Embedded Files
"The future demands from us something more than a nostalgia for some rose-tinted version of a past that did not really exist in any case" John Kerry
I grew up in El Paso, TX in a very real world the Left now insists never existed. I now regularly see -- via the media -- an asphalt-tarred version of my childhood. I see it on TV, in books, in movies, and certainly in the NY Times.
Case in point:
Below: these huge Kodak "Coloramas" (18' x 60') -- and several others -- were mounted on the walls of Grand Central Station in the 1960's. According to progressives, they portray a "wholly imaginary America".
James Reston, NY TImes 2012: "They do still remind us of Kodak’s America: an idealized world of comfortable suburbanites and rural Americans enjoying holidays, vacations and everyday life while using cameras and color film.
Today, it is difficult to imagine many people having the lives that the advertisements depicted. This is not so much because America has changed since the ’60s, but rather because the country shown in the Coloramas never really existed. . . In the Coloramas of the 1960s, there was no space for poor people, feminists or civil rights activists."
So there you go. To a great many progressives, any photo of happy white families that doesn't include the poor, minorities, feminists, or activists is bogus, a fantasy. This is not to say that such types shouldn't have been included -- but such "non-diverse" shots certainly did picture a very real America.
(The politically correctors have also tried to do a similar smear campaign with Norman Rockwell's version of America.)
What kills me is that the James Restons of the world will look at a photograph of some black drug-cursed totally dysfunctional family and consider it entirely “realistic” – never dreaming of dismissing it because there are no whites or Christians or hard-working fathers.
NY Times website comment: “The values of these bygone television eras were nice but were not a reflection of the reality of the times. For every Ozzie and Harriet episode carefully written and constructed; adults were pretty much allowed to do what they wanted with children sexually as long as they could threaten the child to be quiet about it. Yikes!”
Yikes indeed. Where on earth could this commenter have gotten such an absurd and ugly caricature of '50s adults? This was a comment on the NY Times website regarding an article on Reality TV. It exemplifies the absurdly twisted – and thorough -- job the Left has done via the media in portraying 1950s society; a time before post-60s progressives arose, took over academia and the media, and started saving us from ourselves.
The critically acclaimed TV series “Mad Men” is a similar attempt to discredit American society prior to the arrival of our heroic leftist cavalry. Before our “saviors” arrived, they would have us believe that the world as pictured by Ozzie and Harriet was a complete fraud: Women were oppressed by men; women couldn’t get “meaningful” jobs; minorities couldn’t get into medical schools, and child abuse/sex abuse was the norm, rather than an exceedingly rare practice. As with nearly all such propagandistic stereotypes, there are grains of truth -- not the whole truth -- in each of these charges. (See my blog post "Evolution and the So-called Oppression of American Women)
“By the 1910s, however, women were attending many leading medical schools, and in 1915 the American Medical Association began to admit women members.” WIC.Org
FYI, Harvard Medical School admitted its first black in 1850. Prior to affirmative action at least 85 blacks had graduated HMS. . . . In 1915 women were given full membership in the American Medical Association, the same year the Medical Women's National Association was formed. The American Medical Women's Association came later . . In 1947, a woman first won the Nobel Prize in the category of medicine or physiology.
A good friend’s mother graduated from Boston U. Medical School in 1927.
I have long believed that this ongoing effort to discredit American society prior to the PC/multiculturalism/feminist movement is a direct result of the increasingly apparent failures of our leftist “saviors” in their colossally naïve attempts at “social engineering”.
Now that, via their idealistic blunders, many aspects of our society/culture are measurably worse (rates of divorce, out-of-wedlock births; casual-conversation-profanity, vulgarity, sexual assault in the military, black shattered families) than when the post-60s left took over academia and the mainstream media, they have been left with two choices: either admit to their dismal failures -- or rewrite history so as to suggest things were even worse before they began “saving” us. Obviously, they have chosen the latter. As someone who grew up in Rockwell/Ozzieland, I am torn between laughing and crying at their ludicrous efforts to distort the past to their benefit.
Roger Ebert's Review of "Pleasantville (the movie): “a social commentary of surprising power. . . The movie opens in today's America, which we have been taught to think of as rude, decadent and dangerous. . . . The film observes that sometimes pleasant people are pleasant simply because they have never, ever been challenged. That it's scary and dangerous to learn new ways. The movie is like the defeat of the body snatchers: The people in color are like former pod people now freed to move on into the future. We observe that nothing creates fascists like the threat of freedom.
"Pleasantville" is the kind of parable that encourages us to re-evaluate the good old days and take a fresh look at the new world we so easily dismiss as decadent. . . I grew up in the '50s. It was a lot more like the world of "Pleasantville" than you might imagine. Yes, my house had a picket fence, and dinner was always on the table at a quarter to six, but things were wrong that I didn't even know the words for.
(Please Roger -- give me a break!)
The consciences of nearly all post-60’s propaganda purveyors are eased by the three great leftists pillars supporting the rationales for their deceit – (1) their contention that "truth is relative", (2) their contention that “history is written by the winners”, and (3) their contention that "all is political". Once swallowed, these three magic pills free up the polemicist or leftist historian to lie like a going-out-of-business used-car salesman and, rather than feel guilty about the lying, to feel quite virtuous.
Google Sites
Report abuse