'd get out before they make it compulsory.”
"That's nice Michael K, but she was the exception."
Not really. My father had six sisters. Two of them worked all their lives in responsible jobs.
Three married doctors and one married a farmer.
I thunk you are buying into feminist propaganda too much.
My high school girlfriend went to Purdue and graduated in Chemical Engineering. She married a classmate of mine, also an engineer, and worked except when she was raising her kids.
I will grant that the majority of women chose marriage and family but those who wanted to work could have rewarding careers.
Lots became teachers and nurses where they now become lawyers and doctors and I am all for that.
The schools have suffered badly as the quality of people going into teaching has declined severely.
Mainly white homogeneous areas are. Mixed multi-cultural city-state areas eg. LA, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Houston and others are all doing very well.
Really? High taxes, high crime and high violence are your things? Well you're welcome to them.
"Michael, it was so bad even actresses were really men in drag."
That was Shakespeare, which my politically correct university cannot spell.
The answer to mainly white discontent? Either move to city-states or start copying the city-states. The future is already being made without you.
"We will bury you" - says the Left to White America.
Anti-racist or anti-white? Sometimes its hard to tell.
Inga hates the '50's "oppression" of women but wants Muslims to immigrate here.
Because the customs and mores of the Muslim world are so much more enlightened than 1950's America.
I've seen lots of pictures of American women in the '50's and not one of them were in a burka or even a head scarf unless they were covering up curlers. All they all presumably had clitorises intact.
The answer to mainly white discontent? Either move to city-states or start copying the city-states. The future is already being made without you.
Trump is the last howling cry against change that has already happened and is accelerating
Yes..and the proper term to describe it is "the collapse of western civilization".
Cooper Hefner equals two last names, since the surname Cooper derives from the manufacture of wooden barrels, used almost exclusively today in the wine and booze business. But it is a stretch to associate the name with the business of selling sex.
But Hugh's son has his father's surname which puts him way ahead of the newest Cooper brand. This month, Nationstar Mortgage LLC launched its new image using the name "Mr. Cooper." Speculation from various mortgage industry sources have speculated that Mr. Cooper refers to Hollywood star, Gary Cooper from the '50s or raspy-voiced singer Alice Cooper or possibly the old ABC sitcom, "Hangin' with Mr. Cooper."
But the new management at the mortgage company insists that it is looking for an image to project its new customer orientation explained as "we won’t stop until we achieve our single-minded goal: To keep the dream of home ownership alive for every customer.”
Customer orientation is good, so we can all hope that Cooper Hefner will take that to heart as well.
"I get on my knees and pray,
We won't get fooled again."
"Asia"
There are no multi-cultural city-states in Asia. Or countries. Or rather, not in the way you think.
There are and always have been parallel cultures. This is very ancient. Its why ancient cities had the x-quarter and the y-quarter. But it was not and is not really a question of mixed societies.
Singapore is a good example. This is a Chinese city, owned and operated, and there is no doubt of that. Its got minority populations that know their place.
Other Asian countries are much more homogeneous now than they were in colonial times. Korea, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, used to have cosmopolitan cities and enclaves. These are largely gone.
Either move to city-states or start copying the city-states. The future is already being made without you.
Hilarious. Inga, how can you be so clueless ?
Let's see. how about Germany ? They're doing well.
Sweden ? Yes, they are rape capital of Europe.
Chicago ? Yes, the aim could be better,.
Year to Date
Shot & Killed: 426
Shot & Wounded: 2034
Total Shot: 2460
Total Homicides: 462
Outstanding analysis, Inga.
Inga, who lives in a very white part of the country, does not get out much:
"IT’S A SOUTHWEST “WANNA GET AWAY” COMMERCIAL IN HELL:
Shot: New Jersey Transit Train Derails at Penn Station in New York.
—The New York Times tonight. The train reportedly had almost 200 people onboard, with no serious injuries claimed.
Chaser: “It’s obvious why Team de Blasio didn’t want you to see the numbers: They show 3,892 people living on the streets, up 40 percent from last year and the highest rate since 2005….the homeless shelter population is also at a high under de Blasio, having crossed the 60,000 mark last October.”
—The New York Post
It’s the banned-in-New York supersized economy version of Victor Davis Hanson’s Bloomberg syndrome:
Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg used to offer all sorts of cosmic advice on the evils of smoking and the dangers of fatty foods and sugary soft drinks. Bloomberg also frequently pontificated on abortion and global warming, earning him a progressive audience that transcended the boroughs of New York.
But in the near-record December 2010 blizzard, Bloomberg proved utterly incompetent in the elemental tasks for which he was elected: ensuring that New Yorkers were not trapped in their homes by snowdrifts in their streets that went unplowed for days.
The Bloomberg syndrome is a characteristic of contemporary government officials. When they are unwilling or unable to address pre-modern problems in their jurisdictions — crime, crumbling infrastructure, inadequate transportation — they compensate by posing as philosopher kings who cheaply lecture on existential challenges over which they have no control."
Back to the Eisenhower years when blacks still couldn't drink out of the same water fountain as whites in southern states. When blacks were made to pass a "test" in order to vote. Those were the golden years, eh? Let's take our country "back".
And indeed you see some college campuses that are deliberately segregating dorms and other aspects of college life by race.
But we're told it's OK, because it is the minorities demanding segregation this time.
Seems like it would be easier just to ban White men altogether.
Back to the Eisenhower years when blacks still couldn't drink out of the same water fountain as whites in southern states. When blacks were made to pass a "test" in order to vote. Those were the golden years, eh?
Bobbie Byrd and the rest of the Democratic Party sure thought so.
@Unknown:
How were gay people treated during the Eisenhower years? You have said you were gay in past comments. Has that changed, did you go straight?
I'll take your last question as an attempt at humor and ignore it. But let me attempt to answer your question in a roundabout way...
Read the work of sociologist Isabel Sawhill. She makes an incredibly persuasive case that there are really only three things an American has to do to avoid being in poverty: (1) graduate high school; (2) get a job, any job, even at the minimum wage; and (3) do not have children outside of wedlock.
#3 is the most instructive here. I don't think the typical American can even begin to comprehend how much familial breakdown has contributed to social problems in the second half of the 20th century. Single-motherhood is a huge predictor of future social pathology. I have spent my entire professional life working with the Department of Children and Families (DCF) and Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) as a mental health worker, and I witness the consequences of family breakdown every single day of my life. To take just one (but very startling statistic), when Moynihan authored his famous The Negro Family report in 1965, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks was 25% and considered a major social problem (it was around 3% for whites). Today it is over 70% for blacks . Among whites, it's around 30%. That is social breakdown on a staggering scale. And it essentially explains the existence of the welfare state. There has been an attempt since the mid-1960s to construct a welfare state that essentially does for children what parents are supposed to do for children. Over the same time period, the contributions of fathers to their children's lives have been systematically undermined, while single mothers have been elevated to near saint-like status. The old regime of shaming people for having children out-of-wedlcok (even though it is a cruel thing to do an innocent child) has all been abandoned.
