Nineteen Seventy-Five

I've been meaning to write something about 1975 for months now, but the year is nearly over.  So I'll just post a few thoughts today, and may post some personal reflections another time.

Bernie asks a question that can only be answered by those who are old enough to remember the time: Was life better fifty years ago?

Regardless of Bernie's remarks, the truth is that the question has no factual answer. Whether life was better then depends entirely on one's point of view. And indeed, no matter what year you want to talk about, in human life it is always the best of times or the worst of times - for somebody.  Your answer hinges on whether you feel loved or unloved, content or unsatisfied, hopeful or despairing.

I am annoyed by some people's comments on YouTube and in other places, people who were children or young teens then -- Oh, what a glorious time it was to be alive, a golden age! The music, the clothes, the cars - and everybody was so kind and courteous and loving. Well, no, that's not the way it was -- it was far from a golden age, as this CBS news summary makes clear, for anyone who cares to look back at the reality of 1975:

After long, dreary years of conflict and protests, defeat and deceit, Vietnam and Watergate were finally behind us.  Tricky Dick Nixon was gone, and steady Jerry Ford was in the White House; he survived two assassination attempts by wild-eyed leftist radicals (seriously) in this year.  Other wild-eyed leftist radicals blew up the State Department, and the Patty Hearst kidnapping ended horrifically.  The Middle East was still in turmoil, as it always is, and the Cold War was still on, with the spectre of nuclear war always in the background. The crime rate was rising, and there was a growing sense of decline in American power, politics, money, and manners, from the bold optimism of the Kennedy years to the stagnant malaise of the post-Nixon era.  Many felt the country was going to pot.

The change was felt most acutely in the pocketbook.  Inflation was out of control:  the Oil Crisis of '73 had made the prices of everything go up sharply.  I remember that the price of sugar zoomed from, say, a dollar a bag to five bucks.  (That equals $30 today.)  The same with coffee.  And for the first time in my life, there were empty shelves in the supermarket.  The recession of 1974 was still going strong, and jobs were hard to find.  Your Head Trucker was finding out the hard way that it was just not possible to live well on minimum wage - $1.60 an hour, so take-home pay was about $240 a month.  Rent on my first little cottage was $80 a month, plus phone and utilities.  For comparison, an apartment in a nice complex with swimming pool cost about $120 a month, or more.

My first home after high school was very similar to this one - but the front door was on the side, under a porch roof, and there were no basement stairs, so the kitchen was wide enough for a table and chairs.  It wasn't new, but it was decent, and it was MY place, where I could do as I pleased.  I felt very grown-up,

The placid "happy days" of the 1950s and early 1960s were long gone by this time, as I remember discussing with my friends.  However, I will say that compared to the state of the world today and the polarized society we now live in, it was easier to live without constant fear and dread back then. The world was already quite complex in those days, but it all seemed more understandable somehow - and it was easier to hope that tomorrow would be better.  

In the Deep South, far from the tumults and convulsions in the big cities up north and out west, everyday life was mostly calm and pleasant as long as you could pay your rent and feed yourself:  books, magazines, records, radio, television, movies, church doings, and simple outings with friends were enough to keep a young man occupied.  Nobody had a home computer; cable TV was non-existent, as were VCR's and DVD's.  Phones still had dials, and they were hard-wired into the wall.  You didn't buy one, you rented it from the phone company for a nominal fee, with a choice of four styles and half a dozen colors.

All that would soon begin to change, but as yet, no one felt a need to be "linked in" every single waking moment, and broadcast to the world pictures of their cat, or their butt, or what they were eating at the burger joint.  People would have fallen down on the floor laughing at the very thought of such nonsense.  

But now we live in a world seemingly controlled in nearly every detail by nosy machines and callous trillionaires. Since this old man's exit will be coming up sooner rather than later, I don't obsess about these things, though I deplore them heartily. But God help the younger generations.

Speaking of whom, someone has come up with a way to assimilate them even faster into the Hive Mind: watch this report on a new school with no human teachers -- and shudder.

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Lambscaping!

Sheep will save the planet.  Who knew?

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On the Road with Charles Kuralt: The American Heritage

I'm sure my truckbuddies of a certain age will remember fondly, as I do, the folksy, fascinating reports of CBS newsman Charles Kuralt (1934-1997) from his travels across the highways and byways of America, delivered with an ear for poetry and an eye for natural artistry.

This 1989 compilation explores a number of interlacing threads in the magnificent tapestry of American history - a story, like all human stories, of highs and lows, light and shadow, sinners and saints.  Sadly, it cannot be told in this way today.  All history must now be cut to fit the latest pattern of right or left - and shouted, not said.

So enjoy this before it disappears down the memory hole.

