Then vs Now...

Ideologies

Since mid-2022 I find myself witnessing the crumbling of the United States into warring factions just as bitterly divided as the North and South in 1861. The racism, misogyny, xenophobia, hatred, and violence that had been lurking under the surface since the 1960s has boiled up and taken over about half the population and half the states. The federal government is nonfunctional. The 99% corrupt corporate Democrats won't do what's necessary to win back their traditional working-class base: bring back good jobs, support labor unions, fund public education adequately, back off from the USA's world domination project, rebuild the crumbling infrastructure, enact free universal health care, establish a right to work at a living wage and to decent and truly affordable housing, tax the rich, let everyone vote, abolish the antidemocratic senate and the Electoral College, regulate banks and Wall Street and the big corporations and the Internet, bring back actual journalism (to replace today's shameless lying, "bothsidesism", and now AI-generated "news"), guarantee a secure retirement for everybody, cancel the personhood of corporations, regulate political campaign funding, regulate lobbying, un-privatize prisons and treat dysfunctional people in mental facilities instead of imprisoning them or putting them out on the street, etc etc etc. But instead, both political parties have let the private sector run wild and people are sick of it. They vote for Republicans because they are angry and Democrats have deserted them. If the 2022 midterm elections had deliver both the House and Senate to the Republicans, the Democrats will be locked out forever by gerrymandering, voter suppression, and other schemes. Meanwhile, Trump's Supreme Court is issuing a steady stream of astoundingly retrograde rulings on abortion, guns, reunion of church and state, environmental destruction, etc, that are welcomed by half the states and the rest are busy enacting laws to negate the rulings. Soon the states could find themselves with border-crossing controls, e.g. to catch women trying to obtain abortions or people trying to buy banned books or medications, or to block the influx of immigrants (or guns), and then how long before the pressure builds to break the USA up into USRA and USBA (Red and Blue)? (Maybe Red should be White)  Once again, I really did not see this coming. The 2024 elections will tell the tale: more dysfunction as in Biden's first term or Armageddon if Trump is elected and civil war if he's not. Anyway...

Work

(Speaking of those 50 years I worked, the whole time I was paying into Social Security and Medicare, and since at least the 1980s "conservatives" have been trying to take it away and put us all on "vouchers". Medicare didn't start until 4 years after I started working.)

It's also worth pointing out that most jobs in postwar decades did not require college degrees. The pay wasn't high, but neither were prices. Most families with only one parent working could afford a house or apartment and a car without going into debt. Higher paying jobs were there for college-educated people, but college was affordable then and students didn't face a lifetime of crushing debt upon graduation like they do now. It's hard to believe but many of the state and city universities were FREE, and even the most prestigious Ivy League colleges like Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, had tuition set low enough that a student could pay his/her way through by working (as I did).

Meanhwile many of the former working class jobs (cashiers, bank tellers, etc) have been virtually automated out of existence, and manufacturing jobs have mostly been outsourced to China. American kids growing up in the 21st Century will never have it as easy as my generation (War Babies) and the next one (Boomers) had it. The War Babies and Boomers were born into a country shaped by the New Deal; we benefitted from it for decades, and then now watch helplessly as it is all torn apart.

The military

According to an October 2017 Washington Post article, "it can be difficult for many Americans to encounter military families. Fewer than 1 percent of the population currently serve in uniform, and 7 percent are military veterans." (When I went to the Bronx DMV to renew my license in 2018 and get a Veteran stamp on it, I asked the lady did she get many veterans, she said I was the first.) Yet all we ever hear about in the mass media is heroism and sacrifice and Gold Star families, yet when soldiers are killed in some place you never even heard of before, like Niger, nobody asks "What the heck are they doing in NIGER???" Since the end of the draft in 1973, the military has has been the employment of last resort for the poor while affluent families never even think about it. Two different and totally separate worlds.