And so yes, while I am a gay man who quite enjoys the love and sexual company of other men, I am not a self-obsessed narcissist who believes that being able to parade down main street in assless chaps in a parade is the end all, be all of social progress. And for what it's worth, in my hometown of Tampa, gay bars have been open and functioning since the 1940s. And my private life is exactly that, private. I would never be so pathetic as to wear my sexuality on my sleeve and spend my life whining incessantly about what a victim I was. If the modern gay world wants to take the unimaginably vapid and vacuous Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen as their totems, they are more than welcome to. But please do not lump me together with them anymore than I would presume that all heterosexuals must share the same political outlook.
As for city-states as a model -
These aren't. For the most part they do not actually produce much of value. They are rather the headquarters and residence of the owners. They are the collectors of net income from the activity of their hinterlands, the main markets and producers of what is consumed, from whom the imperial cities skim.
There are industrial cities of course, but for the most part these are dispersed industries and these also server as a hinterland.
There was quite a good book from a couple of decades ago, very leftist, that analyzed the economy of San Francisco, an excellent model of this sort of imperial city. I have to dig that up. These are pocket Rome's, pure consumers, living off the revenues of the latifundia and taxation of the provincials.
"Hilarious. Inga, how can you be so clueless ?"
Because she doesn't live in the blue "city-states" she loves so much. Hell, I doubt she visits Milwaukee (another dysfunctional rust belt city) much, much less Chicago, NY or LA. She doesn't have kids trapped in bad urban public schools, and doesn't pay lots of city taxes for shitty services.
Cities are increasingly becoming the havens of the rich and poor. Every single person I knew in DC moved out to the suburbs as soon as they married and started a family.
San Francisco or Manhattan or Chicago are undoubtedly still pleasant to live in if you are wealthy.
J Farmer,
As a gay man I would think you have a better understanding of what happens when those who are something other than male, white and straight are discriminated against, as they were in the Eisenhower years, but maybe you are too young. You enjoy the freedoms you do now because those who came before you suffered discrimination and fought for equal rights. Don't take those rights for granted.
Hamilton and Madison comprehensively took down the idea of city-states both in confederacies and republics in the Federalist Papers.
p.s. Both of my grandmothers were southern women born in the 1930s. Not only did they each own their own businesses and earn their own money, my paternal grandmother was very proficient with a thirty-thirty Winchester and could handle herself in pretty much any situation she found herself in. Today's safe space seeking, intersectionality-obsessed "feminists" would turn their stomachs. You're free to believe that all women in 1963 felt exactly the same way as Betty Friedan did, but it would be amazingly ahistorical of you.
"Back to the Eisenhower years when blacks still couldn't drink out of the same water fountain as whites in southern states."
Back in those days (well, till the 50's) the Chinese (and the Indians and Malays even less so) could not set foot in Raffles hotel or most clubs in Singapore except as employees.
But this was set aside because they ended up owning the place anyway.
what happens when those who do are something other than male, white and straight are discriminated against,
@Unknown:
Just for the record, do you know the only type of person you are legally allowed to, and sometimes forced to, discriminate against today?
Conservative how? Does he mean law and order enforcing National boundaries?
He can't mean sexual mores and restrictive laws based on Judeo-Christian morality. The only sexual restriction honored in the breach by today's Christian culture is sex done by authority figures to vulnerable kids under the age of consent. Although Maming the same ones for life as transgendered experiments gone wild is suddenly an immense new industry legally forced upon the little ones.
The Spotlight investigations by Boston Globe on approved Sex with children among Roman Catholic clerisy shows that age of consent has never been an issue restricting the Ruling Classes.
The dark, dark days of Eisenhower.
(But more seriously, I don't even know what he thinks he means.
Being "conservative" now can't mean the same thing it did in Ike's day, since the ground has changed; certainly the position of, oh, National Review isn't that of the John Birch Society ... or that of the GOP during Ike's terms.
"Reactionary" I normally - and here is no exception - take to be mere left cant for "disagreeing with me", rather than being substantive.
What is he even trying to say?
Saying "about Freedom" is great, but what freedoms does he think Playboy is gonna preserve?
The interview doesn't ask (or he doesn't say).
I mean, apart from the fact that nobody cares about Playboy anymore, it could be a voice for free expression!
But it is not in evidence here.)
"my paternal grandmother was very proficient with a thirty-thirty Winchester and could handle herself in pretty much any situation she found herself in. "
My maternal grandmother, in the 1920's-30's, carried a Mauser, guarding the plantation against the Moros.
@Unknown:
I know plenty of gay men who were alive during and before the Eisenhower administration, and none of them felt oppressed. So please tell me what you know about their lives that they don't...
It is Inga and the Democrats who are bitterly clinging to an outmoded blue state model, as Walter Russell Meade pointed out back in 2010:
"There are several ugly truths that the country (and especially the states whose governments are bigger and bluer than the rest) will be facing in the next ten years.
First, voters simply will not be taxed to cover the costs of blue government. Voters with insecure job tenure and, at best, defined-contribution rather than defined-benefit pensions will simply not pay higher taxes so that bureaucrats can enjoy lifetime tenure and secure pensions.
Second, voters will not accept the shoddy services that blue government provides. Government is going to have to respond to growing ‘consumer’ demand for more user-friendly, customer-oriented approaches. The arrogant lifetime bureaucrat at the Department of Motor Vehicles is going to have to turn into the Starbucks barista offering service with a smile.
Third, government must reconcile itself to its declining ability to regulate a post-blue economy with regulatory models and instincts rooted in the past.
The collapse of a social model is a complicated, drawn out and often painful affair. The blue model has been declining for thirty years already, and it is not yet finished with its decline and fall. But decline and fall it will, and as the remaining supports of the system erode, the slow decline and decay is increasingly likely to bring on a crash.
As I continue blogging about the American future, one of the subjects that will come up again and again will be the blue crack up–we are all going to be singing the blues as the process moves on."
One thing the Eisenhower years had that modern times don't was rapid economic growth, rapid improvement in living standards and rapid improvement and deployment of technology.
Anything else is an ersatz-improvement.
"Chicago are undoubtedly still pleasant to live in if you are wealthy."
Not any more. If you can afford to live in a high rise on the "Gold Coast" maybe but violence with "flash mobs" is growing. Two doctors were attacked on north Michigan last summer walking to lunch from Northwestern Hospital around the corner.
@buwaya:
One thing the Eisenhower years had that modern times don't was rapid economic growth, rapid improvement in living standards and rapid improvement and deployment of technology.
They also weren't importing third worlders at breakneck speed for the sake of "diversity." But then again, America was a much more self-respecting nation back then. In today's self-destructive culture, you're expected to be practically ashamed to be American and constantly trying to atone for original sin. Modern progressive social ideology has nearly all the trappings of a modern secular religion.
"So please tell me what you know about their lives that they don't..."
