Showing posts with label The Rural Purge in Television. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Rural Purge in Television. Show all posts

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Two random items. Andy Griffith and Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift

On "X", fka "Twitter" a man who was the father to a large family of daughters (it was either 7 or 9), and who is very conservative, posted an item expressing relief for Taylor Swift.

His points were really good.

Populist right commentators are all up in arms about Swift right now, for reasons that are darned near impossible to discern.  It seems to stem from her expressing support for Democratic candidates in the past, including Joe Biden in 2016.  Well, guess what, she has a right to do that.  You have a right to ignore it. 

She also expressed support for abortion being legal.  I feel it should be illegal.  That doesn't mean she's part of a double secret left wing conspiracy.

But, and here's the thing, there are real reasons to admire her, or at least her presentation, and the father in question pointed it out.  He'd endured taking his daughters to Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, "Lady Gaga" etc., and found them disturbing.

Indeed, they are.

Miley Cyrus went from a child actress to being a freakish figure posed nude on a ball, looking like she was a meth addict who was working in a strip club.  Ariana Grande has at least one song that's out right graphic about illicit sex.  Lady Gaga has made a career out of being freakish, until she couldn't any longer, and like Madonna is another woman who was the product of Catholic Schools who took to songs that are abhorrent in terms of Christian, let alone Catholic, morals.

Swift, in contrast, can only be criticized a bit for dressing semi provocatively on stage, but only somewhat so. Off-stage, she's always very modestly dressed.  Indeed, she's a throwback, with her ruby red lipstick and classic nearly 1940s appearance.

And in terms of relationships, it's noted that she's dating a football player.

Now, we don't know what their private lives are like, but they're admirably keeping them private.  It's hard to know what Swift's views are on most issues.  And we really don't need to.  But in their visible relationship, made visible to us only because of media fascination, they're quite proper.  As the poster noted, the football star is "courting" her.

It's not that there's nothing to see here.  There's nothing to see here which any conservative in their right mind wouldn't have an absolute freak out about.  They're behaving exactly the way in public that supposedly Christian conservatives want dating couples to do.  No piercings, no weird tattoos, no scanty clothing.

Which would all suggest all the angst is about something else, and what that is probably about is the secret knowledge that huge numbers of real conservatives can't stand Donald Trump and won't vote for him.

The Andy Griffith Show

I was at lunch two days ago at a local Chinese restaurant, and across the way an all adult family was discussing the plot of the prior night's Andy Griffith Show rerun.  It struck me that that may not have happened since the 1960s.

It's interesting. 

The Andy Griffith Show went off the air before the Great Rural Purge in Television, but not my much.  It ran from 1960 to 1968.  It was consistently focused on the rural South, and it felt like it depicted the 1950s, which it never did, save for the fact that what we think of as the 60s really started in about 1955 and ran to about 1964.  Indeed, while the show was in tune with the times in 1960, it really wasn't in 1968.

But that in tune with the times is what strikes me here.  The family was speaking of it as if it was a currently running show, not like it was something from 60 years ago.  That suggests that in some ways people have groped their way back in the dark to idealizing the world as it was depicted then, rural, lower middle class, devoid of an obsession with sex (although it does show up subtly in the show from time to time), and divorce a rarity.

Now, the world wasn't prefect in 1960 by any means.  But the show didn't pretend to depict a perfect world, only one that was sort of a mirror on the world view of its watchers.  To some degree, that world view had returned.

Epilog

The Taylor Swift story also appears on the most recent entries for City Father and Uncle Mike's Musings, both of which are linked in on this site.

Friday, September 16, 2022

Saturday, September 16, 1972. Premier of the Bob Newhart Show.

Cast of The Bob Newhart Show.

The Bob Newhart Show premiered on CBS.  One of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, it would run only until 1978.

I'm actually fairly surprised, as I well recall the show and would have thought that it premiered a little later than 1972.  Having said that it has always, in my memory, seemed very early and mid 1970s, not late 1970s.  My family watched it regularly.

The show was set in Chicago at a time just after the television Rural Purge which would feature a lot of television comedies set in mid-sized Midwestern cities. WKRP In Cincinnati, for example, was set, obviously, in Cincinnati. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in Minneapolis.


Earlier that same week, on September 14, the nostalgic The Waltons commenced airing.  While fondly remembered, I never liked it.  I really dislike Spencer's Mountain, which is based on the same source material.

