Jim Spencer wrote -

There can never (be) enough rules. The more rules, the more things stay in line.

Jim....be very careful with this line of reasoning. Taken too far, it can create more problems than it solves, mate. There was this German guy a few decades back who took precisely this (fairly simplistic) type of thinking too far, and things got way out of hand. Just saying.

John Godson - Yeah, I agree. Part of the fun of those things you mentioned is the fact that they're 'of their time' -  but that they can also be very funny to the modern viewer (for reasons their creators may never have actually intended) is not something that we ought to ignore, or pretend isn't the case. It's a part of their charm. It's possible to laugh with this stuff, not at it.

Just read this article by George Will that fits into this discussion.

The Decade Of Buying Happily

By George Will

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | "There was, too, a wonderful simplicity of desire. It was the last time that people would be thrilled to own a toaster or waffle iron."

      — Bill Bryson

What Thanksgiving is to gluttony, the three days after it are to consumerism — the main event. So, with Americans launching the Christmas season by storming the stores, let us recall when consumption had an exuberance remembered now only by those who experienced the 1950s.

Bill Bryson remembers. The author of 13 books (e.g., "A Walk in the Woods" and "A Short History of Nearly Everything"), Bryson's latest is "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," a memoir of growing up in Des Moines in the '50s, when downtown department stores — with white-gloved operators in the elevators and pneumatic tubes carrying money and receipts to and from cashiers — served the pent-up demands of a nation making up for consumption missed during the Depression and World War II.

In 1951, when the average American ate 50 percent more than the average European, Americans, Bryson says, controlled two-thirds of the world's productive capacity, owned 80 percent of the world's electrical goods, and produced more than 40 percent of its electricity, 60 percent of its oil and 66 percent of its steel. America's 5 percent of the world's population had more wealth than the other 95 percent, and Americans made almost all of what they consumed: 99.93 percent of new cars sold in this country in 1954 were U.S. brands.

By the end of the '50s, GM was a bigger economic entity than Belgium, and Los Angeles had more cars than did Asia — cars for a gadget-smitten people, cars with Strato-Streak engines, Strato-Flight Hydra-Matic transmissions and Torsion-Aire suspensions. The 1958 Lincoln Continental was 19 feet long.

And before television arrived (in 1950, 40 percent of Americans had never seen a television program; by May 1953 Boston had more televisions than bathtubs) America made almost a million comic books a month.

Consider what was new or not invented then: ballpoint pens, contact lenses, credit cards, power steering, long-playing records, dishwashers, garbage disposals. And remember words now no longer heard: icebox, dime store, bobby socks, panty raid, canasta (a card game).

In 1951 a Tennessee youth was arrested on suspicion of narcotics possession. The brown powder was a new product — instant coffee.

Fifties food was, Bryson reminds us, not exotic: In Iowa, at least, folks did not eat foreign food "except French toast," or bread that was not "white and at least 65 percent air," or "spices other than salt, pepper and maple syrup," or "any cheese that was not a vivid bright yellow and shiny enough to see your reflection in."

But unlike today, when everything edible, from milk to spinach, has its moment as a menace to health, in the '50s everything was good for you. Cigarettes? Healthful. Advertisements, often featuring doctors, said smoking soothed jangled nerves and sharpened minds.

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"X-rays," Bryson remembers, "were so benign that shoe stores installed special machines that used them to measure foot sizes."

In Las Vegas, downwind from some atomic weapons tests, government technicians used Geiger counters to measure fallout: "People lined up to see how radioactive they were. It was all part of the fun. What a joy it was to be indestructible." But, Bryson dryly notes, people knew without a warning label "that bleach was not a refreshing drink."

White House security precautions were so lax that on April 3, 1956, a somewhat disoriented Michigan woman detached herself from a White House tour and wandered through the building for four hours, setting small fires. When found, she was taken to the kitchen and given a cup of tea. No charges were filed.