She has no idea. I used to go to Finocchio's in San Francisco and see the show
Half the audience was gay if not 2/3. The rest were mostly college kids like me
I was opposed to the severe discrimination that some gays faced but Laguna Beach was the same in 1972 when I moved there.
The oppression was much less than the myths would suggest.
What we didn't see was aggressive political pressure that causes an inevitable pushback. It's a small fraction of what is dividing the country right now.
"I know plenty of gay men who were alive during and before the Eisenhower administration, and none of them felt oppressed. So please tell me what you know about their lives that they don't..."
Oh please. I don't know what reality you live in. I know gay men and women who were alive during the Eisenhower years and they sure as hell did feel oppressed. They could and did lose jobs, they were not allowed to be teachers, they were subject to evicted from their apartments, they were committed to psych units for treatment to cure them of "the gay" which was considered to be a mental illness, a perversion. They weren't allowed into the military, they couldn't be Scout leaders, etc, etc. etc. You can try to paint a picture of an alternate reality, but I lived through those years. I saw it. Some of my loved ones lived through it and suffered during that time, I know this first hand. I witnessed what happened to my uncle, who was a teacher and was fired.
One thing the Eisenhower years had that modern times don't was rapid economic growth, rapid improvement in living standards and rapid improvement and deployment of technology.
Something that is shamefully suppressed is the knowledge that the same was occurring in the 1920s, which were quite similar to the 1990s economically.
The crash and Depression made the 20s a period of immoral excess by the Puritans of the New Deal.
Plus, of course, they think Republicans were responsible for Prohibition.
“ .. reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years ..”
Huh? Does “reactionary” refer to Goldwater? - or to Eisenhower recruited by both sides? What defines the parameters of Eisenhower “years?” And would a current Dem counter-protest subtheme mean that Hillary ought crowd-surf with Eddie Vedder, while Pearl Jam does a brand new “reactionary” take, and just for Hillary, on Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper?” - with liberated Hillary crowd surfing (all those bodies!) in “reactionary” counterprotest and singing, “touch me, touch me, touch me, toooouuch, I wanna feel dirty?” Why am I having a hard time conceiving Eisenhower or his “years” (before my time) as “reactionary?”
And, once again, Inga completely ignored J. Farmer's larger point:
"I don't think the typical American can even begin to comprehend how much familial breakdown has contributed to social problems in the second half of the 20th century. Single-motherhood is a huge predictor of future social pathology. I have spent my entire professional life working with the Department of Children and Families (DCF) and Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) as a mental health worker, and I witness the consequences of family breakdown every single day of my life. To take just one (but very startling statistic), when Moynihan authored his famous The Negro Family report in 1965, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks was 25% and considered a major social problem (it was around 3% for whites). Today it is over 70% for blacks . Among whites, it's around 30%. That is social breakdown on a staggering scale. And it essentially explains the existence of the welfare state. There has been an attempt since the mid-1960s to construct a welfare state that essentially does for children what parents are supposed to do for children. Over the same time period, the contributions of fathers to their children's lives have been systematically undermined, while single mothers have been elevated to near saint-like status. The old regime of shaming people for having children out-of-wedlcok (even though it is a cruel thing to do an innocent child) has all been abandoned."
Ever heard of the Stonewall Uprising, J Farmer? You seriously want to say gay people were not oppressed during the Eisenhower years? How about when a gay couple who had been living together for years were not allowed to visit their loved one in the hospital because the family dissaproved? You sound like a very selfish person. I surely hope you are more open minded in your line of work.
"They weren't allowed into the military,"
Inga, you are still clueless. Everybody knew people in the military that were gay. The difference was that they were not open about it.
My aunt was a lesbian and her "friend" was a nurse and everyone knew it. I remember talk in the family that she, who was quite attractive, had determinedly declined a marriage proposal.
Now, it may well be that being "in the closet" was oppressive. I do know that the explosion of "openness" led directly to the AIDS epidemic.
If the left thinks that discrimination is so evil, then why are they practicing it today? If discrimination was wrong when it was done to blacks in the 50s, then it is wrong today when it is done to whites, heterosexuals, Christians, and males. Or is the real problem not that there was discrimination, but that it was done to the wrong group of people?
Michael K,
If homosexual men or women were outed in the military they were drummed out. Don't be an idiot.
@Unknown:
I know gay men and women who were alive during the Eisenhower years and they sure as hell did feel oppressed.
Hence, there was not a uniformity of "gay" experience. There were plenty of gay men who lived during that era who did not have any of the problems you mentioned. I can introduce them to you, and you can chat with them to your heart's content if you like. Why are your anecdotal examples more illustrative of the era than my anecdotal experiences?
So - the Left's answer to past bigotry and hatred is more bigotry and hatred, as if hating white straight men will somehow heal the wounds of yesterday.
It's funny to see in Inga in her white, white Republican enclave get so worked up about Stonewall and all that white male privilege which oppressed her so terribly in the 1950's.
"You sound like a very selfish person. I surely hope you are more open minded in your line of work."
Inga is going to give you a lesson on being gay, no doubt from her extensive experience.
One of my favorite authors, Mary Renault., has written several novels back in the 50s on stories involving homosexual themes. Most of them concerned Greece and Greek history. She was in a lifetime relationship with a woman she met when they were both in nursing school.
She was able to write bestsellers with homosexual relationships treated discreetly and did extremely well.
Twenty five is pretty young have the perspective to refine and reposition a global brand. And, he's got the additional burden of considerable emotional baggage (which at least he acknowledges). While it's true that PE guys do have more patience than "Street" analysts . . . . they don't have much more.
Rizvi Traverse guys are unique too, they typically take the passive end of the investment, but here they've putting an investment guy, Ben Kohn, smack dab into a business executive role. Lot's of weirdness to that. Christie Hefner is sharp as a tack and she couldn't figure it out.
FWIW, I hope the new team can figure it out. PB should be fun, horny, wholesome, approachably provocative and mischievous
, witty and American. Sort of like a young man you'd like have live on your block. Seems to me that that is a huge unmet market niche.
J. Farmer, don't tell Inga about being gay! What do you know?
Let a old hetero woman tell you what it was really like! She'll set you straight (so to speak).
"If homosexual men or women were outed in the military they were drummed out. Don't be an idiot."
A lot depended on the particular circumstances. How long were you in the military to collect this extensive knowledge?
You seem to be an expert on both homosexuality and the military.
Men had homosexual relationships, especially in the Navy where it was well known. Public behavior was taboo, just as public heterosexual displays were taboo,
I'm not saying all was full freedom but you are making statements that are not based on fact, Like a lot of your statements.
There was quite a good book from a couple of decades ago, very leftist, that analyzed the economy of San Francisco, an excellent model of this sort of imperial city.
Very true of San Francisco when I arrived in 1985. Utterly untrue today. The same goes for the other great West Coast cities.
