Oft repeated, but seldom analyzed, is the statement that morality is in swift decline in the United States, if not the entire world. The apparent few who have taken issue with this declaration are those who accurately demonstrate just how inhospitable our world of yesteryear was to the marginalized, (i.e., the disabled, commonly referred to in times past as the “lame” or the “crippled,” Black people, or in that age, “coloreds” or “negros,” women with aspirations outside the domestic realm and freethinkers).
The optimist in me wants to believe that those who year for the 1950s, or any era before the advent of the Post-Modern Age are not longing -at least not directly -for a return to the treatment of those outside the dominant power structure, but subscribing to a myopic point of view, a simplified perception of the way things used to be. This myopic view may simply be the one that longs for a popular culture seen as more befitting a general audience. Since the scrapping of the Hollywood Production Code and the advent of Cable television, the celluloid world has taken us further than what audiences expected back in the days when material such as “Baby Doll” or “The Moon is Blue” merited condemnation from the most powerful church on Earth.
Both films treated -however tepidly by today’s standards -the subject of human sexuality, a subject handled euphemistically in that era. Sexuality was the obscene, yet today’s viewer is more likely to watch standard fare of the bygone era and see in the then socially acceptable, the obscene by today’s standards. For the modern viewer, the threats, however veiled in humor, of Ralph Kramden to his wife Alice regarding her imminent voyage to the Moon via his fist or the depiction of Native Americans in the films of John Ford are an exercise in obscenity. Sensitized more to the plight of women and the Indigenous peoples, such representations may strike him as a sad anachronism, a vestige of a less-enlightened time, not one whose return we should usher in enthusiastically.
Yet, it cannot be denied that much of today’s popular culture is a parade of vulgarity, whether it be the continual coverage of the antics of Hollywood luminaries, the easier access to pornography or the premature sexualization in mass entertainment. What differentiates our era from that bygone age is that the means of spreading information, including entertainment, have increased along with the proliferation of modern technology. What remained mostly underground in the 1950s owed itself not strictly to laws regarding censorship, but also to the difficulties of disseminating such information.
We must be reasonable and accept that although much of our popular culture tests the boundaries of taste, we did not entirely dwell in an age of innocence in the Post-War Era. Those longing for the “good ol’ days” must take into account just how rampant vice was and just how strenuous the efforts made were to conceal it. The drug culture, often associated with the counterculture and believed to have erupted sometime around 1965 cannot, in all honesty, be said to have started with the sudden rise in popularity of hallucinogens. A drug culture of sorts existed for eons before that. For those who lived in the Post-War Era, it is not difficult to be told tales of barbiturate-addled housewives masking their discontent through depressants or businessmen leaning on the three-Martini lunch as a coping measure for existential despair –hardly an example for the children born shortly after the Second World War.
The longing for the bygone era is either a stubborn form of naiveté or an all-out desire to put the marginalized back in their “appropriate places.” It is not the dream of the enlightened, those who seek to move society forward to one that is more just, more efficient and more open. In fact, the only societies that have managed to “go back in time” have been Iran with its 1979 Revolution or Afghanistan under the Taliban.
The excess sexualization of our culture is an unfortunate by-product of the movement forward, but to concentrate solely on this byproduct and not the progress we have made as a society since times past is foolhardy. Inertia benefits no one. Those longing for the past are enamored with appearances, and appearances in times past were of paramount importance, especially as a means of disguising widespread discontent among the populace. One can recall before the gay rights’ movements, manifold stories of sham marriages, often resulting in dire pain for both parties; the supposedly “clean” television families enjoyed back in the day was one in which the career woman was an anomaly, to say the least, and the Black character was often an exercise in bufoonery, certainly not a member of a race to be taken seriously; children abused by clergy in no way had the power of redress that their families have today, the science taught in our schools was primordial compared to what we know now. Thus, there is little logic in longing for the past and this makes itself apparent in the fact that so few critical thinkers are desirous of a way back.
A true age of innocence has never been ours, all we have known is the clever concealment of societal scourges, ones we have taken upon ourselves to address maturely at last. Nostalgia, at least the desire to have back those loved ones who are now deceased or a particular aesthetic that brought us much pleasure, is certainly understandable; a re-creation of a bygone era, its morality and all, is an illusory dream, one that would more appropriately be categorized as a nightmare for so many
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