A Brace of Infantile Rants

[steepholm]

First Rant

I was looking forward to Dominic Sandbrook's programme on The 70s. My sensibilities were largely formed in that decade, and I feel defensive, if not proprietorial, about it. My memories of the sixties - at least beyond my immediate circle - are relatively vague, and I hated the '80s as a betrayal of all that I loved about the curmudgeonly, communitarian, mystic shabbiness that was my world. Not only that, the things that people find ridiculous about the '80s now, in terms of style, music, politics ("How could we ever have thought that was a good idea?"), I felt that way about at the time, when everyone around me was taking it seriously. Hell is other decades.

However, I began to have a bad feeling as soon as the programme started, which it did with a series of full-screen questions:

• What did you do in the 70s?



• Get married and have kids?



• Move into your first home?



• Join the world of work?



• Take your first foreign holiday?



• Try to change the world?



• Try to change yourself?

Long-time readers of this blog may remember my intemperate rant about boomernormativity (and possibly even its partial palinode), some three years ago. I thought I'd got it out of my system, but this brought it back in all its acrid piquancy. Just as all programmes about the sixties are about teenage rebellion, so it seems that a programme about the seventies can do nothing more interesting than look at the same generation a little later - settling down, marrying, getting a job, having kids, and starting to accumulate a little wealth. Because, as ever, the experiences of anyone older or younger than them cannot possibly be of any interest.

Well, I was alive throughout the seventies, mister, and did none of those things, except of course the last. (Okay, I think it may have been 1970 that we took a ferry and stayed in a caravan in Brittany for a week, but to make up for it I didn't go abroad again for another 16 years - and I've a feeling that's not the kind of foreign holiday Sandbrook had in mind anyway.) Nor for that matter did my parents, who had done them all long before. But we are all invisible to the eyes of the boomernormative Dominic Sandbrook. Most depressingly in some ways, Sandbrook isn't a boomer himself; in fact he's considerably young than I am. Internalized boomernormativity - it's a dreadful thing.

For anyone who doubts that the seventies really did exist, at least with me in them, I offer as evidence this recently-unearthed photograph, which caused my daughter to double up in breathless laughter when I showed it her yesterday.





I couldn't stand to watch any more of the programme at the time - but does it get a little wider in its focus? Should I persist?


Second Rant

Where the While Things Are was born the same year as I was, but (unlike Dr Seuss) Sendak wasn't a big part of my childhood - always excepting The Nutshell Library, which I did like a good deal. In my twenties I went out with a huge Sendak admirer, though, so I persuaded myself that I was a fan too - which, since he is obviously very talented, wasn't hard to do. All the same, I've never been able to love his work, and recently Where the While Things Are has increasingly irritated me. I think I've worked out why, now: it's because of the way its moral is imparted. Now, I don't mind a book with a moral. I don't mind that Pierre was made to care, that Albert was eaten by a lion or even that Suck-a-Thumb fell victim to the Red-legged Scissorman. In fact, I cheered. I like a bit of utile sprinkled on my dulce. But those correctives were imposed from without. The trouble with Max is that he has to find the moral of his story (which is of course that Mummy Knows Best) all by himself. In the nineteenth century, the child was made to kiss the rod that beat him. In 1963, Max only has to sip the soup, but the demand for self-abnegation is the same, and it icks me out in a way that feels very basic and primal. In fact, I feel like chasing a dog with a fork, just to make a point. Any point.

As so often, Blake said it best, and most honestly:

Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands;
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.

Never let it be said that I have dealt with my shit!

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Well- as for me, I was dealing with that of which you wot through most of the mid to later seventies, getting into rock and folk, still thinking I wanted to be a poet and I was the fairly liberated, wannabe feminist undergrad you see in the userpic. :o)

S'pose at coming on 55 I just about count as a late developing boomer?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Another aspect of boomernormativity is that all boomers' lives are held to follow the same arc, which is patently nonsense, as your example (amongst many) attests. (This is often conveyed through what I call the Documentary We, which is like the Royal We, but used by documentary makers to speak for entire generations, as in "It was in the '70s that we bought our first houses.")

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

I did most of those things in the 70s!

Get married and have kids?
I remember having a wedding on the playground in 1st grade recess, but I couldn't tell you for sure who the groom was. The children thing I suppose is not true--like most children of my generation I adopted a Cabbage Patch kid, but I think that wasn't till about 1984.

Move into your first home?
I was born; I don't know how much more 'first' it's possible to get.

Join the world of work?
I was a babysitter for a good many dolls, and sometimes had to clean up my own colouring books! I don't think I actually was given much more to do--there's a limit to how much work you can trust someone under five to accomplish without casualties.

Take your first foreign holiday?
I can't be certain, of course, because I don't remember when we went where. I lived in a border state though, so I expect Canada was probably a place I went. I know for certain I went to California--does that count as foreign?--because I got the chicken pox whilst there.