Syndromes and allergies

Similarly, kids weren't allergic to wheat, eggs, peanuts, and other common foods; they could eat anything. Also when I was young, I hardly ever saw young men who were bald; now it seems half of all males are bald by age 30. Probably it's a result of things that changed after the 1950s or 60s: toxins introduced into foods and the environment to increase corporate profits and/or the fact that countless electromagnetic waves are passing through our bodies 2/47… computer screens, WiFi, cell phones, cars with radar, etc, orders of magnitude more of all these, at more frequencies, with more power than when there was only radio and broadcast TV. The chemicals, pesticides, additives, industrial waste, and radiation that are everywhere can't be good for us. With all the crap we pump into the air, soil, and water, the world's species are disappearing faster than anybody can keep track of. Nothing like this has ever happened before in human history.

And now cell phones are going to have wireless earbuds — "airbuds" — kicking up the radiation another notch and practically embedding corporate messaging in your own bodies (nobody has mentioned this yet, but if a cell phone can transmit to your earbuds, so can anything else: "Buy", "Consume", "Obey"....)

It only occurred to me just now, but I'll bet they start coming out with "self-charging" cell phones, charged by microwaves broadcast from all the cell towers, so for the sake of total on-demand connectivity, we'll all slowly cook to death… And most people won't even mind!

When I was kid...

• Milk came in reusable glass bottles and had a layer of cream floating on top. Tomatoes and onions that you bought in a store were actuall good — tomatoes were red, tender, juicy, and delicious; onions didn't stink when you cooked them. Crops were not genetically engineered. There was no Roundup (although there was DDT). Meat wasn't full of antibiotics, arsenic, urine, pus, and ammonia and injected with liquid fillers to make chicken breasts the size of footballs. Ground beef wasn't mixed with Pink Slime and sawdust made from wood soaked in formaldehyde. When you cooked chicken or ground beef, the pan didn't fill up with foul-smelling liquid and boil the meat rather than sauteeing it. There used to be delicious cooking smells.

• Coca Cola came in reusable thick glass bottles, and the fun part about that was that the place of manufacture was indicated on the bottom. Bottles would be reused 10, 20, even 100 times. Sometimes we'd get an Arabic coke bottle. Also bottle caps were lined with a disk of cork. Kids would take out the cork piece and use it to stick the bottle cap to their T-shirt like a badge (I read that Trujillo used to do this when he was a kid, which is why people called him Chapitas, but not to his face). The thick bottles gave rise to the expression "Coke-bottle glasses" for thick eyeglasses. Later they started to sell sodas in cans, but you needed a can opener and the cans were made of steel so only very strong people could fold them in half.

• Hats (including baseball hats) used to come in sizes. So did socks!

• Air conditioning had been invented but nobody had it, not in their homes, or in schools, or in stores. At home, we had a big heavy black cast-iron oscillating fan, and would put ice in a pan in front of it to blow cool air. Didn't do much good, the temperature often went to 105º in the summer. Throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, movie theaters were pretty much the only places with air conditioning.

• Speaking of movie theaters, they used to be everywhere. Instead of watching movies on cell phones, people watched them on a gigantic screen, in darkness, with no distractions, a shared magical experience. The COVID pandemic and the Internet killed them off.

• Most products were made in the USA and had union labels, and were generally of good quality, built to last, and didn't stink or spew out toxic fumes. New shoes smelled good instead of like formaldehyde mixed with diesel fuel. Ditto for all products made of or containing rubber or glue. In the postwar years a lot of cheap junk was imported from Japan, but it wasn't toxic like today's Chinese imports.

• On the other hand, toothpaste tubes were made of lead, "glow in the dark" items like clock and watch dials — not to mention a lot of children's toys as well as the stick-on stars and planets and comets for their bedroom ceiling — were made with radium, and every shoe store had an X-ray machine where you could check the fit when trying on new shoes… they even had small ones for kids. X-rays were good for you then; my Mom was X-rayed once a week while she was pregnant with me.

• As a child I had mumps, measles, and chicken pox, which were all normal for children then. You guys had chicken pox too, Mommie took you to chicken-pox parties where all the kids could be exposed to it, to get it over with all at once. Nowadays mumps and measles are rare diseases that set off DEFCON 4 alerts and there are vaccines for them but millions of people believe the vaccines are an evil plot. The polio vaccine wasn't available until the mid-to-late 1950s; some of my friends in elementary school before that got polio.