We didn't watch The Waltons, but even back then I had the feeling I ought to like it.  I never did and never have.  It always, even in the 1970s, had the feel of a show filmed in the 1970s, with the look of the 1970s, trying to be about the 1930s.  It ran until 1981.  Additionally, the set and the fact that it was tapped made it impossible to suspend awareness that you were, in fact, watching it in the 1970s.

The show was unusual in that it had a rural setting at a time in which most television shows did not.  It was also unusual in that it presented a very clean, romanticized, look at the Great Depression, something that was well within living memory of many of the viewers.  In this fashion, it contrasted with the earlier Spencer's Mountain, which was centered on desperation.   Both were based on the work of Earl Hamner Jr. who had grown up in Depression era Virginia.  Hamner died in 2016 at the age of 92.

FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt reviewed a draft of Bob Woodward's news story on Watergate by telephone and confirmed an anonymous tip that money from Maurice Stans had been used to finance the break in of the Watergate Hotel.  Felt did so undercover, using the odd and somewhat perverted cover name Deep Throat.

Monday, October 25, 2021

Monday October 25, 1971. The Recognition of the People's Republic of China, The Electric Company and The Rural Purge

On this day in 1971 the People's Republic of China replaced the Republic of China s the US recognized representative of the Chinese people.  A resolution to oust Taiwan, i.e., Nationalist China, failed, but the Taiwanese representative walked out in anticipation of the inevitable future results.  Taiwan also announced that it would not pay the over $30,000,000 it owed the UN, given this result.

Chiang Kai-Shek was still living at the time and officially the Republic of China sought reunification with the mainland with it as the Chinese government.  In reunification, they were aligned in principle with the People's Republic of China, but only on that point.  The PRC saw reunification under their banner, not the Nationalist one.  As a practical matter, the U.S. Navy had precluded that from occurring following the 1948 retreat of the Nationalist to Taiwan.

The US had been a major factor in the hold out in according the PRC recognition at the UN. While the US, tired of Chiang Kai-Shek following the Second World War, and despairing of his abilities to force a successful conclusion to the Chinese Civil War, had chosen to slowly decrease its involvement with the Nationalist Chinese efforts following the war, was nonetheless shocked by the sudden collapse of the Nationalist Army in 1948.  This had caused Congress, which hadn't been taking a huge interest in the Nationalist's plight, to suddenly focus on China with the "who lost China?" query becoming a tag line for conservatives.  Moreover, the Chinese Red Army's recovery from eons of civil war and World War Two was evident when it intervened in the Korean War (using some formations that had been Nationalist ones earlier).  A widespread assumption that the PRC danced to Moscow's tune ramped up the concern, although PRC government was plenty repressive and scary in its own right without, as it turned out, much influence from the Soviet Union.

Be that as it may, the relucatance of the US to recognize Red China as the Chinese government had reached the fairly absurd level by the mid 1960s. It was clear that the Nationalist were not capable of jumping the Straits of Taiwan and taking on the Chinese Red Army.  And as the most populous nation in the world, recognition of it was overdue.  This didn't, of course, accord it American recognition, but that would be on the near term horizon.

Taiwan since has developed into a parliamentary democracy and the current ruling party has an official policy of independence.  Taiwan functions as a putative state, although it still is not recognized as a sovereign by anyone anymore, and it has not declared independence, that being too risky given its massive aggressive neighbor that still claims Taiwan as its own.  It's now likely the longest running unrecognized state in the world, and its odd status is such that it functions as a country in everything but name.  Tensions with Red China, of course, have been very much in the news recently.

From the outstanding Uncle Mike's Musings, we also learned that this is the day when PBS's Electronic Company premiered.  As he states there:

October 25, 1971, 50 years ago: The Electric Company premieres on PBS. A companion piece to Sesame Street, it is geared toward kids a little older who were, by then, learning to read. As the closing tagline say, it is produced by the same production company: "The Electric Company gets its power from The Children's Television Workshop."

The show had a truly remarkable cast, which I had not realized until I read the entry.

The odd thing about this for me is to realize how little I participated in this sort of television from the era.  I was just a kid when this came out, but I don't recall ever watching it.  That might be because, like a lot of other television from the early 1970s, it seemed so very urban.  I suppose it was all part of the "Rural Purge" of television that took place in the early 1970s.