The '50s did have worries. When a contestant on a TV game show said his wife's astrological sign was Cancer, the cigarette company sponsoring the show had the segment refilmed and her sign changed to Aries. You could get 14 years in an Indiana prison for instigating anyone under age 21 to "commit masturbation." And to get a New York fishing license, you had to swear a loyalty oath.

Nothing has changed more for the worse since the '50s than childhood. The lives of children were, Bryson remembers, "unsupervised, unregulated and robustly" physical.

"Kids were always outdoors — I knew kids who were pushed out the door at 8 in the morning and not allowed back in until 5 unless they were on fire or actively bleeding."

But as the twig is bent, so grows the tree: These children, formed by the '50s, grew up to be Olympic-class shoppers. They are indoors this Sunday, at malls.

The context is different for something like a film from the late 50s showing people freaking out on maryjane. But it annoys me when folks laugh at the films made by blacks in the 70s, just because they have men dressed like peacocks. The time was the time. A is A. Mark Twain was held in contempt by black kids when I was in high school because of Nigger Jim. Well, in Twain's time, there wasn't the kind of social consciousness we've come to understand. The accusation of racism doesn't fit when Twain lived in a completely different time in which some ideas had not been made acceptable to the general public.

The "porn" novels of the 50s had wonderful, lurid covers with some of the most ridiculous, over the top blurbs ever conceived. They ARE extremely funny, but also liberating. In a time when every statement didn't cut our sensitive souls to the bone, a little exploitative titillation is worth it's weight. And again, A is A. At least these novels never, ever profess to be anything than what they are, and they definitively give the buyer what they are looking for. There is nothing fake, faux, or "hidden". There's nobody trying to convince you shit is really prime rib. For all the naivety of the past, I prefer the straight-forward nature of the times. Yes, Japanese portrayed as yellow caricatures is ludicrous taken out of the context of the war years. That doesn't make people wounded psychologically and emotionally by Pearl Harbor any less honest in trying to deal with their fear.

It's images and ideas taken out of context which almost killed comics too, by the way. At least, the first time they died, at the hands of Dr. Werthem.

The fact that we need simpering intellectuals to point out how stupid people were "before" is really saying the ego "I" is better than anyone who existed because by god, I wouldn't have listened to the government or believed blacks were shiftless or dived under my desk to protect myself from an atomic blast. "I" am smarter than all those dolts.

Times may be easier now, in the sense that no one expects anyone to actually DO anything, because hell your parents will let you live at home indefinitely and there's all kinds of publications and balding douche bags to tell you that it isn't your fault, and that thugs who commit crime are justified in doing so because it's a hard world for a pimp.

Listen, I lived in the 70s as a kid and I played outside all day until nightfall. I was told not to approach strangers because they might hurt/rape/kill me. I didn't have to trust anyone except the German Shepherd who chased along beside my bike. I read comic books in the sun under the trees and I drank Coke in bottles and I waited for the Hulk television show and cartoons on Saturday mornings and Creature Features on Friday nights.

I wasn't bored, or stupid, or complacent, or selling out every thrill in my body before I'm thirteen because I have unlimited access to porn, or drugs, or dumb weak-minded girls who, even now, have not learned how to protect themselves.

I was a screwed up kid for the normal reasons, like shitty parents who divorced and bullies in school and an attention problem and intense shyness. A whole generation has learned that it wasn't their fault, that anything that happens is out of their hands. I'm part of it too, and I realize I made a mistake. It wasn't fate, it was an unfortunate lack of direction.

The access to information today is great, but without the need to work for it, what's the point of existence? If you never have to leave your home, if every human being you meet is trying to dismiss you are there in order to get on their cell phone or get back to Internet purchasing or check out the football game on the new 50 inch flatscreen that they are bitter they cannot afford but their friends can, how exactly is that a better world?

The way this culture has run itself into a Total Access culture bothers me, because human beings need endeavors and if their endeavors are a button click away, then what do they need to feel alive? That's right...another tinker toy that's smaller, cooler, or another vehicle that's bigger and has heated seats for their balls' enjoyment, and another pop star getting boned on a scandal tape.

Bullshit.

Robbie, no worries !