"The liberals who long to return to the Midcentury Moment seem to forget that it was a time of enormous cultural uniformity that stigmatized being unmarried or unchurched or gay."

Observes Michael Barone, explaining "liberal nostalgia" for what he calls "America's Midcentury Moment":

The huge menu of lifestyle choices from which we can choose today was a very short menu with very few choices then. It could not last. Baby-boom children, raised in prosperity, were not content with being small units in large machines....

Vietnam, urban riots, Watergate, stagflation—all undermined confidence in big government, big business and big labor, and by the late 1970s the Midcentury Moment was long gone....

So the Obama Democrats, partially successful in expanding the size and scope of government, largely unsuccessful in reviving private-sector unions, are on the defensive politically. As Mr. Levison and other liberals recognize, most Americans don't accept Keynesian economics and don't favor expansion of government as they did during the Midcentury Moment....

[T]he Midcentury Moment's confidence in big institutions was inextricably connected with an acceptance of a cultural uniformity that almost all of today's liberals, and probably most non-liberals, would find unacceptable.

Read the whole thing. There's much about the unifying effect of WWII and the military draft. Do you buy this — the notion that belief in big government depends on cultural uniformity?

It's not Lady Gaga unseating Oprah that disturbs me. It's Elton John and Bon Jovi in the top 10.

"The World's Most Powerful Celebrities"... according to Forbes.

We need better celebrities! It was bad enough back in the 80s when Elton John and Bon Jovi were the celebrities we had to settle for. But here they are. Still "powerful," whatever that means. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, I really got the wrong impression of the speed of the flow of new celebrities into the popular culture.

Maybe this is why time has seemed to go faster as we (Baby Boomers) have gotten older. Or do you think it should be a reason why things should appear to be going slower? When nothing's happening and you're bored, time does seem to go slower. But uneventfulness also makes long stretches of time look shorter. It's a paradox. The paradox of the puzzling persistence of Bon Jovi and Elton John.

"Unlike probably everyone else watching Charlie Sheen these days, we think this 'train wreck' (as some are calling it) is probably the best we've seen him..."

"... and (having mutual friends) we applaud him mightily for it. He looks and sounds more like his father than ever. His nothing-can-take-me-down attitude, in the face of this wimpy, middle class, wet rag nanny state finger-wagging opinion is winning. This is a man, owning his actions and insisting everyone else come clean and take responsibility for theirs as well.... [A]ll too often, we see too many powerful beta males in this country... We've become a cautious, conformist, inoffensive, non-risk taking, arrogant, lying bunch of NewAge pussies who think if any woman... says she or others don't approve, then some form of public contrition and apology is called for. Well, screw that. Neither she, or the public, are Charlie Sheen's mother and even if his parents disapprove, he's a grown-assed man who refuses to be a part of whatever milquetoast existence the rest of you think is good for gaining social approval from a worthless feminized culture-killing clique. He didn't ask for it, doesn't need it, and isn't angling for it. He's a man. He's rich. And he's free."

That's Crack Emcee, taking a macho look at Charlie Sheen.

It's funny, I was just saying to Meade that people don't rant against "conformity" anymore — not like they did in the 50s and 60s. What got me going wasn't Charlie Sheen. It was my Bloggingheads with Timothy Noah, which, for various reasons, made me think about the way liberals, including liberal media folk, talk to each other and feel emotional rewards for saying what they all say back and forth to each other. They become so immersed in this feeling of belonging that they don't even hear the things that are not the things that they've been saying back and forth to each other. And my question is: Why does that feel so good? Why doesn't that immersion feel like drowning? Why don't you want to surface into the air and be free — to think about everything, from any perspective, and to find out for yourself what is true and what is good? You are a human individual: Don't you want that?

"And that was when he discovered he had a special kinda way with animals."

"They just come right up to him like he was a natural part of the wilderness."



Have you been living free in harmony and majesty like we did back in the 1970s?

***

Charles Sellier Jr., the man who created "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams,” has died at the age of 67.

Loosely based on an actual person who escaped into the wilderness in 1853 after being accused of a murder he didn’t commit, Grizzly Adams is a bearded, barrel-chested man (played by Dan Haggerty) who counts among his friends raccoons, skunks, ferrets, deer, coyotes, porcupines, an eagle and, of course, the abandoned grizzly bear cub who matures into a powerful companion named Ben.

ADDED: Did you have the same question I had?: Is Ben the same Ben as "Gentle Ben"? The answer is no: "there is no connection between the bears."



