A little off topic, but It’s interesting to watch old TV commercials from the 50s and the early 60s, which you can find aplenty on YouTube. They say a lot about the culture and priorities back then, an era to which MAGGATS think we should return. Thankfully, we can’t even if we wanted to, and no one should want to.
The products themselves being hawked are almost universally awful: Coca-Cola (awful for you), Kool-Aid (awful for you), Brylcreem (most of these grooming products are totally unnecessary and some have serious health risks, particularly, according to studies, for women of color) cars (all big-finned, gas-guzzling dinosaurs that Ralph Nader later showed to be largely death traps on wheels) and of course the omnipresent cigarettes (Kool, we are told, gives you that special “cool spot” in your throat, which, I suppose, is an indicator of early-stage throat cancer).
Cleanliness is absolutely vital. Everyone and everything is constantly being scrubbed, scrubbed, scrubbed to antiseptic futility. Dial Soap, we learn, is an absolute necessity for killing germs that cause the dreaded body odor — “Aren’t you you glad that you use Dial? Don’t you wish everybody did?”
One commercial depicts a mousewife in high heels (!) scrubbing her kitchen floor, while announcing a grand new discovery in cleansers. A moment later a bulletin interrupts this vital lesson to inform viewers that JFK had been shot. Lucky him. At the time, of course, many mousewives complained that their favorite soap, As The World Turns, had been interrupted by Walter Cronkite to announce the shooting. Priorities!
The really important point is that all the people in the commercials are white — ALL of them. Judging by U.S. TV commercials, one would not know that people of color even existed. They are all usually very well dressed, formally dressed, and the women are almost exclusively depicted as dutiful mousewives doting over their rosy-cheeked children or preparing their Man’s meal, usually involving red meats and other destructive elements.
Of course, forget about gays, trans people, etc. Back then, being gay was actually a criminal offense in every state I believe, and the American Psychiatric Association designated being gay as a mental illness. Remember that the next time you think about engaging a shrink.
Even then the world depicted in TV commercials was largely an idealized fantasy land, but they are largely accurate in depicting a suffocatingly conformist, drearily regimented consumerist culture of total and utter intellectual vacuity — the era of “the worship of spoons,” as characterized by Vladimir Nabokov.
For all our current problems, I am deeply thankful I wasn’t around then, and that I live in multi-culti NYC.