• Telephones had dials and were connected with wires. Airplanes had propellers. Cars were made of metal and you opened them and started them with keys, and they had round headlights instead of devil eyes. Every make, model, and year was unique and easily identifiable. Furniture was made of natural nontoxic wood. Pennies were made of copper (except in 1943), nickels were made of nickel, and dimes, quarters, half dollars and dollars were made of silver (people used half dollar coins all the time until 1964, then they disappeared from circulation even though they are still being minted more than 50 years later). The Pledge of Allegiance (which we had to say in school every morning, along with Lord's Prayer and a Psalm) did not have "Under God" in it until 1954 (4th grade) and paper money did not say "In God We Trust" until 1957.

• Speaking of Psalms, I also know a lot of hymns and I'm not really sure why. I think they were sung in school as well as in church. Also, "Negro spirituals" and other colorful traditional Negro-theme songs such as "Mammy's Little Baby Loves Shōtnin Bread" and "Old Black Joe"; as Virginians, these (and of course our state song, "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny / There's where the cotton and the corn and taters grow / There's where the Darkies labor so hard for Old Massa / That's where this old Darkie's heart does long go") were considered an important part of our heritage, even though we were kept as isolated as possible from Black people.

• Indian-head pennies and buffalo nickels and standing-liberty quarters and half dollars were still in circulation. (The guy who designed the standing liberty half-dollar also did the Depression-era sculptures at the Bronx County courthouse.)

• Speaking of money, everything used to be paid for with cash, at least in stores (when my Mom and Dad were in the Navy, they were paid in two-dollar bills! Nobody wanted them so they were unloaded on government employees). Now, more and more, it's cards and cell phones; yet another way for Big Brother to know where you are and every single thing you buy. Plus, once cash is effectively phased out, there will be nothing you can do when the banks raise the interest and start charging a fee for every transaction. And every time you use your card or phone, you are at risk of having your info stolen and ALL your money along with it, something that doesn't happen with cash. Supposedly the new cards with chips are more secure, but I don't see how; you still have to enter your PIN. Cell phones are even worse because, unlike cards, they can be hacked into, giving the hacker (or NSA) access to your whole life. In fact, I think the whole purpose of cell phones is for companies and government agencies to keep track of everywhere go, everyone you talk to, everything you you buy. It disturbs when I go out, to see every single person either talking the cell phone or gazing intently into iit.

• Banks used to have long counters with lots of tellers and big lines. If you needed cash you had to get it from a bank teller. Ditto if you needed to deposit a check or anything else you do now online, or have done for you automatically. Tellers did other things too… For example, you could always trade in your paper money for silver. US paper money wasn't really money, it was only a certificate that could be redeemed in silver. When kids deserved a reward for doing something good, their parents would go to the bank to get them a silver dollar. Nowadays a typical bank might still have 6 or 8 teller windows, but rarely more than one teller working. In affluent neighborhoods they're phasing banks out altogether to save labor costs, i.e. increase profits and shareholder payout.

• I remember in the 1970s when the first ATMs appeared. In reality there was a teller upstairs. You put your deposit or withdrawal slip or whatever into a cannister and shot it up to the teller through a pneumatic tube, and you communicated through a little TV, and then got your cash or whatever back in the canister. This was the first step in getting us used to not having tellers.

• Similarly supermarkets typically had six or eight checkout counters with cashiers who rang up each item and bagged your groceries. Customers and cashiers were always friendly with each other and checkout was a pleasant experience. Now cashiers are being "cashiered" en masse and replaced by "self checkouts", for the same reason as bank tellers. When that happened at my local Foodtown a lady yelled at the manager, "If you want me to ring up my own groceries and bag them myself, you should pay me!" The other customers cheered. The elimination of customer-facing employees is only one of many demoralizing and desocializing features of the 21st Century. So far I have never used a self-checkout, no matter how long the single cashier line is, but I'm sure the day will come when I have no choice.

• When I was young — and you guys too — if you wanted to buy something you went to a store. There were stores everywhere, as there have been for thousands of years, like in Pompeii (which even had something like 40 takeout restaurants). But by the mid 20-teens they are disappearing. The big chains like Macys and Sears because of online shopping, and the small ones because of soaring commercial rents. Even Starbuckses are shutting down because the rent is too high. What will become of all those commercial spaces? Broadway is increasingly a street of empty storefronts.

