The Lure of Opulent Desolation

[PrettySquareGal]

I just read this Op-Ed in the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/opinion/30warner.html?_r=2

I am very irked by this commentary. The author uses the following to describe the fifties:

"sad and sordid sexual repression, the infantilization of women, the cookie-cutter conformity"

"an unhappy past. A past characterized by every possible form of bigotry?"

"a cruel ideal we can never reach."

"housewives — those doe-eyed, frivolous, almost simple-minded depressives"

She ends this piece of schlock with: "No matter how lost we are, no matter how confused, no matter how foolish we feel, we can judge ourselves the winners. "

Discuss......

 

[Foofoogal]

I may get banned on this one. I will wait in line to see how it goes.
Such drivel though. :eusa_doh: I will say.
I may be back.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

(By the way, she wasn't born until the 60's, so she wasn't even there!)

 

[PrettySquareGal]

What about all of the housewives of today? They MUST be miserable if they have nice eyebrows and keep an orderly house. I just get so agitated by these faux feministic rants that demean a valid and lovely lifestyle choice.

 

[Senator Jack]

How we make them pay now, when we breathe them back into life. Our cultural representations of them are punishing. We defile the putative purity of the housewives — those doe-eyed, frivolous, almost simple-minded depressives — by assigning them drunken, cheating, no-good mates. We discredit the memory of the organization men by filling them with self-loathing and despair. Each gender invites its downfall, and fully deserves the comeuppance that history, we know, will ultimately deal it.

That’s where the pleasure comes in. No matter how lost we are, no matter how confused, no matter how foolish we feel, we can judge ourselves the winners.

Yeah, this bit is particularly ugly. She's one of those people I usually tell to to fly down to the Amazon and laugh at the natives because they're not as smart as we are. That will certainly make her feel good about herself.

Are we really winners? Back then, perhaps 10% of the women weren't happy staying at home, and now 90% are miserable going to to work. So now everyone's miserable. The husband, the wife, kids. Bravo. Stupid writers like that keep perpetuating the myth.

Regards,

Jack

 

[LizzieMaine]

After reading it over a couple times, I think what she's ripping on here is the tendency modern folk have to over-exaggerate the stereotypes of "The Fifties" (as opposed to the actual realities of the real '50s), because it gives them a chance to proclaim themselves superior to something that didn't actually exist in the form in which they've cast it -- in other words, setting up Fifties Madison Avenue imagery as a straw man to which they can easily set fire, which is a lazy, easy way of feeling better about the many failings of the present culture.

 

[PrettySquareGal]

Yeah, this bit is particularly ugly. She's one of those people I usually tell to to fly down to the Amazon and laugh at the natives because they're not as smart as we are. That will certainly make her feel good about herself.

Are we really winners? Back then, perhaps 10% of the women weren't happy staying at home, and now 90% are miserable going to to work. So now everyone's miserable. The husband, the wife, kids. Bravo. Stupid writers like that keep perpetuating the myth.

Regards,

Jack

:eusa_clap

 

[PrettySquareGal]

After reading it over a couple times, I think what she's ripping on here is the tendency modern folk have to over-exaggerate the stereotypes of "The Fifties" (as opposed to the actual realities of the real '50s), because it gives them a chance to proclaim themselves superior to something that didn't actually exist in the form in which they've cast it -- in other words, setting up Fifties Madison Avenue imagery as a straw man to which they can easily set fire, which is a lazy, easy way of feeling better about the many failings of the present culture.

I understand what you are saying and agree with your last point. I don't agree with the author's version of what was real then, though, both positive and negative.

 

[Senator Jack]

The author doesn't know what was real then, because she obviously didn't bother to study more than a few old issues of Cosmopolitan. If that. More likely, she just heard what it was like back then and regurgitated it for the column. How do these slipshod 'journalists' continue to get work?

 

[Red Diabla]

After reading it over a couple times, I think what she's ripping on here is the tendency modern folk have to over-exaggerate the stereotypes of "The Fifties" (as opposed to the actual realities of the real '50s), because it gives them a chance to proclaim themselves superior to something that didn't actually exist in the form in which they've cast it -- in other words, setting up Fifties Madison Avenue imagery as a straw man to which they can easily set fire, which is a lazy, easy way of feeling better about the many failings of the present culture.

That was my general impression of the article as well after reading it.

I think the author went into her reading with a stereotype of the 50's and came to the above conclusion about how the Gen X crowd puts its spin on that decade. I think it's less about laziness and more about jealousy, especially with quotes like this:

How we seem to love and hate those men and women we never knew. What we would give to know their secrets: how Dad managed to come home at 5 p.m. to read the paper or watch TV while Mom fixed dinner and bathed the kids. How Mom turned up at school, every day, unrumpled, coiffed, unflappable. And more to the point: how they managed to afford the lives that they led, on one salary, without hocking their homes to pay for college, without worrying about being bankrupted by medical bills.

Nostalgia is a tricky thing though, and I've seen it discussed on this site how misleading it can be. That same grain of salt needs to be taken with the article, too.

RD

 

[Imahomer]

Nostalgia is a tricky thing though, and I've seen it discussed on this site how misleading it can be. That same grain of salt needs to be taken with the article, too.

A grain? After reading that article I'm thinking the whole salt shaker.