@Unknown:
Ever heard of the Stonewall Uprising, J Farmer? You seriously want to say gay people were not oppressed during the Eisenhower years?
No; I never said that. You attacked my support for the social mores of the Eisenhower administration based on nothing but the fact that I am gay. And what I am telling you is that the collapse of those mores led directly to the collapse of the stable family unit, and that has been disastrous for the country (and particularly for the children who had to live it). So if I was faced with a choice between the out-of-wedlcok birth rate for the 1950s and the gay rights of the 2010's, it would take me about a nanosecond to choose the former over the latter. Now you can say that makes me seem like "a very selfish person," but that would be an exceptionally bizarre notion of "selfish."
Sorry guys and gals, but being Gay is just a total so what today. They are normal except for being unusually nice professional people who have lots of extra money to spend on life style
because they don't have to spend it on raising and educating a family.
The idea that women were "oppressed" in the 50s is laughable. I can tell you none of the women (Mother, aunts, etc.) in my family were "Oppressed" - LOL.
They came off the farm, went to college, worked, left to raise children, then went back to work when the kids were grown.
Michael K is right about teaching losing quality women. My aunts both were school teachers in 50s, but when they returned to the workforce -after raising kids - in the 60s they went into business and make a fortune in real estate.
BTW, "Inga" isn't an American - she's a German. No doubt she's getting East Germany confused with the USA of the 1950s.
@Unknwon:
On the subject of Stonewall, I could probably speak extemporaneously on the subject for an hour. Did you know that the bar was mostly used as a mafia front for illicit activities (e.g. extorting wealthier customers) and that this had much more to do with its targeting by police than anti-gay animus?
"Very true of San Francisco when I arrived in 1985. Utterly untrue today."
Still true, so there.
It partly goes to the nature of the hinterland.
SF is full of the same sort of servants and hangers-on and courtiers of the past, merely redesignated as consultants and web app developers.
"And what I am telling you is that the collapse of those mores led directly to the collapse of the stable family unit, and that has been disastrous for the country (and particularly for the children who had to live it). So if I was faced with a choice between the out-of-wedlcok birth rate for the 1950s and the gay rights of the 2010's, it would take me about a nanosecond to choose the former over the latter."
Jesus. So it's women who had babies out of wedlock that caused the downfall of the Eisenhower era social mores? You would trade your rights of today as a gay man, for not allowing women to have babies out of wedlock? Just how do you think you would've stopped it from happening? What would you have proposed, men to be forced to marry the women they impregnated? What about abortion? It was illegal back in Eisenhowers day. Back alley abortions OK with you? What about divorce? How would you have forced married couples to stay together? What do you think needs to be done now to get back to the good old Eisenhower era?
The problem with this is that the bourgeois (in that sense) no longer exist.
You're looking at one. I'm so bourgeois, Marxists puke when they see me.
Paul Johnson contends that Eisenhower was one of greatest presidents, and for a number of reasons. I agree.
The Eisenhower years were great. I remember them well. I grew up in the 50s. I'm a child of the 50s. I loved the 50s.
If only we were reverting to reactionary cultural conservatism. I imagine this means different things to different people. I know what it means to me and I like it. But it isn't happening, unfortunately.
I'm guessing that Althouse is not referring to the same kind of reactionary conservatism as people believe existed in the 1950s. I think she is referring to the reactionary conservatism of today's weaponized political correctness.
If Playboy wants to help undermine that then they can start running issues featuring Mike Rowe and other white men doing blue collar jobs. Push back against the stifling conformity!!!
buwaya:
I think you might enjoy "Waiting for the Barbarians" by J.M. Coetzee.
@traditionalguy:
because they don't have to spend it on raising and educating a family.
This is also why gays tend to be at the forefront of neighborhood gentrification. Since they are less concerned with good schools or their kids being able to play outside the home, they are more tolerant of moving into higher crime, lower socioeconomic areas. But of course, once mainly white gays gentrify an area, they're attacked (rhetorically) by the formerly dominant black community. See, for example, Spike Lee's famous tirade over how disappointed he is that Bed Stuy is no longer a predominantly black, crime-ridden hellhole. The Brooklyn neighborhood's former moniker was "Bed Stuy do or die."
Inga is a nice example of the clueless left. She accuses a gay man of not knowing what it is like to be gay and then lectures us on the military. I am just curious about her military record.
"So it's women who had babies out of wedlock that caused the downfall of the Eisenhower era social mores?"
Yep, Inga, he's right. The trio of the sexual revolution, feminism and Great Society programs destroyed the social fabric of American life.
That's a stone cold fact you hate and so will deny.
You're a perfect example of the saying that conservatives get angry when you lie to them and liberals get angry when you tell them the truth.
The culture is more sexually repressed than it was in the 1950's.
It ain't conservatives making it so.
Hello Ann and everyone. I’ve been reading the blog on and off now for a few months, and this is my first time commenting.
There’s a serious misconception here. The 1950s in America were anything but culturally conservative. High and pop culture alike were triumphally liberal then. It was liberalism's heyday. Read Trilling’s “The Liberal Imagination” (1950), especially about the high end of culture, but he suggests the general tone as well.
The insistence that everyone was terribly repressed in the '50s originated among the Beats, and was taken up for parti pris reasons by political radicals. What was miscalled conservatism was simply cultural confidence, which the Beats lacked, and sometimes resented, but in any case undervalued. Their complaint was essentially false; but the maligning of the '50s has proved to be a story with legs - maybe because it’s so flattering to those of us who came after: we like to think ourselves more enlightened than our forebears.
There was, however, one aspect of '50s culture which, while not actually conservative, was certainly beyond the reach of liberality - and it’s a biggie: the lifestyle conformism that ruled among the corporate salary-workers, and had some sway in most other walks of life. This one does seem to be staging a bit of a comeback, at Google and suchlike places. I don’t think the Hefner brand will buck the new conformism, do you?
Thanks, Ann, for much interesting reading these past few months. And an extra Hello to my old pal (I think), rcocean, from a previous lifetime.
@Unknown:
So it's women who had babies out of wedlock that caused the downfall of the Eisenhower era social mores?
Are you trying to make a habit of completely missing the point? That is not what I said at all. I said that the much vaunted relaxing of social mores led to an explosion of out-of-wedlock birth rates and that has been disastrous for society and the individuals. Please join me on one of my work trips to state prison and see for yourself the legacy it's left behind.
What do you think needs to be done now to get back to the good old Eisenhower era?
That is a nonsensical question. It is not possible to "get back" to anytime in the past. But I can tell you that the worldview that sees the 1950s as nothing but a time of unbearable oppression and victimization is wildly off the mark. In many measures of social progress, the late 1950s were much better than the 2010s. Now you can try to invoke gays and women as totems against this fact, but it remains a fact nonetheless.
"I remember them well. I grew up in the 50s. I'm a child of the 50s. I loved the 50s."
Me, too. Eisenhower was so good at being president that he made it look easy,
I am still not a fan of John Foster Dulles. But, given the circumstances with Stalin, maybe that was all they could do.