Wow! The 60s were so different from the 70s. The 60s had a lot of 50s in them, and the 70s had a lot of 60s, but not the part of the 60s that was leftover from the 50s. If you're not old like me, maybe those distinctions sound meaningless, but if you are, I bet you know exactly what I mean.

The last of the Nelsons, David Nelson...

... has died.

"Barbara Billingsley, TV’s June Cleaver, Dies at 94."

Ah!

I was 6 years old when the show "Leave It to Beaver" began in 1957 and 12 when it ended in 1963. I watched an unbelievable amount of television in those years, but, without question, the TV family that impressed me most deeply was the Cleavers. June and Ward were, for me, the perfect parents. From this long distance, it now seems that were not really that different from June and Ward, but back then, how I longed for a family like the Cleavers. I can still make the theme music play in my head and open a flood of memories of childhood feelings of what a family should be. How profoundly affecting were the gender differences between the 2 parents! Ward and June were a beautiful team, and they were not even all that dissimilar. Both were tough and principled and at the same time caring and sensitive. But I can hear June in my head, echoing for all the ages, urging Ward not to be too severe with the boys. And Ward always listened and hesitated before he proceeded with his fatherly role.

Here's some video.

Things watched just now.

There's this really cool Mickey Kaus ad:



I found that via Mickey's Twitter feed, where he thanked Instapundit for embedding it, so why didn't I see it on Instapundit too? Must have been that, scrolling, I got sidetracked by the monitor lizard. Anyway, I was over on Twitter to write:

Got M to watch the movie "Slacker," which made us look up "Growing Up Absurd" in Amazon, which recommended we buy the movie "Slacker."

We almost never watch movies. We're too fragmented. But "Slacker" is fragmented, and, thinking we could put up with that, we ended up watching the whole thing. In the end of the movie — and I realize I've watched the beginning many times and the end only a few — the camera flashes on the book "Growing Up Absurd." We were trying to remember the author's name, and Meade got it right. We were talking about what a verbal tic it used to be to call everything "absurd."
Thanks for coming over to the other side of the line? What did you think you'd find here? It turns out, it's a passage from an essay by the big old conservative Roger Kimball about Paul Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd":

Goodman said virtually nothing new in Growing Up Absurd. But somehow, his method of recycling received opinions about the problems of youth culture in what he liked to call the “Organized System” struck a chord. His success was due partly to the way he combined the radical clichés of the moment with a traditional language of virtue. “My purpose is a simple one,” Goodman wrote in his first chapter: “to show how it is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system of society does not want men.” (Girls and women do not figure much in Goodman’s scheme of things.)

In other words, Goodman cannily blended rhetoric appropriate to a Marine recruitment poster with portentous fantasies about America being an “unnatural system” that warps young souls. Given current conditions in America, Goodman wonders, “Is it possible, being a human being, to exist? Is it possible, having a human nature, to grow up?” But the pertinent question is whether it really was “desperately hard” for an average child to grow up in the United States in the 1950s—an era of tremendous prosperity, excellent public education, potent national self-confidence. Was it true, as Goodman insisted, that “the young men who conform to the dominant society become for the most part apathetic, disappointed, cynical, and wasted”?

Part of Goodman’s purpose was to sympathize with and exonerate those elements of youth culture that had chosen not to conform to “the dominant society”—the Beats and other fringe groups who believed that “a man is a fool to work to pay installments on a useless refrigerator for his wife.” (Not so useless if one wishes to keep food from spoiling, of course, but Goodman never acknowledges that side of things.) 

"We are not very judgmental people, generally, and probably these kids are having a blast dancing their scary little hearts out."

Gawker primed me to disapprove of this video with young girls dancing to "Single Ladies," but I thought they were just fine and even kind of great.

Isn't there a song that is not about, you know, marriage, that they could dance to?

Pro-marriage is a bad message for young girls? When did that happen? When I was a kid, in the 1950s, we played "house," in which you pretended to be a married woman. With children, of course. Adults loved to give us baby dolls to play with. Imagine that. It was all perfectly okay. As for the costumes the girls are wearing in that video — again, in the 1950s "dress up" was a perfectly conventional and encouraged form of play. When did that become wrong?

If you don't think girls should dance like Beyonce in "Single Ladies," you shouldn't let them see the video at all. When I was a kid, I learned to dance listening to "The Mexican Hat Dance." I think I'd be a lot better off or at least a lot better dancer if I could have learned how to dance from "Single Ladies."

"I heard a couple new-sounding tunes on the tubes and they blasted me sky-high..."

I was thinking about that lyric from the Lovin' Spoonful song "Nashville Cats" this morning as we were talking about the old days when you might stay up late at night to pick up the signal of a distant radio station that played music that you couldn't hear during the day.

