I’ve read bits and drabs from a book on American Popular Culture, years 1830 (ie: the rise of Jacksonian Democracy) on to publication date.  Something that struck me in my breezy browsing: Baseball.  What accounts for its popularity in the late 19th century?  In a rapidly changing country, it tapped into a nostalgic yearnings to a simpler time —

— So we have a perpetual popular culture artifact that feeds and refeeds into nostalgic yearnings from its very inception.

Likewise, I was reading a recent issue of either The Nation or In These Times, and ran into an odd comment which I took the note of the quotation, but have lost the article it comes to.  Here it is:

“played the mom on the Wonder Years, the quintessential television program about the halcyon days of apple pie America that Tea Partiers pine for”

That’d be 1968.  Or about then.  To 1972, I think?  Or, in the lexicon of how we define this “The Short Sixties”.  When everything was going crazy in America.  And, Granted, at this point in time for most of Middle America, the Revolution was being watched on the television and guarded against, but this is the age that conservative bemoaners wail against.  So I’m wondering — since when did it slide into the same mind frame as the 1950s?

Probably still not there for Representative Gingrey:

In a speech Monday on the House floor, Gingrey stressed his continued support for the Defense of Marriage Act — which defines marriage as only union between a man and a woman — and suggested that children need to be carefully taught about the traditional roles of their genders:

GINGREY: You know, maybe part of the problem is we need to go back into the schools at a very early age, maybe at the grade school level, and have a class for the young girls and have a class for the young boys and say, you know, this is what’s important.This is what a father does that is maybe a little different, maybe a little bit better than the talents that a mom has in a certain area. And the same thing for the young girls, that, you know, this is what a mom does, and this is what is important from the standpoint of that union which we call marriage.”

Who’ll be guarding against 60s re-revisionism in much the same way, oh, we have to battle Reagan Revisionism.

Actually, interestingly I watched clips of the new “Fall TV lineup”.  There was a sitcom set in “1991”, using Vanilla Ice as a backdrop to set a very specific time frame.  It’s promoted as “A Time before Internet Porn”, (and a bunch of jokes that seem to set the boy in the mold of the sitcom character of the era — Bud Bundy) and — whether this is the new “80s Show” of tedium short lived contrivance or the new “70s Show” of retro – Happy Deals nostalgia cycling, I guess it is a new cycle…

(Never mind the harsh realities of the time period of that 70s Show)… (I think this is the video I want?  Close enough for now.)

… which, on tv would have started when the earliest tv stars of the late 1940s and early 1950s brought back 1930s Vaudeville!  For the nostalgic yearnings back to the halycon carefree years of the 1930s…

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