America gets erased more easily than we suspect. Erased and redrawn. We are always promised that what comes after will be better than before, but lately I don’t believe that. By now I expected computers to solve so many of our previous problems, but there were so many more added from the law of unintended consequences it would seem to me we’ve gone backwards, not forwards.
One of the worst things you can do is to turn on television and watch a movie from the early 1960’s. Especially if it takes place in some urban setting. You see the cars made of heavy steel, US made cars, big behemoths of automobiles, heavy, substantial, sleek. In the background you see prices, the thirty-five cent gasoline gallon, or prices in a diner listing a full breakfast for less than two bucks. Cigarettes advertised at a quarter a pack. Even movies from the later sixties, 1968 and “The French Connection” you see things long gone, pay phones, table service in a fine dining restaurant, men in hats and suits traversing the pavement walkways in the middle of a mid-week day. Coats and ties, and finely polished dress shoes.
There is something awfully quaint about those films from that era. Even when they film outside of a major city you see wide open spaces that today are housing developments as far as one can see. Somehow movies of that era filmed out West always want to show the single lone gas station all alone in the vast expanse of space, somewhere out between LA and Phoenix, or LA and Las Vegas.
An old Clint Eastwood movie of the time shows him escorting a prisoner back East and facing trouble from the mob who doesn’t want his prisoner to testify in a trial. From the walk-up to buy plane tickets to the way you pay for tickets, and just walk onto a plane absent any and all security, even hauling a criminal in cuffs, well, it is a time capsule of a much different era. Everyone boarding the plane has a coat and tie, or dress. Not a single person boards in pajamas, or slippers, looking as if they just got out of bed and decided to board the plane unexpectedly.
We lost drive-in movies along the way, we had a nice drive-in in Timonium, Maryland near where I grew up. And of course the whole group of us that hung together and went on dates together all went to the drive-in on Friday nights. Liquor in tow. We’d park on those cold fall nights, wind the hand crank to get the windows down so the speaker could be held in place when we ratcheted the window back up. Then drink, eat subs or pizza we’d brought with us, and more than once we fell asleep during the second of three. features. Waking up late into the night in a panic realizing “Oh Shit” “Your dad is going to kill me, getting you home at two AM”, I’d say to my used to be girlfriend, now wife.
Hotels and an office park now sit where we used to watch the big screen, neck, drink, and enjoy our youth. You really can’t explain a drive-in to kids today. Mainly because to kid’s today the very idea of leaving the house to even see a movie is a thing of the past. No one goes out to the movie theater anymore really, unless it is some blockbuster film. The comic book aficionados will go out for the big new superhero fare, and adults will go out for the big movie on the creator of the nuclear bomb.
Mostly kids want to stay home and see a new film on the biggest screen in the house. Everyone with real cash has a movie theater in their home. Hell I’m as middle class as it gets and I know at least three people with in-home theaters, actual small movie theaters built into their oversized home. Why go out and see a movie at the theater when you have a room upstairs that provides the same experience?
I breezed through a few airports on a business trip and noticed what wasn’t there. I guess that is actually impossible, to see what isn’t there. But I looked specifically for pay phones and there were none. For a generation that grew up with the rotary dial and was just amazed at the push button princess telephone, well, there is an entire generation of people who can’t imagine that land lines are fully a thing of the past. I know when we moved to Florida some 18 years ago we didn’t bother to install one, we could see they were a throw back to a time that no longer existed.
I did the same with “shoe shine” stands at the airport. Went through two huge terminals and never saw a shoe shine stand. Very few wear real dress shoes anymore, I guess the shoe shine stand has just about disappeared. That used to be an airport staple. Who didn’t fly into a city for a job interview and feel better about their prospects after getting a real nice shine put onto their shoes? I almost said wing tips, but I’m not quite that old. Sure I remember wing tips, I have a pair somewhere left in the closet I only wear at funerals. But wing tips go back just a bit before my time. I caught the last gasp, which is how I have come to own a pair. Got married in the pair I have, that was forty years ago. Black, looked great with the tux, I hated those patent leather shiny ones.
We got microwaves and computers that can speed up wait times to an instant. But somehow also cause a greater anxiety. We stand and tap, tap, tap our feet waiting. As if the two minutes to heat our left-over lunch is two minutes too long. When back in 1960 you had to stick the sandwich and fries into the oven and wait for ten minutes.