Culturally, it was a period of calm and pleasure.
Inga will be along in a moment to tell us about the oppressed blacks and some of that is correct but, in Chicago, I had black friends and used to spend Saturday evenings playing bumper pool in a bar where the only white faces were mine and my buddy's. Guys would line up to play us and we got so good at it that we would leave about midnight never having bought a beer. We played for beers and the guy would put their quarters (the price of a beer) on the edge of the table to show they had the next game as challenge.
I would not dream of going into such a place today.
The black families had about a 20% illegitimacy rate. Today it is over 75%.
Yes, it was terrible then.
J. Farmer, your description of life as a gay person in Eisenhower's era up until the 60's doesn't jive with reality or history.
"By the time LGBT bar patrons fought back against a police raid of the Stonewall Inn on a hot summer night in 1969 – the moment that most people would call the beginning of the modern LGBT rights movement – LGBT people had been making themselves visible and organizing politically for nearly two decades.
When early gay and lesbian rights organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis began in the early 1950s, the country was in the midst of one of the most conservative periods in the twentieth century. This was the era of McCarthyism, when much of American politics and culture was focused on containing the spread of communism.
But it was also the time of the “Lavender Scare,” when federal and state governments investigated and fired thousands of employees who were suspected of being gay or lesbian, claiming that they were “security risks” who were vulnerable to Soviet blackmail. As historian David Johnson explained, “many politicians, journalists, and citizens thought that [lesbians and gay men] posed more of a threat to national security than Communists.” Ironically, this government persecution of gay men and lesbians brought more visibility to LGBT people, which led them to seek each other out and form communities and political consciousness.
http://www.hrc.org/blog/lgbt-history-month-the-1950s-and-the-roots-of-lgbt-politics
"Culturally, it was a period of calm and pleasure."
Not if you were a minority. But I'm sure you have anecdote about your black nanny being unoppresed in the 1950's.
Trump is the last howling cry against change that has already happened and is accelerating.
In contrast here's a take from the sane left.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
It's too bad there aren't more grownups on the left.
@Unknown:
J. Farmer, your description of life as a gay person in Eisenhower's era up until the 60's doesn't jive with reality or history.
There is no such thing as the "description of life as a gay person in Eisenhower's era," because there was nothing like a unanimity of experience. Can you point to individual gays in the 1950s who experienced discrimination? Absolutely. And I can point to ones who didn't. Neither is illustrative of the 1950s, and as I said, your anecdotes don't supersede my anecdotes, as both involve the individual lives of gay people in the era.
Regarding Stonewall, the bar was not targeted because it was gay, but because it was a front for mafia activity and because it was selling liquor without a license. The Knotty Pine is a famous gay bar in my hometown of Tampa, Florida that had been operating since the 1940s and never once experienced a police raid. That is as true and valid a part of the gay experience as the Stonewall case, but how does it jive with your preferred view of gay life in the 1950s?
Inga is another example of baby boomers who speak nostalgically of their '50's childhoods ("We had so much more freedom! We went out and played and didn't have to be home until the streetlights came on! Poor kids today! No wonder they're so fat!") while despising '50's cultural mores.
They don't recognize that they had that childhood freedom because of those despised '50's cultural mores.
@Unknown:
Not if you were a minority. But I'm sure you have anecdote about your black nanny being unoppresed in the 1950's.
I think you will find that actual history is a lot more complex and complicated and does not lend itself easily to banal cliches. See, for example, Thomas Sowell's Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?. A sample: "In the period from 1954 to 1964, for example, the number of blacks in professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s–when there was little or no civil rights policy–than during the 1950s when the civil rights revolution was in its heyday.”
"You're looking at one. I'm so bourgeois, Marxists puke when they see me."
Well, so are we, over here.
But there aren't very many of us anymore, and we aren't the audiences those epater fellows are looking at.
Here she is again to lecture all of us who grew up than on how oppressed we were,.
My wife had an aunt who owned a rental building in Hollywood in the 50s. Her husband was a fairly successful actor's agent. After he died, she lived off the rents from her building. She only rented to gays, and never had a problem with a vacancy. Once the guys knew someone was moving out, they would line up a new tenant and they would be vetted better than Dunn & Bradstreet could do. They didn't want straights in the building and she was happy with a full place.
At that time gays, being somewhat oppressed, although not like Inga imagines, tended to be secretive and kept quiet about stuff they knew. Our hospital, which I moved to in 1972, had gays as administrators. They did a very good job, although there was always a couple of young handsome guys with vacant expressions raking leaves, but the reason the owners (we suspected later) had hired all gays as the administration was that they were committing medicaid fraud. I guess they figured the gay guys would stay clannish and not gossip with outsiders.
Anyway, they all went to jail and the administrator lost his gorgeous Laguna house. I have a story in my second book about a party he had that all the wives insisted we go to.
"I'm sure you have anecdote about your black nanny being unoppresed in the 1950's."
For a moment I thought Ritmo was back.
She came from people in Georgia who were landowners and she had cousins in New Orleans she would visit.
She lived to 95 and converted to Catholic because we were.
I guess we oppressed her.
She was also the first person I ever met who was anti-Semetic but nobody's perfect.
What an oasis of calm and plenty the '50's must have seemed like after the Depression of the '30's and the massive bloodshed of the '40's. Then the '60's rolled around and the spoiled brat boomers had to make mom and dad's life miserable once again. Because those old folks hadn't experienced enough misery in their lives.
"Not if you were a minority."
I suppose it depends on the minority. But the rate of improvement, of opportunity, was tremendous.
My example is the first wave of Chinese entrepreneurs - of the 1950's - the sky was the limit for these guys, and that was then. It is literally no better now, in any way, and usually worse because of the sclerosis of the economy - consider these guy's careers, and of all the fellows in their circles -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Wang
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_S._C._Chao
There are whole worlds out there existing in parallel.
Why is it considered some sort of moral failure on the part of Michael K's parents to have employed a black maid in the '50's?
I know Inga is just mindlessly aping Ritmo's insults, but really, why is that bad? Would it have been better if that woman had been unemployed?
"Culturally, it was a period of calm and pleasure."
"I think you will find that actual history is a lot more complex and complicated and does not lend itself easily to banal cliches."
Yes, indeed. Too bad you have a very skewed view of history. You can try to whitewash history all you want, but there are those alive today that remember the truth of the matter.
@Unknwon:
Too bad you have a very skewed view of history. You can try to whitewash history all you want, but there are those alive today that remember the truth of the matter.
The first quote was not from me.
I just told you about a gay establishment that I have personal knowledge and experience of that was opened and operating in the 1940s. Why is that a "skewed view of history?"
Hmm..not sure an Eisenhower era "reactionary" culture would vote in someone with such a Playboy history as Trump.
"The first quote was not from me."
Yes, I know. It was from the guy who had a black nanny.
