Nostalgia

Big Ruckus D · August 14, 2023 at 1:19 pm

I don’t watch tv anymore, though reflecting on TV viewing of my childhood, and through the time I started high school (1988-89), I remember first run shows like CHiPs, The Rockford Files, Six Million Dollar Man ,The Dukes of Hazzard, Airwolf, The A-Team, Magnum P.I., and Simon & Simon (as key highlights) being stuff I enjoyed watching. Saw plenty of reruns of 60’s and early 70’s shows too, with early cable using those as staples of filling hours of airtime. Never got much into 50’s tv, though saw some reruns here and there.

Some of these have aged poorly, and many were always kind of corny, but that was less evident to me as a kid. That said, they weren’t woke, and though some of these series got socially preachy in the mid to late 80’s, they didn’t bludgeon the viewer with wokist crap. Barney Miller had that couple of faggots as periodic recurring characters, and that was played up to the stereotype of the lisping, effeminate sort in a semi-insulting manner, something that would never fly now. I doubt I picked up on that until at least the late 80’s when I’d see those episodes in reruns.

Aside from TV, music was also much better in terms of inculcating a sense of good times and optimism. Sure, there were dreary songs and even downright depressing ones. But 70’s and 80’s rock and pop, which were the staple of my listening at the time, were far more melodic and generally “happy sounding” songs. I can pick out any random song from the 80’s (which was the prime of my childhood, ages 6-16) and there are so many that are upbeat. Almost anything Huey Lewis and the News did meets that definition. When is the last time you heard a good sax solo? Van Halen was great rock (with Dave, Sammy took them in a more serious direction that wasn’t bad either). I could list a lot of bands and songs, but no need to go on a lengthy dissertation. What do we get now that is big and has mass-appeal (to the extent such exists anymore)? Taylor Swift doing her 86th teen angst song (while in her 30’s) about another ex-boyfriend or some similarly vapid bullshit. And parents buying $6000 tickets for their kids to see her latest tour.

Even TV stations got in on optimistic and upbeat music with their image campaigns and news themes. In the early 80’s the composer and producer Frank Gari created a combined image/news music package titled “Hello News”. It’s centerpiece was a one minute jingle performed by orchestra and a vocalist – usually Florence Warner – that was customized for many dozens of stations all around the country. Here’s a link to a version done for Cleveland, though there are many others. Just try to find anything this positive today:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w4rOG_X8cY4&pp=ygUbRmxhc2hiYWNrIHR1cm4gdG8gbmV3cyBnYXJp

As a kid, I was just at the cusp of the video game and computer age, which was to have had so much promise for a better future. That largely went to shit, having now morphed into another commoditized, corporatized bunch of exploitative, controlling garbage not all that different form previous forms of media technology like radio and tv. And no surprise many of the same old companies that ruined TV and radio are the ones controlling it all still. The promise of the early internet has been largely pissed away in clown world 2023.

We were told of cures for cancer and other scourges, and yet our healthcare sytem has gone to shit, outside of triage which it does well (for now), being a literal racket reminiscent of the mafia (“nice body you got there, be a shame if something happened to it. Pay our protection money (insurance) or get exponentially fucked when you need to avail yourself of our services”). Sure, youthful idealism, and not yet having learned just how screwed up the world really is, shielded us from the cynicism and weariness that we have come to develop in adulthood. But we did at least have some legitimate expectation for a better future based on things that were happening at the time.

Picture the moment when the Berlin Wall fell, and contrast that to the state of geopolitics in 2023. Yeah, we are a long, long way from what we expected back then. Instead, we got (just since circa 2000) multiple major financial cirises, waves of terrorist violence (both from belligerent muzzies, and later bullshit like blm and antifa riots, both of which qualify as terrorist orgs) a pandemic that was obscenely oversold with manipulative fear porn of the highest order, in order to force widespread uptake of a horribly damaging “treatment”, the consequences of which are just now beginning to permeate the mainstream consciousness. And presently, the big one – sexually degeneracy and mutilation – is destroying the minds and bodies of scores of people.

And to cap all that off, we are facing unchecked tyranny and legit collapse of empire in the FUSA and other western powers that were once, so many years ago, to have been the world’s hope of liberating humanity. Heh. See how stupid it sounds to say something like that now? So yeah, the future looks and feels shitty – near to moderate term, anyway – however you care to assess it.