 

[John in Covina]

If you can't make people believe your outlook and way of life is better, you can at least try to make them unhappy with theirs. Victomology 101

History is not based on facts it's based on how the winner re-writes it.

Generation Ipod drivel.

 

[Paisley]

I think the author is saying that a lot of us would like to live the ideal 50s life:

Many of us, deep down, yearn for it, having experienced divorce or other sorts of family dislocation in the 1970s. We keep alive a secret dream of “a model of routine and order and organization and competence...." But that order and routine and competence in our frenetic world proves forever elusive, a cruel ideal we can never reach.​

And being unable to reach it, we say sour grapes to it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The author doesn't know what was real then, because she obviously didn't bother to study more than a few old issues of Cosmopolitan. If that. More likely, she just heard what it was like back then and regurgitated it for the column. How do these slipshod 'journalists' continue to get work?

Exactly so -- although I suspect the depth of her cultural research didn't even go that far. Pieces like this are constructed out of images taken from sitcom episodes, kitschy greeting cards, Hotpoint appliance ads torn from "Good Housekeeping," and maybe an old Bufferin commercial or two. Unfortunately, those are the main images the average person of today has of the pre-1965 era. It's like claiming to understand what World War 2 was really like because you used to watch "Hogan's Heroes" as a kid.

 

[SGT Rocket]

"How we seem to love and hate those men and women we never knew. What we would give to know their secrets: how Dad managed to come home at 5 p.m. to read the paper or watch TV while Mom fixed dinner and bathed the kids. How Mom turned up at school, every day, unrumpled, coiffed, unflappable. And more to the point: how they managed to afford the lives that they led, on one salary, without hocking their homes to pay for college, without worrying about being bankrupted by medical bills."

People call the 50's a simpler time. And in a way it was. Just think of all the stuff you DIDN'T have to pay for: cell phones, cable tv, internet, computer, x box, video games, etc.... Man, I could make a list for days!

Also, people were probably satisfied with less in the 50's. Shoot, most people lived through the great depression and then the second world war. I bet most women were happy that their husband came home at night (and wern't off fighting in Europe or the Pacific) and the husbands were probably happy they cold put food on the table and were not getting their butts shot off.

Sure, we had to worry about "duck and cover" but now day's we have islamic terrorism and the such.

 

[dhermann1]

I'm reminded of Pat Morita's great line in "Karate Kid", "You, too much TV!"
I read that piece today. Usually Judith Warner has worthwhile insights to offer. But this one was a real dud.
First there was the myth of how great everything was in the 50's, then there was the myth of how awful everything was.
Just myths.
I was there, it wasn't so bad. believe me. Yes, after a while it got a little dull. But then we had the 60's. And guess what? In spite of all the upheavals you see in newsreels of the time, life went on through that decade much as it had before and has since.

 

[Lady Day]

This author is talking of the surface of her subject matter, because if she studied, she would find that like most eras we glorify, it is always more complex than we admit.

From the tone of her article, she was speaking at me, not to me, as if she had discovered this profound revelation from the most superficial of reading material about that time, and that had made her a learned preacher of the era. Snore.

Its presumptuous taking the nostalgia as dogma, and ignorant in its 'analyzation' from only a few superficial sources.

Shes living up to the tenants of her own generation quite nicely.

LD

 

[ShoreRoadLady]

Say, weren't we discussing why newspapers aren't selling?

I'm still not quite sure what she's trying to say. Is she scorning the idea of admiring the 50s and 60s, as her last line implies? Is she a little wistful for those days herself? Or has she not decided yet? I'm inclined to believe the first. If so, hers is an opinion based on very superficial sources.

It's funny how some people admire the grit, courage, and know-how of women in the 30s and 40s, and then suddenly, turn these same women into the most loathed of beings once they enter "The Fifties".

This author has fallen for the stereotype hook, line, and sinker.

 

[ShoreRoadLady]

Exactly so -- although I suspect the depth of her cultural research didn't even go that far. Pieces like this are constructed out of images taken from sitcom episodes, kitschy greeting cards, Hotpoint appliance ads torn from "Good Housekeeping," and maybe an old Bufferin commercial or two. Unfortunately, those are the main images the average person of today has of the pre-1965 era. It's like claiming to understand what World War 2 was really like because you used to watch "Hogan's Heroes" as a kid.

fftopic:
Makes you wonder, doesn't it: what would people would say about the early 2000's (er, "noughties"?) fifty years from now? If you sat down and read a stack of fashion magazines from 2008, you'd come away thinking all women were anorexically skinny (though mysteriously, diet pills and liposuction ads were prevalent), and everyone shopped at both H&M and Chanel. That is, when they weren't working at their high-powered, well-paying jobs that took the glass ceiling and smashed it under pointy stiletto heels.

 

[BinkieBaumont]

Exactly so -- although I suspect the depth of her cultural research didn't even go that far. Pieces like this are constructed out of images taken from sitcom episodes, kitschy greeting cards, Hotpoint appliance ads torn from "Good Housekeeping," and maybe an old Bufferin commercial or two. Unfortunately, those are the main images the average person of today has of the pre-1965 era. It's like claiming to understand what World War 2 was really like because you used to watch "Hogan's Heroes" as a kid.[/QUOTE

Television gives a creamy, sugary mix, of what a family should be, in Australia we have a Soap called "Neighbours" everyone is white, but the reality is that we (Australia)are a multi-cultural nation, built on migration