@Unknown:
In addition to my professional life, I have volunteered at a private high school for gay students who experienced difficulties in their public schools (especially from black students but we're not allowed to mention the exorbitant anti-gay attitudes of blacks lest we be called racist), and one of the topics I have routinely spoken about was the "Gay Experience in America." I am not particularly fond of arguments from authority or credentialism, but I am nonetheless willing to put my knowledge of the subject up against yours anytime, any place, anywhere.
That's good Farmer. Pat yourself on your back, but you denying what it was like for minorities in Eisenhowers era tells me you aren't fully informed.
Still true, so there. It partly goes to the nature of the hinterland. SF is full of the same sort of servants and hangers-on and courtiers of the past, merely redesignated as consultants and web app developers.
The distinctions you’re drawing are important, but you’re not in control of your material. Through the 1980s San Francisco was indeed a decaying regional center dependent on its hinterlands and on tourism — a hilly New Orleans, if you will. Since then its economy has been entirely transformed by technology. It would be hard to name an industry less dependent on the hinterlands. The Bay Area now has a GDP greater than all but fifteen (or so) nations, and that kind of productivity is most certainly not the work of "servants and hangers-on and courtiers of the past."
Maybe the West is different but my parents had friends who were black and friends of Japanese descent. They weren't exactly thrilled when I married a black guy in the 60's but they got over it. I think the only ethnic slur I ever heard from my parents was my father saying Wop and it was due to some personal conflict with someone he served with in WWII and he didn't really know very many--if any--other Italians.
Baceseras said...The insistence that everyone was terribly repressed in the '50s originated among the Beats, and was taken up for parti pris reasons by political radicals. What was miscalled conservatism was simply cultural confidence, which the Beats lacked, and sometimes resented, but in any case undervalued. Their complaint was essentially false; but the maligning of the '50s has proved to be a story with legs - maybe because it’s so flattering to those of us who came after: we like to think ourselves more enlightened than our forebears.
There was, however, one aspect of '50s culture which, while not actually conservative, was certainly beyond the reach of liberality - and it’s a biggie: the lifestyle conformism that ruled among the corporate salary-workers, and had some sway in most other walks of life. This one does seem to be staging a bit of a comeback, at Google and suchlike places. I don’t think the Hefner brand will buck the new conformism, do you?
That's very well put, Baceseras. Even given that perspective, though, I don't think the assertion that we're now experiencing a movement towards those cultural conditions can stand without some serious work.
@Unknwon:
Pat yourself on your back, but you denying what it was like for minorities in Eisenhowers era tells me you aren't fully informed.
Quote one thing I said to that effect. Go on. I'll wait...
p.s. And if you care to tell me something you have done individually for gays beyond virtue signaling and moral grandstanding, I'd love to hear it
I know Inga is just mindlessly aping Ritmo's insults, but really, why is that bad? Would it have been better if that woman had been unemployed?
I think she is aping Ritmo.
The "black nannie" came to live with us when my sister was born in 1941. She stayed until we went off the college and work.
My mother, like most of the middle class women of our neighborhood, had back housekeepers and the like. The neighbors' maid used to do ironing for us. We had a black man named "Bill" who came several times a year to wash windows. Just about every one of our neighbors had at least part time help, most of whom were black.
I think Ritmo thinks this was an indication of wealth but it was not. It was part of the 1940s and 1950s,
Some of these women had husbands and children and a few even brought their children to work.
Our nanny had been doing childcare since she was 16 but she was educated and quite well mannered.
She lived in the same area of Chicago where Obama is supposed to have his house after my father sold our house. The neighborhood was declining badly. I used tio bring her a cactus every time I came back from California. She had a green thumb and could make anything grow,.
Eventually my sister arranged a Catholic nursing home for her and she died there about 20 years ago. She was 95.
She did get to see all my kids and all my sisters.
"By the time LGBT bar patrons fought back against a police raid of the Stonewall Inn..."
Hey, it's a National Monument now, but one with a politically unfortunate name.
Unknown, you should get a mob together and burn it down!!!
And women happily returned to the home post WWII to raise families and enjoy homemaking. A few preferred the workplace but full time homemakers like my mother would not have been persuaded to seek employment outside the home. And I suspect many young mothers today would prefer to stay home and teach their children if they could afford to do so. There is no career more important than child-rearing. Much too important to relegate to strangers in the absence of in-home nurses/governesses for most families now.
Maybe the West is different but my parents had friends who were black and friends of Japanese descent. They weren't exactly thrilled when I married a black guy in the 60's but they got over it.
Loving v. Virginia
You were lucky you didn't live in the south.
And I would rather be a nanny or governess for a single family than work in a day care center. My BIL was also raised by a black live-in nanny. I met her at the wedding and she is really part of the white-Jewish family she worked for.
"I agree that the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years."
The only things I see reverting back to the 1950s is the New Democrat "John Birch Society". They see Russians and Nazis everywhere.
They see Russians and Nazis everywhere.
How confusing! As Althouse would say, 'They don't know which way to tsk'.
And I suspect many young mothers today would prefer to stay home and teach their children if they could afford to do so.
I think what we seeing now is two trends. One is inflation that is forcing most families to have two earners,
I see medical students marrying each other as they will need two incomes to repay student loans.
Tuition inflation has been insane. I could work in the summers and save enough for tuition. Then work part time during the school year to pay living expenses. I had a scholarship for most of the time but others did it and managed well. Now, USC tuition is $57,000 a year. Of course, they have built a magnificent new campus but who van afford it ?
The other trend is that people seem to require more house for smaller families.
One of my fraternity brothers' parents had a 700 square foot house in San Bernardino. It had two bedrooms and one bath.
My younger son has a house that is bigger than the one I had when he was a kid. His wife works from home and does very well but I'll bet she would rather be home schooling her kids.
"You were lucky you didn't live in the south."
We are so fortunate to have an expert of gay life, the military and race law right here in River City.
"We are so fortunate to have an expert of gay life, the military and race law right here in River City."
One doesn't need to be an expert, one only needs to have some awareness and not be fooled by revisionist history.
I take the younger Hefner's statement as virtue signaling and ignorant.
The debate over gay marriage is done.
Racial covenants are gone.
Jews are in danger of disappearing in the us due to intermarriage. Anti miscegenation laws are gone. Demographics have gone thru massive changes.
Porn is easily available.
Other viewpoints from the MSM are just a click away.
Newspapers are a shadow of their former self.
A twice divorced man is now President.
Research is much easier.
Blogger J. Farmer said...
Quote one thing I said to that effect. Go on. I'll wait...
p.s. And if you care to tell me something you have done individually for gays beyond virtue signaling and moral grandstanding, I'd love to hear it
And.......crickets
What's funny is the people who were supposed to benefit from the destruction of the old social order are the ones who have paid the steepest price. Are women really happy being forced into the workplace? I see no evidence that's the case, and every study that tries to quantify "happiness" has women being less happy than in the past. The same goes for blacks.
