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From the Inbox... How true is this? | by kc5sdy | 2008-04-28 07:14:11 |
| Mostly glurge. |
by werehatrack |
2008-04-28 10:18:09 |
Like the Reagan-era "welfare mom" and "welfare Cadillac" tales that were used as the propaganda basis for the dismantling of several safety-net programs, there are true (usually shallow) roots for certain of them...but most are made up from whole cloth.
For me, the one about Jack having the shotgun in the rack of his vehicle in 1958 is simply ludicrous. If Jack was a faculty member, he'd have been a very poor hunter if he hadn't bagged any quail (and what did he do with his dog?), so he'd have stopped by the house to drop off the birds...and wouldn't have had a shotgun in a rack; the stereotype of the rack of guns in the back window of the pickup truck was one that became a real reflection of common usage only much later, when you could actually get the seat back far enough in the cab to allow driving the truck comfortably without having your head against the back window. Yes, the Sears catalog listed a gun rack for pickups in those days, but the more practical place to mount it was behind the seat, where the rack kept the gun up out of the mud on the floorboards. Mounted in front of the rear window, it quickly became an unutterable literal pain in the neck. In a car, you didn't mount a gun rack unless you were a deputy sheriff; your rifle or shotgun went under a blanket in the back seat where nobody would see it and try to steal it. (The tales that said crime was not a big problem in 1958 are greatly exaggerated; this I can state from personal recollection.)
Jack clearly wouldn't have been a student; very few students drove a car or truck to school in those days. In the neighborhoods where I and my brothers grew up, the High School campuses did not even have a student parking lot, and the amount of on-street parking in the area was minimal. Of course, most students lived within walking distance of their schools, too; widespread busing of students from socioeconomic groups that might be able to afford a car for the kid was still in the future.
I view these as being largely "1958 idealized vs 2008 unusual horror story"; a more useful set of comparisons would have been 1958 unusual horror story vs 2008 unusual horror story; the paranoia about teen gangs, drug addiction, homosexuals, communists, racial pollution (in many areas) and a variety of other bogeymen was every bit as much of a problem in 1958 as the hatreds fed by the irrationalities of today. The 21st century has no monopoly on superstitiously and culturally derived idiocies; the nature of what makes up the group of horrors for any given time period will change, but the fact that there is a group of artificially inflated "terrors" that Everyone Must Fear remains a constant.
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Not so... | by azander | 2008-04-28 11:39:14 |
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Yup, in 1980 in Wyoming. | by werehatrack | 2008-04-28 12:43:37 |
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