• When I was a kid, there was also another way to shop: by catalog. The Sears catalog was the most famous, it was like a telephone book (if you remember what that is), and you could buy anything in it. We used it when we were in Germany; I bought my big f-hole guitar that way. My grandmother's house came from the Sears catalog. Other "everything" catalogs included Montgomery Ward, Hammacher Schlemmer, Spiegel. Specialty catalogs are still being mailed out — Lands End, LL Bean, Eddie Bauer, Company Store — but probably not for long. Then the trees can start to grow back (ha). Back in the day, the previous years' Sears catalogs were used for toilet paper in outhouses, not just in the country but in cities too — in NYC, apartment buildings had outhouses in their backyards until about 1900:

  https://www.6sqft.com/life-in-new-york-city-before-indoor-toilets/

• In cities, buildings were made of stone or brick, not glass and steel. Parts of Manhattan are completely unrecognizable now, like around Columbus Circle, nothing there now but unbelievably tall shiny misshapen towers, new ones sprouting up about once a week. The Empire State Building used to dominate the midtown skyline but now there's an ever-growing number of pencil-thin shiny luxury apartment buildings that tower over it. The Columbia University neighborhood was an affordable and diverse multiracial working-class neighborhood and now it's only for hedge fund managers or their college-age brats; ditto Harlem and (soon) Washington Heights. Skyscraper luxury condo buildings are going up everywhere, especially on 110th Street. Only recently (long after I moved away from the Columbia neighborhood) I see a massive luxury condo building – Claremont Hall — dwarfing Riverside Church, rising from the COURTYARD of Union Theological Seminary! "...a new landmark that seamlessly connects the academic and cultural tradition of Manhattan's West Side with enlightened contemporary living."

  La Rosita

• Back in the 60s and 70s, there were bodega-like food markets on the four corners of 110th and Bway that sold plátano, yuca, huge bags of rice, etc, because of the Puerto Rican and Dominican population south of 110th and east of Broadway. There were "Spanish" restaurants and lunch counters on Broadway like Ideal and La Rosita, and walking down Broadway towards 96th Street you could get café con leche on almost any block. By about 2000 it was impossible to find those any of those things — or those people! On Broadway at least; some still survived on Amsterdam and Columbus when I moved away 2012, only because the Frederick Douglass public housing project is nearby.

• Records were 10-inch 78rpm when I was little. A record album was a big fat book (similar to a photo album) with a bunch of 78s in it, each in its own stiff brown paper sleeve. For example a Beethoven symphony would come as an album of maybe six records (I should know, my dad had all of them and played them incessantly, conducting with his fork and shouting "Tremendous! Tremendous!"). All my dad's records were 78s. 45s didn't become the norm for singles until the early 1950s, and LPs weren't common until about 1960 (45rpm records first appeared in 1949; I have one from 1950; 33rpm LPs first appeared in 1948, but mainly for classical music at first). Also sheet music was a big deal, every town had a sheet-music store, even drug stores sold sheet music. More about records HERE.

• Vacuum tubes

  Radios and record players (and TVs too, but we didn't have one until I was 10) were full of vacuum tubes. When a tube went bad there was often no way to know which one, so you had to pull them all out and take them to a store that had a tube tester, test each tube until you found the broken one, buy a replacement, and then plug them all back in. When we moved to Arlington that was my job since the tube store was just a couple blocks away. Actually it was the drugstore.

• Drug store soda fountain

  In those days drugstores were everywhere; they sold not only drugs and toilet articles but also magazines, books, and candy, and they had lunch counters, booths, and soda fountains where you could get ice-cream sodas, sundaes, banana splits, cherry Cokes, hot dogs, grilled-cheese sandwiches, etc. They smelled really good inside, like vanilla. This was one of the main places where teenagers hung out after school. The Peoples Drug Store chain was ubiquitous in the DC area; it was pretty atmospheric; the soda fountain had a black marble countertop and stainless-steel revolving stools with red leather seats; the walls were dark wood with mirrors. The ceiling had thousands of "straw darts" hanging from it (drinking-straw covers con­verted to sticky missiles with spit and launched by blowing them from the straw itself). The bottom surfaces of the counter and stools were thick with gum wads.

