Yesterday, I bought a box of LPs left over from a neighbor's garage sale. A friend came over last night and we tickled some memories.
Late for the Sky. More Than a Feeling. Freakin' out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah.
And it struck me like a hammer: we haven't budged. In forty years. If anything, we've slipped backwards.
When I was first hearing these records on the radio, there was no question that a woman's body was her own business, that decisions about her health care were her own to make. It was common knowledge that petroleum was too volatile a commodity to be the root of our economy and that hyper-efficient cars and solar PV were the way of the future. Heck, the president had even put panels on the White House roof.
Racism, sexism, religious bigotry were just too old-fashioned and booooooring to be taken seriously. An energized, activist press was shutting down Republican uglinesses like secret wars and domestic spying. After a long, bumpy road, it looked like the century was finally getting someplace.
And. . . scene.
GF has a theory about centuries. It's actually a principle taught in art history that she's extrapolated to culture in general: the first years of a century, far from being revolutionary and progressive, are really frightfully reactionary. Fearful of the new, society reaches back to imagined simplicity and safety. Nostalgia's the coming thing. Blurry pink is the new black.
It takes society a decade or so to adjust to the fact that the past has really passed and we have to make room in our heads for the new.
It's certainly holding true for this century. Despite novelties like an African American president and hybrid cars, tomorrow, so far, is looking depressingly familiar.
Women should be shamed if they fuck. Blacks and browns need to be kept from the voting booth and Jesus should be the principal of your kid's school. We've got all the oil in the world.
Well, I'm sorry to burst your pretty pink balloon, my dear countrymen, but the alarm clock's ringing and you've busted the snooze button with one slap too many. It is time to get up.
Time to rub your blurry eyes and get a good look at the year on that calendar. Note the first digit. The odometer's rolled over and it's a new, scary modern world. There's no more time for the comforting lies as old as I am (I was a little kid when The Pill became available; by the time I was old enough to care about it, it was already passe as a Johnny Carson joke).
We're grownups now, in a great, big, grown-up new century. The quaint idiocies and worn-out hatreds and superstitions of the last one are no longer going to be taken seriously as rules for running our society.
It's time--long past time--to bury them, and those who wish to make them laws.
Welcome to the 2000s. You're late. Better get a move on.