Who's Got a WIN Button?
I never did understand the nostalgia craze, which is a relatively recent blight on cultural life in the United States. It was the unlamented Sha Na Na that first stoked the memory industry, although in a modest way, when the group surfaced in the late 60s with their ducktails and lame renditions of classic songs from the previous decade. Since then, with the introduction of cable tv, it's all nostalgia all the time, cluttering the minds of kids by presenting dumb misrepresentations of recent history. If I walk past my older son's room one more time and hear Devo's "Whip It," it's just possible I'll flip out, dude, and become a Yankees or John Kerry fan. That's how dangerous this garbage is.
The Daily News' Lenore Skenazy, one of the city's least bright columnists, had a groovy time at Starsky & Hutch, which resulted in a ludicrous March 10 piece called "The '70s?My Decade & Proud of It." As a Boomer who straddled the decade of choice (the 60s) and its ridiculed successor, I find the entire argument silly. What's the point, say, for a teenager today to openly wish he or she had been born 30 years earlier, when all those cool demonstrations were happening in DC, sex was available at the snap of one's fingers and the grass was cheap and easy to score? For sure, señor. As I recall, the endless waits for phone calls from a dealer peddling nickel bags, screwed-up meetings on street corners and the sheer paranoia of being, like busted, totally sucked. Less annoying was being spat on during a Vietnam demo march in Huntington?anything for the cause!?but it's not a golden moment in my life.
Anyway, Skenazy defends the "Me Decade," a reasonable and original topic, but for all the wrong reasons. She writes: "Like many Americans who came of age in [the 70s], I always felt an inferiority complex compared with my immediate elders. After all, their era gave us the Beatles, Woodstock, the anti-war movement and the Civil Rights Act." Not to mention Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, urban riots, Spiro Agnew and Family Affair. She continues: "My era gave us hot pants. Also gaucho pants. Also pantsuits. One-piece. Zippered. Purple. So for many years I would pretend I didn't really remember my youth. 'Oh, did we have a pet rock? I guess we did.' Guess we did? I loved that pet rock. I was so jealous it was my sister's!"
Like any decade, the 70s had its ups (punk rock) and downs (Earth Day and Carole King), but nitwits like Skenazy, rhapsodizing over pet rocks, tight polyester shirts, shag haircuts and awful tv?she forgot that damn smiley face?completely miss the point. In reality, adolescents and young adults growing up in the 70s reaped the benefits of the previous decade without paying a price.
Kids didn't get thrown out of restaurants for wearing long hair. The draft ended. Colleges started to go co-ed. It was cheaper to travel overseas (Icelandic Airlines, anyone?). The Camelot myth began to be punctured. David Bowie, Roxy Music, Steely Dan, the Clash and Bruce Springsteen neutralized the Eagles, bad disco, the Starland Vocal Band, Ringo's solo albums and Livingston Taylor. Coors beer became available on the East Coast. Solipsistic "underground" newspapers gave way to weeklies like the Chicago Reader, which didn't feature an "Off the Pigs!" headline every other week. Rolling Stone (as well as National Lampoon) was not only readable for a few years in the early 70s, but contained groundbreaking journalism. You could still call a young woman a "chick" without facing arrest. Few people had even heard of Donald Trump, Dr. Phil, Al Franken, Lady Di or Barbara Boxer.
Bill Murray rocked.
Yes, Jimmy Carter was insufferable, but the Watergate hearings haven't yet been matched for political entertainment, and Ronald Reagan was just getting warmed up.
I enjoyed the 80s and the 90s (with the exception of Bill Clinton's scummy campaign demagoguery about hard-working Americans "who don't play by the rules"), and the early 21st century, with all its uncertainty, as well. Nostalgia for decades is a waste of time: It's fascinating to read reputable historians from the past and easier than ever to immerse yourself in the culture, high and low, of long-ago eras, but if a teenager in 1964 had said "Man, if only I could've grown up in 1920s," he'd have been considered quite a loon.
