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May 29, 2006
A look back through rose-colored sun glasses
An “oldies station” graced my ride to work last week with “Jamie’s Got a Gun” by Aeros-mith, and I had to laugh.
It wasn’t because Joe Perry’s mother, Mary, was my gym teacher in high school and Joe was a little kid who hung out at times with my kid brother. It was more because the ageless guitarist is younger than I am, and I have a hard time accept-ing him as someone whose mu-sic is considered oldies.
The past for me is the ’60s and ’70s, and oldies are from the ’50s and have the words “Shing- a-ling” and “Doo-wop-doo-wadda-wadda” in the lyrics.
The past was so much better I thought as I passed through Shelton on Route 8.
Don’t we all notice that when we look back?
It was a simpler time, more easy going. Not as hard.
Remember when a mile-a-minute was fast? Boy, back then we were cooking with gas and everything was just hun-key dorey. Not like today at all.
We could hear the news at 6 and see the “film at 11.” And TV went off the air sometimes, on purpose, like every day.
There were only two kinds of coffee — hot and cold. Immi-grants meant us, and aliens were on Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and in Terry and the Pirates.
Milk came from contented cows, not mad ones, and Won-der Bread built strong bodies eight ways instead of the puffed up 12 we have now.
The only person we knew from Iraq was Ali Babba and his 40 thieves, and The Sheik was an old silent movie. We liked Ike, not Mike, but we didn’t like his sniveling VP. The big war was over and eve-ryone had a job.
Then my reminiscing burped.
We also had “Machine-Gunner Joe” McCarthy and his communist hunt in the name of national defense, and we all learned how to duck and cover while our parents built fallout shelters that wouldn’t have worked if we needed them.
Black people and women had few rights and fewer job oppor-tunities. And worker strikes were stopped with military force.
There were fewer divorces because even an abusive hus-band with a paycheck was bet-ter for a woman than being os-tracized by her town and having little or no government assistance to turn to.
And, of course, there was Korea, in case you forgot, and tensions in the Middle East.
But how about those ’60s and ’70s I thought.
Now there was a time.
There was free love and Ne-hru jackets, bell-bottoms and mini-skirts. (They invented mini-skirts when I was in Viet-nam, and I thought it was just part of my welcome home. Man, I loved mini-skirts).
We had Phil Ochs and “I Ain’t Marchin’ Any More” and Bob Dylan and “The Times They Are A Changin' ” and Janis and Jimi and the Moody Blues.
There was color TV that you could adjust from across the room, and TV dinners to eat while you watched “Bonanza.”
There were plenty of flower-power rallies to go to and meet women, and psychedelics, and 35-cent-a-gallon gas, and bra-burning, and free love. Did I mention free love. Did I men-tion mini-skirts?
Burp.
Of course there was the war in Vietnam and on TV, and we never had to wait until 11 to see the film, and there were meth monsters and speed freaks, and “OD” and “draft number” be-came household words.
There were missiles in Cuba and Nikita’s shoe tirade at the United Nations.
There were assassinations of a president and his brother and the most important man in our civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr.
And there was Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew making a charade out of the Bill of Rights and government ethics in the name of national defense.
And there was the National Guard at Kent State, and the Chicago Democratic Conven-tion and trouble in the Middle East.
Then I was at work in front of my computer screen check-ing the day’s stories on the wire.
There were drugs, ethics breaches by politicians, aliens and immigrants, missiles in Iran, civil rights abuses in the name of national defense, vio-lence in the Middle East, and. of course, war.
I guess things haven’t changed that much. The “good old days,” always look better in retrospect.
But the sad thing that occurs to me as I pore over the wire is that we continue to make the same mistakes, and continue not to learn a damn thing from them.
John Hourihan is wire edi-tor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6207 or via e-mail at jhouri-han@ctpost.com
Posted by todd on May 29, 2006 6:24 PM
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