In that song, John Sebastian sings of a radio station that captivated him when he was 13:

And the record man said every one is a yellow Sun
Record from Nashville
And up north there ain't nobody buys them
And I said, but I will

And so the boy from the north fell in love with country music. Me, back in the mid-1960s, I liked some college radio station that came in from Fort Wayne, Indiana. I heard songs they didn't play on WABC in New York City. Indiana seemed like a cooler place than NYC. (Oddly, I still think that sometimes.)

I used to write down the names of the artists they played that I'd never heard before. I remember, listening that way, late at night, hearing "I Got You Babe" for the first time and wrote down "Sonny and Cher."

That was my little experience. Did you have anything like that?

Consider this:

Dewey Phillips was on the air in Memphis around 1950. He was an anomaly at the time: a white DJ spinning regional rhythm and blues hits for black audiences. Rick Wright says Phillips and his African American contemporaries up the dial on Memphis' WDIA helped elevate disc jockeying to an art form.

People like Nat Turner, a young B.B. King, and, one of Wright's favorites, Rufus Thomas. "Now, Rufus comes in, 'Hey baby, this is Rufus Thomas, WDIA Memphis, Tennessee, where you can cop a smile about a quarter mile provided you've got time and don't mind this drive time line we're gonna try.'

Wright says that one Nashville station, WLAC Nashville was owned by the Life and Casualty Insurance Company - L-A-C. He says that that station would take this music and this DJ style to places it had never been. He says the course of American cultural history was changed one Saturday.

"And they were playing, basically, records by Guy Lombardo or whatever and it was that era of a 50,000-watter trying to find itself with no audience," says Wright. "And there were some African American students from Fiske University who had gotten past the security and got up to the station and brought a bunch of 78s with them."

And they walked into the studio and started talking to the DJ. "Mr. Nobles, can you play some of our folks' records on your radio show?"

And Nobles said sure, hand them over. Records of Fats Domino and Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Etta James, Laverne Baker.

And he played them.

"All of sudden," says Wright, "the phone started to ring, and the letters and cards were coming from all over the place. And they established that night, one of the real, first, mainstream R&B formats on a major powerhouse radio station. WLAC 1510 Blues Radio Nashville, Tennessee. The only full time R&Ber at night with 50,000 watts."

At night, 50,000 watts get you very far. Bob Dylan has said he owes much of his musical inspiration to listening to WLAC as young teenager all the way up in Minnesota.

***

It was the "Moonstruck" clip that I blogged last night that set me off thinking about Cher and the first time I ever heard her sing. It was observed that I love Cher, and I confessed to my longstanding affection for the durable diva. I loved Cher since the first time I heard 'I Got You Babe' on a radio station from Fort Wayne, Indiana, I said.

I remembered answering some questionnaire at the time about what famous person I would like to be. It was 1965, so I was 14. I said Cher. And it wasn't just that I wanted to be a female pop star. I was entranced by the strong affection that Sonny and Cher showed each other when I saw them on TV.

I searched YouTube for an early appearance — perhaps their first national TV appearance — when the two were singing IGYB while sitting at a little table. They were petting and kissing — a real public display of affection. There are, of course, a lot of clips of them doing that song, but I couldn't find that one or any other where they were transgressively pawing at each other, the PDA I'd seen when I was just 14.

So let me go in a completely different direction and show you this instead:

I GOT YOU BABE

Your baby wants you to smoke.

1950s ads (via Boing Boing).

I love the notion of not wanting to "feel over-smoked."

Kindergarten, 1957.

I just ran across this old picture from my kindergarten class. Place: Newark, Delaware.



For the full-size picture, go here.

I can't really remember who any of these kids are (other than me). I think it's cute that they got nearly all the girls to cross our legs at the ankles, which was considered the only proper way for a female to cross her legs. Note that the girls in shorts are put on one side and the girls in skirts on the other. Whatever they did to makes us smile seems to have amused the boys more than the girls. I like the way you can tell who the class clown is. Back in those days, there were no public kindergartens. This building was next to the pool that everyone joined for the summer. I like the windows. Kind of Usonian, right? What did we do in kindergarten back then? We were not taught to read. I think the only idea was to get us used to going to school. We played rhythm instruments, mostly sticks. We fooled around with clay. We were sent outside to run around. We were forced to take little naps lying on little throw rugs. I remember coming up with the theory that I could use my feet to propel myself around the room, and that if I did it slowly enough the teacher would not be able to see it. My analogy was to the minute hand on a clock. Turns out the analogy was not that accurate, and the teachers did not appreciate my scientific experimentation.