The computer makes everything quicker and easier, but also creates anxieties.
I feel sorry for all those in the younger generation that lost the “float”, every company that gives them a loan today requiring they also add “bank withdrawal”. Kids today would laugh if I told them that I used to be so broke I’d write out a check to pay a bill and then immediately rip off the numbers across the bottom. As if they got ripped off from the book of checks when I took them out of the pack.
If you ripped off the computerized numbers at the bottom, even just a little, say four digits, then the check would have to be “hand cleared” at the bank of the company cashing the check. Which would take two extra days. Which was two extra days I could spend trying to get enough money into the account to make sure the payment cleared and didn’t bounce. Today with automatic withdrawal on a certain date if you have insufficient funds you are in a heap of trouble.
My “check ripping” means of floating funds worked for those lean years.
In those old 1960’s movies one bumper weighed more than entire cars today. The late 1950’s cars still on the road in an “Easy Rider”, or “Bullitt” had big conal points simulating airplane design, and sometimes wings to make you think you could drive those cars into space. Those were some fierce bumpers. Last year driving home late from the Fort Lauderdale airport after a long flight from the West Coast I switched lanes at an inopportune time and tour the front “bumper” up something awful on the Audi my wife owns. The “bumper” all plastic and front end. Just changed lanes at the exact time those plastic lane dividers started somewhere in Boca Raton, the wrong time to decide to move over into the fast HOV lane. That bumper disintegrated from those plastic strands and just shredded. A 1950’s bumper would have taken out every plastic “pole” and made mincemeat out of them, and been unscathed. In fact those plastic “poles” might have just added some shine to the chrome on one side.
Instead the piece of plastic shit they make for cars today lost the entire right side of the front and fender and spent six months at the body shop before they could finish the repairs and return the car. When we did pick the car up the center acted as if we were fortunate that it only took six months to fix.
I read recently where the new “hot item” in the finest New York restaurants that everybody wanted and were grabbing up were matchbooks. The hostess now guarding this newly introduced souvenir with one eye so people didn’t grab up too many. Until I saw the article in the “New York Post” I had forgotten about match books. In my youth they were a staple of every bar and restaurant in town. I’d find them on my older brother’s bureau with phone numbers, names, and notes scribbled inside.
Why they brought back the matchbook at a time when no one smokes anymore I don’t know, you certainly don’t need them for a vape pen. Perhaps the new pot laws have made them a sought after item. But I do recall a time when you could open a drawer at home in the kitchen and see matchbooks collected from every fine restaurant in town.
Every now and then when the wife goes to bed early she will wander through the living room and catch me watching an old WC Fields movie on TV. She will roll her eyes and ask why I’m watching “that old crap”. She doesn’t get it. First, WC Fields cracks me up just speaking, just hearing his voice. But second it is the scenery, the world long gone. Five cent coffee at the diner. A “super market” that isn’t self-serve. You actually go to a counter and order and a clerk runs from place, to place adding your requests to the bag. How comically inefficient.
No one wears fine leather shoes that require a shine anymore, in fact everyone has some shoe they never have to tie, the back is designed so even a laced sneaker is a slip-on. No one goes out the door in a suit anymore, it is all casual wear, the boss in a polo shirt displaying a private country club logo where they’d never allow you entrance.
A printer at Staples costs something like fifty-five dollars. When it stops working you throw out what seems to be an item easily repaired and just get a new one. As the rates for a repairman greatly exceed the cost of new. Go figure. Everything made so cheaply that we live in a disposable world.
There are at least three generations who sit in the passenger seat of your car and see the cigarette lighter hole and think it was designed to plug in a phone charger. To tell you the truth I’d have to go look at the car to see if it has a cigarette ash tray or not. I don’t think it does. I didn’t notice they disappeared the same way the old vent windows did forty years earlier.
Our computerized age is faster. Whether or not it is better, well, some of us older Americans would like to put that up for debate.
Seems to me we have the entire repository of life’s knowledge now in the palm of our hands. Inside every cell phone the answers to all questions, all of the accumulated wisdom of the ages right in our sweet little hand.
And if you ask an old curmudgeon like me I’d tell you that at the same time we have the dumbest ass generation that ever lived at the very same time.
Because anyone who would fall for all this “Woke” crap, DEI, CRT, is just dumber than my sphincter.