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Pretenses! Ain't that mendacity? Having to pretend stuff you don't think or feel or have any idea of? . . . I've lived with mendacity! Why can't you live with it? Hell, you got to live with it, there's nothing else to live with except mendacity, is there? -- Big Daddy to Brick |
Well, boys, I reckon the heat musta got to me yesterday - you know it's still over 100 here ever day, and the mercury don't get below 90 till after sundown - I feel a little foolish now, that I started out talking about sociology and wound up on clothes and disco. And was stone cold sober at the time, too, swear to God. Oh well, maybe some of you enjoyed that little time trip back to the 70's, and I still intend to finish that essay in the next day or so.
But it so happens I've come across a video that is pertinent to the topic. First, in an interview with Don Lemon on the Joy Behar show, here's Randy Potts, grandson of evangelist Oral Roberts, whose moving It Gets Better video I posted here on the Blue Truck last fall:
But what I really want you to see is this video of Randy giving a talk at All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa last month, in which he talks about his life growing up in a home where "the clock stopped in the 1950's" - in that America people some mourn the disappearance of. But let Randy tell you what the problem with that America was:
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5 comments:
A wonderful young man.
I thought the post on clothes was brilliant.
I think you are on a roll here. I had not thought about those flair legged pants for too long.
I was in the sixth grade when I HAD to have a pair of them (thankyou Madison Avenue)...and a southern father who thought they would lead to homosexuality, oh well, .......LOL
Which came first the cart, of the flair legged pants.
It is a good thing to remember the 50s 60s as we see people recreating them in our country, I think.
Great post!
OMG it was the flared pants that turned us queer! Why didn't I realize that before now?! And that "damned long hair" probly played a part too. Grin.
Yes I remember similar comments from the so-called Greatest Generation, parents and preachers and teachers. They were so horrified at those very modest styles - considered rather quaint and preppy now - which were nothing compared to the really outrageous stuff that has come and gone since then.
But that's always the tension between the older and younger generations. In Rome, about the 1st century, the young were ridiculed for their "effeminate" enormously big togas that flapped in the wind - geezers derided them as wearing "sails" instead of manly togas.
And in the early 1600's, oh the critics were frothing at the mouth over the "effiminate" long hair that came into vogue - think King Charles I - but which became the prevailing fashion that lasted over a century, at first with natural hair, later with elaborate wigs, worn by kings, generals, preachers, everybody.
Which just goes to show, what's considered "right" or even "manly" is infinitely variable, and mainly depends on what you're used to. But not something people should ever take too seriously.
I applaud Randy Potts but can't help thinking of John Lennon "Imagine no religion".
Yeah but people would still find plenty of reasons to be assholes, as they already do. I may blog on that topic one day soon.
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