Haven't really seen any research on gay people, and I suspect AIDS makes statistical comparisons meaningless.
"One doesn't need to be an expert, one only needs to have some awareness and not be fooled by revisionist history."
There is no such thing as "revisionist history".
Merely different points of view.
A deep study of history reveals the complexity of situations and events.
"They weren't exactly thrilled when I married a black guy in the 60's but they got over it."
Yeah, sure. Who are you again?
Oh that's right "unknown".
Yep. I believe it. Sure. Honestly, the internet is the biggest comedy on earth.
@Bob Loblaw:
I tend to believe that the explosion of lifestyle brands like Martha Stewart and the whole HGTV/Food Network phenomenon is reflective of a desire of people to reclaim the lost art of homemaking. My mother went to medical school in the 1970s and is an attending trauma surgeon at Tampa General Hospital. Both of my older sisters have graduate degrees, both are currently homemakers, and both are very happy.
No, really, I do recommend a deep study of at least one historical period, or question, or controversy, with popular, academic and original sources. If controversial, with whatever tracts are available from different sides in the argument.
This is an approach to education on the question of ALL history, because all of it is similarly complex.
@rcocean:
Yep. I believe it. Sure. Honestly, the internet is the biggest comedy on earth.
To be fair that statement was only being quoted by "unknown." It was made by mockturtle.
@buwaya:
There is no such thing as "revisionist history".
Another way to put this is that all history is revisionism. Otherwise, there'd be almost no work for modern historians to do.
Jesus, y'know minorities NEVER forget.
The Irish are still bitching about 1850.
The Jews are still whining about 1930.
The Blacks are still talking about 1955.
The poor WASPs. They never realized did they?
Sorry, buwaya, be there is such a thing as 'revisionist history'. It's what is taught to schoolchildren today. While all history writers have an agenda, the best ones at least try to be objective in their approach. Today the agenda is set and is all Anti-American, our nation founded by blacks, women and natives, humans are destroying the planet and white men are bad. Every one of them--past, present and future.
"Hugh Hefner, 89, lives:"
Yeah, but why?
In case whoever was bragging about living in Blue cities is interested Here is a little taste of Chicago, so to speak.
I have a fair sized library of Civil War history and I now realize it was all a waste of time. The political left will remove it all.
Just like the Red Guards destroyed the Ming Dynasty tombs.
@Dr K - I think that the big reason that your experiencs of a mother working was odd, is that for most of us, the Baby Boomers, the generation born around when your mother was, were our grandparents, not parents. All 4 of my grandparents were born in the 1890s, and the women worked. And, there were a lot of maiden aunts and uncles of that generation who worked. My father's parents met at teaching school. After teaching a. It, they founded a business school, where my grandfather sold it and my grandmother taught accounting and ran it. They had a (white) livin housekeeper even through the Depression. After selling the business school, both ended up teaching at the college level. I. Remember working on my MBA in the late 1970s, and had a female prof who was proud of breaking the glass ceilings no there. I didn't have the heart to tell her that my grandmother had taught the same subject (accounting) there 30 years earlier. And on my mother's side, her father had two sisters who worked throughout their lives and ever had kids. One taught HS math the other was an RN.
As I pointed out before - the Baby Boom was not really caused by increased family sizes, but rather by an increased marriage rate. In the latter 1940s, the younger adult women were pushed out of the workforce to make room for returning vets, and into marriage. Those maiden aunts and uncles of their parents' generation would have married in the next generation. So, for the Baby boom generation, working mothers were much less common than for the previous generation. Another part of this is that it was their parents who were the adults during the Great Depression, a time when any extra income was useful. The Greatest Generation, thanks to the post-war boom had the luxury of having the mothers stay home and raise the kids.
But I think that that latter may have been part of the feminist movement. A lot of those mothers in the 1950s had worked during the first half of the 1940s. I always felt some resentment by my mother to dropping out of the workforce. She had been first in her class (in science) at U Illinois, but ended raising 5 boys instead. I suspect that there were a number of Baby Boomer women whose mothers felt the same.
@Michael K:
Here is a little taste of Chicago, so to speak.
Sigh. It's just the latest iteration of Michael "gentle giant" Brown shouting "hands up, don't shoot" or of "white hispanic" George Zimmerman hunting and gunning down young black bodies. We have a narrative here, people, and we're not going to let petty things like facts get in our way!
There is a puritanical streak among the Millennials, but it's not your grandmother's brand of puritanism. As a member of the free love generation, it's interesting to me. My Millennial niece and her friends seem, I don't know, kind of prudish. They love my Tales of the Seventies, but I can tell they can relate not at all. What was SOP back then seems to shock them a little. Sometimes more than a little--sometimes they look at me like I have two heads (and my carryings-on were tame compared to much of what was going on around me). I don't think they're very good at interpersonal relationships. It's like they can't be bothered with all that. Someone did a survey of Millennials and found the majority preferred to play with their iPhones than have sex. For a Boomer, this is inconceivable.
The latest issue of Playboy has an article titled "Van Jones, an American Hero." I hear the centerfold is Brad-cum-Chelsea Manning, but that may be just a rumor.
One doesn't need to be an expert, one only needs to have some awareness and not be fooled by revisionist history.
8/24/17, 5:04 PM
No, one only needs to be an arrogant, sanctimonious biddy.
I'm the professor's age and grew up in the South till I was 15. I spent the later half of the 1950s in Mississippi. I seldom heard the N word till I moved to the Midwest. My father was gone a lot being a Major in the USAF and we had a black maid. She help my mother around the house and would be in charge when my mother was away playing bridge or working with the catholic charities. The maid was paid in cash, when she fixed dinner she made enough to take home for her family. When it came for back to school clothing my parents included her two children, same for Christmas. In the summer she brought her children, her son ran with my friends and I. We bought all our produce and meat from her husband. That's how it was done in my town in the South, till civil rights lawyers came to town. Their demands made it affordable for everyone but the rich. Guess who they hurt the most.
Philosophy is nice.
Will we get to see boobs and stuff?
"I think what we seeing now is two trends. One is inflation that is forcing most families to have two earners,
I see medical students marrying each other as they will need two incomes to repay student loans."
I think that it is more than that though. One part is proximity - med students, interns, and residents spend much of their time around each other during their prime marriage formation years. Another may be that many doctors don't make the best spouses, thanks, in particular, to their hours. Most of the people I knew in college and then went to Med school, who got married before maybe 30, got divorced. And I know a number who are on their 3rd or 4th spouse. I am sure that you do too, being in that business.
Let me add though that that phenomenon does not appear to be limited to medicine - I see it in law too. I would expect that being married to a lawyer would drive a normal person crazy. Hard to get a straight answer out of them, or a firm commitment- because it invariably depends on the specific circumstances. Etc.
SukieTawdry said...
There is a puritanical streak among the Millennials, but it's not your grandmother's brand of puritanism."
