I’ve read bits and drabs from a book on American Popular Culture, years 1830 (ie: the rise of Jacksonian Democracy) on to publication date. \u00c2\u00a0Something that struck me in my breezy browsing: Baseball. \u00c2\u00a0What accounts for its popularity in the late 19th century? \u00c2\u00a0In a rapidly changing country, it tapped into a nostalgic yearnings to a simpler time —<\/p>\n
— So we have a perpetual popular culture artifact that feeds and refeeds into nostalgic yearnings from its very inception.<\/p>\n
Likewise, I was reading a recent issue of either The Nation or In These Times, and ran into an odd comment which I took the note of the quotation, but have lost the article it comes to. \u00c2\u00a0Here it is:<\/p>\n
“played the mom on the Wonder Years, the quintessential television program about the halcyon days of apple pie America that Tea Partiers pine for<\/em>”<\/p>\n That’d be 1968. \u00c2\u00a0Or about then. \u00c2\u00a0To 1972, I think? \u00c2\u00a0Or, in the lexicon of how we define this “The Short Sixties”. \u00c2\u00a0When everything was going crazy in America. \u00c2\u00a0And, Granted, at this point in time for most of Middle America, the Revolution was being watched on the television and guarded against, but this is the age that conservative bemoaners wail against. \u00c2\u00a0So I’m wondering — since when did it slide into the same mind frame as the 1950s?<\/p>\n Probably still not there for Representative Gingrey:<\/a><\/p>\n In a\u00c2\u00a0speech Monday<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0on the House floor, Gingrey stressed his continued support for the Defense of Marriage Act \u00e2\u20ac\u201d which defines marriage as only union between a man and a woman \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and suggested that children need to be carefully taught about the traditional roles of their genders:<\/em><\/p>\n GINGREY: You know, maybe part of the problem is we need to go back into the schools at a very early age, maybe at the grade school level, and have a class for the young girls and have a class for the young boys and say, you know, this is what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s important.This is what a father does that is maybe a little different, maybe a little bit better\u00c2\u00a0than the talents that a mom has in a certain area. And the same thing for the young girls, that, you know,\u00c2\u00a0this is what a mom does, and this is what is important from the standpoint of that union which we call marriage.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/em><\/p>\n Who’ll be guarding against 60s re-revisionism in much the same way, oh, we have to battle Reagan Revisionism<\/a>.<\/p>\n Actually, interestingly I watched clips of the new “Fall TV lineup”. \u00c2\u00a0There was a sitcom set in “1991”, using Vanilla Ice as a backdrop to set a very specific time frame. \u00c2\u00a0It’s promoted as “A Time before Internet Porn”, (and a bunch of jokes that seem to set the boy in the mold of the sitcom character of the era — Bud Bundy) and — whether this is the new “80s Show” of tedium short lived contrivance or the new “70s Show” of retro – Happy Deals nostalgia cycling, I guess it is a new cycle…<\/p>\n (Never mind the harsh realities of the time period of that 70s Show<\/a>)… (I think this is the video I want?<\/a> \u00c2\u00a0Close enough for now.)<\/p>\n … which, on tv would have started when the earliest tv stars of the late 1940s and early 1950s brought back 1930s Vaudeville! \u00c2\u00a0For the nostalgic yearnings back to the halycon carefree years of the 1930s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve read bits and drabs from a book on American Popular Culture, years 1830 (ie: the rise of Jacksonian Democracy) on to publication date. \u00c2\u00a0Something that struck me in my breezy browsing: Baseball. \u00c2\u00a0What accounts for its popularity in the late 19th century? \u00c2\u00a0In a rapidly changing country, it tapped into a nostalgic yearnings to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12258"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12261,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12258\/revisions\/12261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}