John Edwards' New Calling
One childhood yarn that my kids never tire of hearing is about the first time I ever ate at McDonald's. The parents were out of town?Mom had won a trip to Puerto Rico, the Bahamas or Mexico, I forget which?and so my oldest brother, holding a small wad of cash for the week, took the rest of us out to dinner one night, claiming we were on our way to a fancy restaurant. I was about seven at the time, and when he said, in a goofy accent "Yup, we're going to have steak ba-guuuherrr, French fried patats and crème de chocolat," this sounded like putting on the Ritz.
As it turned out, we arrived at one of the original McDonald's franchises, and it was better than any restaurant I'd ever been to, save Howard Johnson's. My own boys, who've supped on Happy Meals, Big Macs, large fries, Chicken McNuggets and the like since their stroller days, get a real charge out of how "sheltered" I was.
McDonald's is having a number of problems in this new, increasingly paranoid century. Worrying about terrorists blasting a subway station, destroying the Brooklyn Bridge or White House is one thing, but all this nonsense about obesity is grating.
Getting too tubby? Don't eat as much.
It was interesting to compare the March 8 editorials on this subject in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The Times, of course, applauds McDonald's decision to phase out their "supersize" deals, where it actually costs less to receive more food. Completely missing the point for this edict, the Times decrees: "It would be nice to pretend that this sort of corporate assistance isn't necessary, that we could all just exercise a little more self-control. But by the time you're standing in McDonald's, it's probably too late. Whatever comes over the counter is going to be eaten, and the best you can hope for is that there won't be too much of it."
The Journal, on the other hand, got the core of eliminating the sales gimmick of more for less. In a word, litigation. The editorialist writes: "[W]hat the Supersize dump is really about is the mau-mauing that the hamburger chain has received from the nation's food nannies for selling what increasingly overweight Americans love to eat. This public shaming has led to a crush of trial lawyers, who've already started a tobacco-like assault on the food industry. McDonald's has seemingly thrown in the wrapper and moved to damage control."
Another Pretender
Jackson Browne's discography, with a few exceptions, makes me cringe, but I do agree with his March 22 New York Times op-ed that travel and trade restrictions ought to be relaxed with Cuba. Obviously, that won't happen this year, with Florida's electoral votes in the balance. Yet Browne, typical of wealthy celebrities, distorts the decades-old embargo of Fidel's hovel. He writes: "This policy is an outdated relic of the cold war and exists only as a political payoff to Republican-leaning Cuban-American voters in Miami."
Doctor, open Jackson's eyes. If the washed-up entertainer would consult recent history, he'd realize that Bill Clinton was president for eight years after the Cold War ended and didn't do a damn thing about normalizing relations with Cuba.
Los Angeles: Man, It's Hard
I don't agree with the Justice Department's attempt to obtain the medical records of women who've undergone abortions in scattered cities across the country. The procedure is legal, and the government has no right to that information.
That said, a March 19 Los Angeles Times editorial on the subject was appalling. The paper said: "Of all the moments when a patient consults with a doctor, few could be sadder than when a woman concludes she must end a pregnancy. Sadder still is when this occurs after the first trimester, and it's true that one technique [the Times can't possibly use the term "partial-birth abortion"] used in late-term abortions can be grim. With anguished deliberation, the American people and the judiciary have decided that women should have the right to make a choice."
I'm generally pro-choice, although ambivalent about third trimester abortions since it seems a woman after six months ought to have come to a conclusion about having a child. But the Times trivializes far more serious visits to a physician by saying that "few" moments are "sadder" than when a woman decides to terminate a pregnancy. Sadder than when a doctor tells a patient she has ovarian cancer at the age of 29? More heartbreaking than a diagnosis of premature Alzheimer's Disease? Worse than receiving the news that you're going blind or deaf at a rapid pace? I don't think so.
And while it's true that the decision to have an abortion is wrenching for some individuals, for others, such as the devotees of horrid special-interest groups like NOW, Roe v. Wade amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card. Let's call a scalpel a scalpel: It's true Justice has overstepped its bounds, but the Los Angeles Times' view on abortion is just as sickening.
[mug1988@aol.com](mailto:mug1988@aol.com)