Want to fluster your Millennial relatives? Show them the unedited version of "Blazing Saddles." Or even "16 Candles" from the '80's. My niece was perturbed because a nerdy boy has sex with a beautiful drunken cheerleader type and it's treated as a joke. The next morning the cheerleader realizes what happened and doesn't accuse the nerd of rape. There's also a Asian foreign exchange student with severe culture shock and it's played for laughs. She was quite tsk-tsky about the movie, which I thought and still think is hilarious.
"There is a puritanical streak among the Millennials, but it's not your grandmother's brand of puritanism."
There is some evidence that the ext generation, Gen Z, is swerving right, to counterbalance the Millenials who tended to swerve left, supporting the Light Bringer, Obama, while the next generation supports Trump.
@J. Farmer,
I think you are on the money with the homemaker trends. One thing I've noticed in recent years is couples putting in outrageously expensive professional kitchens and then not using them for lack of time. But the kitchen is there... "for entertaining".
Bob Boyd said...
Philosophy is nice.
Will we get to see boobs and stuff?
--
I sure hope so. But might only be because men can show theirs."Free the nipple" and all that. And boobs make for more convincing protest.
But where to get my next pair of fuzzy dice...
Michael K said...My aunt was a lesbian and her "friend" was a nurse and everyone knew it. I remember talk in the family that she, who was quite attractive, had determinedly declined a marriage proposal.
I also had an aunt who was a lesbian. She had the same "longtime companion" all her life who accompanied her to all our family celebrations. Her sexuality was never discussed.
"But where to get my next pair of fuzzy dice..."
Amazon.
Use the Althouse portal.
The '50's (and '60's - and even the 70's for many of us) were certainly a time of deplorable food however. I think I was 17 or so before I saw an actual garlic clove. Heaven knows where American chefs in high end restaurants got their hands on things as basic as fresh herbs.
That is one thing I will grant to the hippie weirdos who opened those flunky natural stores where they sold wheat germ and granola along with Dr. Bronner's soap - their rejection of canned and frozen and fast everything paved the way for much better food, even if much of the foodie culture has become overly precious and ridiculous.
The notion that "the country is reverting to a reactionary cultural conservatism remarkably similar to the Eisenhower years" is just goofy. The cultural conservative norm in the 1950s and early 1960s was evolutionary, not reactionary. Hugh Hefner pounded against social mores that were long established and that were not a "reaction" to anything. And it's a battle that Hugh Hefner and others won. Cooper Hefner's challenge is not the same -- it's to make the Playboy brand relevant to his generation. He acknowledges as much by noting that Vice is his competition. And I don't think Cooper can pull it off.
There is revision and there is revision.
The point of the revision is the purpose of teaching history.
An honest scholar, studying history for its own sake, will explore all POV's.
In schools, no.
Schools do not teach history for its own sake, but to use it as a vehicle for a message, which was the ideology the school wished to push. In the old days, in the US, it was Americanism, as they wished the kids to be American. I got this part as we were on the edge of the American field of cultural influence, a lot of our schoolbooks being American. Otherwise out school propaganda was Catholic, and besides that, Filipino. In France it was to be French, and etc. All of these are non-historical purposes.
For instance, in our Catholic school History of Religion class quite a lot was made of the matter of Canossa, as if that had somehow settled something.
These days the message in the US is to vote Democrat, very nearly in so many words. That is the revisionism.
@ Mac McConnell:
What you describe is standard stuff for white middle class households in the south. This is a true story:
I was born not long after WWII ended. My father was busy in New York trying to find us a place to live and re-establishing himself in business. Our family home in Brooklyn was stuffed to the rafters, so my mother went down to her mother in North Carolina for the last few months of her pregnancy (I was delivered by the first female OB/GYN in Nash County btw). The black woman who had helped raise her and my uncle came out of retirement to help out with me. When the day came for us to leave for New York, Willie Mae followed my father with me in his arms down the steps wringing her hands and pleading, "Mister Chet, mister Chet, please don't take my baby up north with all those wicked Yankees."
I spent my childhood living in the northeast and upper midwest. I seldom saw a black person, not in person, not on TV, not anywhere (and we're talking cities like Detroit and Chicago). We generally lived in hotels when we first arrived in a new city and back then "white" hotels didn't employ blacks even as maids. But when I would go south to visit relatives, I interacted with black people on a daily basis. The two races may not have mixed in a manner deemed acceptable today, but they mixed.
exiledonmainstreet said...Want to fluster your Millennial relatives? Show them the unedited version of "Blazing Saddles." Or even "16 Candles" from the '80's.
Or Animal House. Cornell had an "animal house" frat (I suppose they all do--or did). I went to a few yoga parties there. Those are the kind of stories that get me the two-heads look. Even some of the sitcoms from the 70's, 80's and 90's can get them clucking.
BTW, Sukie, I have long suspected that the reason for the Millenials prudishness about things we in the '70's didn't bat an eye over is because they (or their elders) realized that the no-holds-bared atmosphere of that era led to a lot of bad things, like the AIDS epidemic, for instance. They want to reestablish a sexual moral code but one without reference to the older Judeo-Christian one. In other words, they're reinventing the wheel and not doing a very good job of it.
Umm..not so sure there's prudishness in the era of Tinder. They just found new dimensions of recklessness in sex..at least on campi and the workplace for males.
"They had a (white) livin housekeeper even through the Depression."
Look at old census records. I have done a lot of family history stuff and all those farm and even small city families had "hired girls" and "hired men" who lived there for bed and board and maybe some extra,
One part is proximity - med students, interns, and residents spend much of their time around each other during their prime marriage formation years.
Oh, I agree but medical students don't marry nurses anymore as the two incomes make a huge difference.
Women doctors, who don't marry classmates, often choose men in occupations that involve shift work, like firemen and policemen.
One of my very pretty students married her high school boyfriend who was an auto mechanic.
The '50's (and '60's - and even the 70's for many of us) were certainly a time of deplorable food
I have to agree with this, much as I loved the 50s. I did not have a green salad until I moved to California.
My parents idea of a salad with dinner was stewed tomatoes. My father loved tomatoes and we had a "Victory Garden" during the war and he had gardens later, although the Victory Garden was huge and shared with many friends. Still aside from summer, not much fresh veggies. We even had a "root cellar" in the basement for storing root veggies through winter.
I think people in the South, for all the segregation and mistreatment, were more comfortable with each other.
Blacks in the North were kind of exotic and scary for whites who knew none of them. I think that is why so many blacks are going back. Plus they want to get away from the pathology in the inner cities.
My former neighborhood is violent now but the homes were all nice and I even know a guy who was convinced gentrification was coming soon and he bought some apartment buildings and rehabbed them with new windows, etc. I'll bet he has lost his shirt on them,
Sukie Tawdry says: I also had an aunt who was a lesbian. She had the same "longtime companion" all her life who accompanied her to all our family celebrations. Her sexuality was never discussed.
And that was nice, IMHO, when people didn't feel they just had to share their sexual proclivities with all and sundry.
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