My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #32, March 21, 1997

NEW AND IMPROVED

After writing two columns about how much better things were when I was young, I'm afraid you'll think I'm turning into an old foof, harrumphing like George Will or something. The time has clearly come for me to tell you how I think the world is, in many ways, better than it was when I was a kid.

You see, I remember polio. We had swimming pools available to us (for that matter, we had Lake Michigan available to us), but we didn't go swimming when I was little, because our mothers were scared we'd catch polio. I knew kids whose lungs didn't work because of it. Since that was a time before respirators, they lived inside "iron lungs" that looked depressingly like coffins. I knew kids who'd never run and jump again. The polio vaccine liberated us to live a normal life, to have pleasantly unhygienic fun again.

I remember when, if you were in a car wreck, or if you had a heart attack, the odds were that you would die on the spot. It was before the days of EMTs and paramedics and rescue squads and airlifts to hospitals.

I remember the cold war in a deeply personal way, because we kids from the 1950's were scared to death that atomic bombs would be dropped on us. We were taught in school to duck under desks when the warning sounded--although we strongly suspected that that wouldn't do us a heck of a lot of good . I remember how scary it was when the Russians sent up Sputnik--if they could do that, how easy would it be for them to send missiles?

I remember weekends, and weeks, spent on the road between Michigan and New Jersey, long before there were divided highways. There were no road signs telling you what towns were coming up, and how many miles away they were, and whether there were gas stations there, or restaurants. Heck, I remember there not being any restaurants or gas stations for long, long stretches. That was also before the states had thought of putting rest stops along the highways. So naturally, I also remember us really little kids scampering into bushes at the side of the roads because we couldn't hold out until the next gas station came along.

I remember America before pizza. It was an America that specialized in bland food--Wonder bread (air, water, flour and sawdust in equal proportions, I do believe), peanut butter, baloney sandwiches, hotdogs, horrible canned spaghetti, and "American" cheese (so called, I think, because nobody but Americans and dogs would eat it).

Hardly anyone ever went out to eat. We carried our lunches to school, and our dads mostly carried their lunches to work. Eating out was something we did on a birthday or some other really special occasion--prom nights, and such. In the early 1950's, pizza, formerly known only to Italian restaurants in the big cities, was only just becoming commonplace in the hinterlands. Oriental restaurants were just becoming available in Grand Rapids as well as Chinatown. In the 60's and 70's, we discovered Mexican food, and made salsa the best-selling condiment, over ketchup which had long reigned supreme.

Yuppies may not have done much else useful for the world, but they have dramatically improved our food life. With their appreciation for fine pastas, carrot cake and cheesecake, and their preference for whole-grain breads and bagels and fresh fruits and vegetables year-round, they changed restaurants and grocery stores, maybe forever.

I remember an America that treated you differently depending on whether you were born male or female. The Help Wanted section listed Jobs for Women and Jobs for Men, and the jobs for women were awful--low pay, low prestige, and hard work. When Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor graduated first in her class from Stanford Law School, she could only get a job as a law clerk, while the men behind her were snapped up as associates by prestigious law firms. It didn't matter how bright and talented a woman was--she was expected to stay at home, have babies, and take care of her husband and children. If women had to work, it was understood that it was only until they found a man to take them away from all that. A whole lot of brains and talent got wasted in those days.

A more minor point, perhaps, is that when I was growing up, in Michigan, in the dead of winter, when the snow was up past your knees, and the wind chill was 40 below zero, females still had to wear skirts. (My sister, the only female in the city planning program at Michigan State University, had to get a special dispensation from the Dean of Women to wear slacks when she was out field-checking.) If the sixties did nothing positive except give us pants suits, they would still have been worth it.

I also remember living in an America that was profoundly unjust to black people. Again, a whole lot of brains and talent were being wasted because the educational and job opportunities for blacks were so limited. The civil rights revolution was a start in the right direction, giving blacks at least nominal equality before the law. Because of it, a large percentage of the black population had become part of the middle class by the 1970's. Our race relations leave much to be desired, but they are still a lot better than they were when people were threatening to kill Jackie Robinson for breaking the color barrier in the major leagues.

As a magazine junkie, I look back with horror at a world before Mad Magazine (I was 10 when its first issue appeared), before Washington Monthly, before Utne Reader. There were no hilarious press bloopers ("Late Bus Coordinator Remembered") in the "Lower Case" section of the Columbia Journalism Review because there was no Columbia Journalism Review. There was no Liberal Opinion Week, or Rolling Stone.

Then there's the gadget revolution. After all, I remember life before microwave ovens. Before fax machines. Before computers. Heck, I even remember when the electric typewriter was a new concept--I was a secretary then, and hadn't realized how much effort the clunky old Remingtons took until I got an electric typewriter.

And, of course, I once lived without the internet. How, I can't imagine.

Another way the world has gotten better, I think, is in its music. Bill Haley and Elvis opened us stiff-rumped middle class white folks up to rhythm in a new way. But the Beatles began a revolution in musical form and content. They liberated us from the constraining A,A,B,A, verse, verse, chorus, verse form forever, making possible such free-form but elegant songs by later artists as "Stairway to Heaven," and "Bohemian Rhapsody." And they made all ideas fair game for song content.

When I was growing up, most of the songs on the "hit parade" were Moon-June-Love-Dove sorts of songs. True, we also had a cultural treasure trove of songs that included the witty lyrics of Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin. (My mother was horrified that at the age of 7 I was belting out some of the more risque of these.) But the hit songs were uniformly dopey love songs, all capable of being dramatized in sweet little romantic vignettes on TV's "Your Hit Parade" (a show that was unable to cope with "Wake Up, Little Susie"). The Beatles started something new when they gave us hit songs like "Eleanor Rigby," and "She's Leaving Home, "A Day in the Life," and "Nowhere Man."

Since then we've had hit songs about Vietnam ("Goodnight, Saigon," "Born in the USA"), about the fall of the Berlin Wall ("Right Here, Right Now," "Winds of Change"), about the hypocrisy and emptiness of the British ruling classes ( "Anarchy in the UK"), about child abuse ("Luka"), about mass murder ("I Don't Like Mondays," "Jeremy"), about the Irish troubles ("Sunday, Bloody Sunday"). And those are just the hits. No topic is off limits for popular music anymore.

Look at the songs by just one of my favorite bands, XTC. They sing about the cold war ("Living through Another Cuba"), about fending off groupies ("Another Satellite"), about oblivious parents of dangerous children ("No Thugs in Our House"), about censorship ("Books Are Burning"), about Britain's unbecoming bloodthirstiness during the Falklands War ("War Dance"), about stultifying middle-class life ("Respectable Street"). And at the same time, nobody can top them for ditsily blissful love songs, like "Mayor of Simpleton," and "Then She Appeared."

Does this beat "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" and "Shangri-La" and "Catch a Falling Star"? You bet.

Maybe the world IS going to hell in a handbasket in many ways, but, you know, I still like it a lot. In many ways, it really is a New Improved Version.

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