What Happened to That America? Part I

Your Head Trucker as a fashion plate of 1959.

Over on YouTube, somebody asked that question under this video that I blogged about the other day:



The person who posted the video responded, "It existed primarily in our televisions." Which is a pretty good answer, but I've not been able to get this exhange out of my head since then.

So here goes with a little meditation on the remembrance of things past. Apparently the questioner is not the only one who wonders about that vanished country: Matthew Yglesias quotes House Speaker John Boehner's complaint that "Barack Obama and congressional Democrats 'are snuffing out the America that I grew up in.'"

Which, of course, is nonsense; the America that Boehner (born 1949) and others remember so nostalgically disappeared long before anybody ever heard of Barack Obama.  I came along about five years after Boehner did, and I too remember that world, which, unlike previous eras, is preserved forever in television shows, documentaries, and even commercials.  At the push of a button, the click of a mouse, we can return there at any time of the day or night, and many people do. 

Some time back, in the middle of an article about country megastar Alan Jackson, the writer mentioned that when Jackson isn't touring or working on a new song in the studio, he likes to relax at his country place near Nashville with simple pastimes, like watching reruns of the Andy Griffith Show.  And I understand my fellow Southerner's fondness for that program; I have some DVD sets of it myself that I watch from time to time, as well as other old shows from the era when Dinah was singing the praises of Chevrolet.  I was there - I remember - even though I was just a young tyke, and of course my perceptions of the world were obscured by my innocence and ignorance of many grown-up matters.

And the nostalgia for that past time is nothing new at all.  By the dawn of the 1970's, I very well recall, there was already a general sense that as a society we had moved into a new and different era, one that in some respects was not nearly as pleasant or attractive. 

Continued below the jump

Car Porn: Pontiac Firebird TransAm

News of Pontiac's impending demise - who would have thought? - makes me remember how much I once lusted after a Firebird TransAm, midnight blue with a gold bird on the hood very much like the ones in these photographs.

Way back when 30 still sounded old, and I had finally managed to struggle through college, graduate, and get my first real job, I needed a car to replace the old one that had finally died after hauling me to school and back for many years. And then miraculously, the TransAm of my dreams came along, for sale, at the right price.

I wish I could say I bought it. I wish I could tell you stories of driving to the beach in that T-top, tearing up the Interstates, outrunning the law, radio blaring, cruising down the coastal highway, cutting doughnuts, laying rubber, a throbbing engine that made heads turn when I pulled up, stories of warm days and hot nights, stories that would make you jealous of a carefree and very misspent youth.

But I can't. I bought a cheaper, and much more respectable Chevy sedan. As things turned out, a much more practical choice. A much more practical life. Being what I thought I was supposed to be.

Sometimes I wish I hadn't been so practical. Sometimes I wish I had better stories to tell.

If only we knew then what we know now.