Seemingly Simple

We hear the phrase all the time: It was a simpler time.  Things were very different back then.  Back then can refer to anything from 20 to 100 years ago these days.  But, for the most part, we do live in a different world than mere decades ago.  One easy way to compute and visualize the differences is to simply turn on the TV.  As a culture, we seem to be fond of looking at family sit-coms from the 50s and 60s as a way to gauge social change.  The black and white images of squeaky clean 50s families with perfectly coifed mothers and business-suited fathers seem ridiculous by today's family units.  Take the color out of TV and we find a land where nobody is gay, neighborhoods are lily-white, and the language...oh the language is ever so proper.  These Pleasantvilles weren't always so peaceful and perfect.  But the arch of early TV sitcoms is both predictable and benign compared to today's fare.  Sometimes, while watching TV these days, I imagine myself a 10-year-old again watching television with my 11-year-old sister and my parents.  I replace the 1957 show with one from today and wonder what my family's reaction would be to the plot line, the language, or the characters of the show.  In moments like these, it's fairly easy to see how far we've come.

I guess this is one of the luxuries of growing older.  We have the benefit of historical perspective that younger audiences do not.  In fact, it recently came to my attention that many Millenials do not recognize the photos of some of the most well-known figures of the past.  A friend of mine who teaches Freshman composition recently reported that the all but two students in one of her classes could not identify a picture of Malcolm X.  Now, I don't know what to attribute this to because, in California, where I spent the majority of my teaching career, most kids had read Malcolm's autobiography or at least seen the Spike Lee film based on it.
If we take the term "simpler time" it could be argued that today is literally a simpler time because the vast majority of folks in this culture do not read books anymore and depend on questionable sources for everything from their daily news to the weather and staying "on trend."  That they are more gullible and less well-informed seems obvious.  One has only to look at the mob behavior at Black Friday shopping events to see this in all its consumeristic glory.
I recently saw the new George Clooney directed film Sururbicon.  Despite its awful reviews, I wanted to see how the dark underbelly of this "simpler time" was translated to the screen.  After all, it had a script that the Cohen brothers originally wrote and seemed ambitious in its intention.  True, the film tries to do too much, but symbolically it cuts through the aura of cleanliness that inflates the era and depicts much of the ugliness that accompanied the racial hatred and duplicity of the time.
I'll bet some of the cocktail party chatter of the early 60s included a longing for the simpler times of the 20s.