  Peoples Drug DuPont Circle

  The drug stores in Virginia were segregated; the ones in DC weren't. There were sitins at the one near our house in Arlington in 1960-61 while I was in Germany... Sit-inners were harrassed by American Nazis with armbands and arrested by police. As recently as 1966, after the Army, I lived near a Peoples Drug Store in Washington DC at DuPont circle (21st and P Streets NW) and I was still taking tubes to the tube-tester. The building is still there but now it's a CVS. By the way, I once got a $5 ticket for jaywalking at this intersection.

• As recently as the 1980s, supermarkets packed your food in brown paper bags without handles; plastic bags didn't become standard until about 1990 and already they are choking the whole planet. (I will say, though, that it was pretty awkward carrying 6 or 8 big brown bags full of groceries home from the supermarket!)

• Public schools were much better than they are today. Teachers had secure jobs and pretty much made their own curriculum. They were respected in the community and school was mainly a pleasant experience for kids as well as teachers. In junior high school they still taught music and shop classes, driving and auto mechanics, also Latin (I don't remember if it was required but I took it in grades 7-10). I had year-long classes in woodworking, metalworking, plexiglass, and mechanical drawing. In metal shop we did blacksmith work; heating metal white-hot in a forge, pounding it on an anvil to make things out of it. There were also typing classes, but I learned that at home. And driving classes. And "home economics" for girls, but I knew some guys who signed up for it to meet girls. And Geography was a required subject.

• How people talked… It was much different then. For one thing, southerners had southern accents (even I had one that Mommy used to make fun of), New Yorkers had NYC accents with Brooklyn and Bronx variations, and also Jewish, Irish, Italian, etc; people in New Orleans had a distinct accent; people around Chesapeake Bay had Tidewater accents, people in Boston, etc etc... and now everybody talks the same way. You see people on the news in Mississipi after some flood or tornado and they have the same corporate way of talking that you hear on all the commercials. Ditto everyplace else. Black speech is still pretty distinctive, but a lot of Black people don't use it any more.

• Hitchhiking… Unheard of today but it was the main way I travelled in the late fifties through the late sixties. In JHS Ludwig and I used to hitchhike to McLean to buy records. I hitchhiked back and forth between Charlottesville and Arlington (111 miles) so my Mom could do my laundry (I'm not proud of it), sometimes I'd be picked up by a pervert and would spend the ride fending them off, other times by farmers in old beat-up pickup trucks. I remember one guy who was so damaged from being out in the sun all his life, his head and neck and ears looked like they'd been roasted, his ears were just crispy little sharp-edged slivers. I hitchhiked all over Germany while in the Army before I had a car. Even after the Army I remember hitchiking, for example Wendy and I hitchhiked to see Jude in Boston where she was going to summer school.

• Have I ever been shot? Once with a BB gun; some big kids were shooting at me when I was 8 or 9 and a BB lodged in my arm. I dug it out with my pocket knife. Another time a shotgun shell that exploded in a fire hit me in the butt; my grandmother dug out the pellets (see story). Another time I wasn't actually shot but almost… In the Army at the Grafenwöhr tank range I was on garbage duty in a deuce-and-a-half (big Army truck) picking up garbage and taking it to a huge burn pit. We were backed up to the edge of the burn pit along with 9 other big trucks, shoveling out the garbage, when a large amount .50-cal ammunition started going off… belts of M2 machine-gun ammunition, big heavy bullets flying in every direction. All 10 trucks took off like race cars!

• How about stabbed? Well, once I stabbed myself… Uncle Pete gave me a big double-edged dagger from Iraq curved like a scimitar, about 18 inches long with an obsidian handle and Arabic writing engraved on the blade. He said it had been a murder weapon. One day when I was about ten I was sitting on the kitchen counter, throwing it up in the air and trying to catch it and I missed and it went right into my thigh; you can still see some of the scar. I played with knives a lot as a kid, throwing them at trees, throwing them up and catching them by the handle, and whittling. And playing mumbledypeg with my friends.

• Did I ever fly an airplane? Yes! One time Howard Eskin took me up in the plane he flew (a small single-engine Cessna I think) and turned the controls over to me and I flew all over upstate NY for about an hour. Another time Peter and I went up with him and Peter flew the plane.

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