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Midterm Election Results: The Blue Ripple

Well, the American populace had its say on Trumpism last night, and spoke out of both sides of its mouth.  The Democratic Party hoped a big "blue wave" of fired-up voters would give them control of Congress; but they gained a majority only in the House of Representatives, the Republicans still controlling the Senate.  Well, that's disappointing, but it's a start.  At least now there is a power of resistance to the Trumpocracy in one of the three branches of government.

I found some videos that concisely summarize the election returns and results, in case my readers (like me) weren't glued to the TV set last night.  But whether you are interested in those or not, do take a moment to watch this rather heartwarming story of civility in a political race in Vermont - introduced by the delightful and ever-pleasant Jane Pauley, whom it's so nice to see again on screen.  (Where has she been all these years?  And why didn't NBC hang on to her, the fools?)



Well, that was a sweet story.  Maybe there' s still some hope left for this country.  Let us pray.

Wikipedia has the breakdown on all of last night's races here, if you want to burrow down into the numbers (though not all returns are in yet).  You could also take a look at the BBC's informative charts and maps if you care to.  If not, here's a quick summary of last night's election coverage from the Wall Street Journal:




The New York Times gives brief glimpses of some notable Democratic winners, including Jared Polis, the first gay governor of Colorado, or of any state, hooray:




Who knows what the percentage of red and blue will be, come the next election?  The NYT guesses at the future of American politics in this prognostication:

How to Measure a Happy Nation

The World Happiness Report was released yesterday, and Norway is officially number 1 on that scale.  It is of course not a strictly scientific measurement, like the freezing point of water, or the diameter of the moon, but a made-up statistic:  a conglomeration of numbers put together by some bright boys to make a point.  Next year, they might decide to use a totally different scale - so don't put too much faith in a thing like this, fellas.  How on earth could anyone know whether Nils Nilsson in Norway is any happier or sadder than you are, just at this moment?  Still, it is mildly interesting to think about.

The actual report is found here.  Or you can watch a report from CBS Sunday Morning instead:

The Way It Was

From The Advocate via Joe.My.God:  the 1967 CBS Reports:  The Homosexuals.

Homo = pervert = sick = dirty = disgusting = miserable = doomed:  this was the world I grew up in and remember so vividly.  The attitudes and prejudice and total condemnation that drove a lot of guys to suicide, and deeply wounded those of us who survived - wounds that still hurt and still deeply affect our lives all these years later. 

I didn't see this show when it was first broadcast, and that's probably a good thing, but I do have a memory from just a couple of years later that I want to share with you.

When my father died unexpectedly in my junior year of high school, an older lady I'd never met before, some friend of the family, started a conversation with me at the viewing.  She pulled a photograph out of her purse and said, "This is my grandson, we just buried him a few months ago.  He killed himself with a shotgun in his car one night.  Look at his picture:  he was such a handsome young man, smart, athletic, popular.  I just can't understand why he would do a thing like that.  Can you?"  I suppose because I was nearly the same age as her grandson, she perhaps hoped I would have some younger-generation insight into this unfathomable mystery that obviously grieved her deeply.

I looked at the photo, his senior portrait:  yes, a smiling, goodlooking guy with wavy blondish hair, neatly dressed in sport jacket and tie, the kind of guy who might have been elected class president or won a scholarship to an Ivy League school.  The kind of guy who would have been popular in school, who could have had lots of friends, and plenty of girls lined up to date him.  I had to tell her no, I couldn't understand it, either.

But years later, I remembered:  and it flashed on me.  What if he was gay?  And then it all made sense:  the fatal sense of guilt, the inward shame, the disgust with one's self, the need to hide and pretend, the unanswered prayers, the hopelessness.  The knowing that you would never be what everyone thought, what everyone expected you to be.  The despair.  The unremitting pain.  The one way out.

There was no hope for small-town guys back then.  Do watch this and learn just what the world was like for us gays not so long ago, just in my lifetime; and notice that some straight people's minds have not moved one inch forward in the forty-three years since then.



Some quotes from Mike Wallace:

“The average homosexual, if there be such, isn’t interested in or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His life, his love life, consists of series of chance encounters in the clubs and bars he inhabits, and on the streets.”
“Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness.”
“The church has a great deal of sympathy for those who are handicapped in this way.”
“[Being a homosexual] automatically rules out that [the man in question] will remain happy.”

The men (no mention of lesbians is ever made) who aren’t on camera as representatives of fledgling gay rights groups at the time, like the Mattachine Society, are interviewed in shadow or behind plants, and say things like, “I know I’m sick inside . . . immature.” And then comes the segment on a 1955 homosexual witch hunt in Boise, Idaho, one that apparently turned the whole town upside down with fear and paranoia, with a close-up of an op-ed piece in the Boise newspaper titled “Crush the Monster.”

On a related note:  here's a trailer for the 2006 documentary The Fall of '55, about the Boise witch hunt:



It's available from TLAvideo here.