Try to change the world?
And usually succeeded. There were monsters under the manholes, faeries in the trees, and the entire cast of Winnie-the-Pooh came to visit. Owl kept getting on top of the bookshelves and knocking things over.

Try to change yourself?

Literally. Clothes are complicated when you're not even five.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Clothes are complicated when you're not even five.

Apparently one of the things I used to say at that age (if I'd put a jersey on backwards, or something) was, "As I dress, I stay!"

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Um, well, went to school, moved out of the house I was born in, discovered cricket, read books, watched Blake's Seven, helped to care for a father with Alzheimers, fell in love with girls at school, and ended the decade with a boyfriend I didn't love, of course. There were various foreign holidays, but I started those in 1963 (I learned to walk in Malta that Easter).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Did Blake's Seven really start that early? I suppose it must have done.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

1978. Though actually I missed most of the first series because of dancing class, so I didn't really get into it until 1979. I don't think I realised what a huge effect it would have on my life twenty years on.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Loud applause.
I'm another product, largely, of the 70s, and I also was very unhappy with the dominant culture of the 80s. I am with you on those anti-boomer barricades.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Those were dark days indeed, and not just because of Thatcher.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Yes, absolutely.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I hated the eighties, too. I remember watching Ugly take over the world, and at one time, I thought, "That's what you get for voting Reagan in. The world of Ugly."

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It had a slightly different inflection in the UK, of course, but it did seem as if everyone were trying very hard to pretend that their worst instincts were actually their best, and ultimately that's bound to lead to big hair and shoulder pads.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Don't forget those mullets. Geez, it was an ugly decade.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

How did the mullets become iconically Australian, is what I want to know? Everyone else shucked them off and moved on to other things. On a related note, my burglar stole 2 bags of 80s clothes, high fashion. I do wonder what he made of them.

I was a teenager in the 70s and always find myself wedged between generations. Those of us born from 60-62 appear to have some very odd experiences. Still regarded as baby boomers, yet the first to be seriously unemployed, is what happened to us in the 70s (except for me, I went to uni and it wasn't until I left uni that this hit).

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Oy! I have pics somewhere of a younger me with both those aids to gracious female living :o/

Embarrassed.........................

[calimac.livejournal.com]

There's nothing awful-seventies about the clothes in that photo; I suppose it must be the hair that caused your daughter to laugh, or more likely the mere encounter with the evidence that your parents once were young. Actually, my hair looked rather like your brother's when I was in my teens, and my younger brother's very much like yours. I keep my hair, what's left of it, rather shorter now, and my brother keeps his virtually shaved, so that he can wear a hat in winter without mussing his hair up, which he hates.

One reason I dislike the concept "boomer" (I hate the term even more) is that it is too broad: by the technical definition, you're still old enough to be one. I'm some six years your senior, and while I did take my first solo trip abroad in the 70s (to the UK! tra la!), I didn't get married or have a home (if by that is meant a house without parents or guardian) until around 1990.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I think my need for an orthodontist was probably uppermost in her mind. But yes, I agree about the 'b' word. I think of "boomer classic" as anyone born between '45 and '50.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

As I was born in '52, I am at the tail end of the Baby Boom. There was actually a less flattering name for the generation at the time, which was The Bulge. But they truly were the babies born between '45 and '50 whose conception and birth had been bunched together due to the effects of WWII. I wasn't considered part of The Bulge because my parents were a little slower off the mark than many of their peers. :)

I'm not sure when the term Baby Boomers came into use. In my mind it feels more American, though would their birth rate have been as affected by the war as it was in the UK?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I've a feeling it's an American phrase, too. It's a good point about whether their birth rate would have been as affected by the end of the War - given that their soldiers were away for a shorter period, and (I assume - but maybe wrongly?) that a smaller proportion of their population was involved. Maybe it has more to do with general postwar US prosperity there, and being able to afford more children? That would also account for the long tail.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

So you're the one with the teeth? I had those too. Well, duh, most people have teeth of some kind. I mean of course that I had very, very similar buck teeth. They were successfully orthodonted and look all right now, except that I am definitely a Horse rather than a Hen (in the dichotomy of an anecdote my mother used to tell about a Frenchman looking despairingly about him in London and saying of the women, "Nothing but hens and horses, horses and hens!").

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Boomernormativity! Thanks so much for the construction, and the whole entry.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it struck a chord!

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

the moral of his story (which is of course that Mummy Knows Best)

I'm one of the people who does love Sendak deep in my bones, and I don't know if it's annoying or helpful to share that I've never thought of that as the moral of the book at all. The moral to me has to do with anger and explosions and strong emotions being sometimes fine and productive; and that going off to do your own thing for a while, physically or emotionally, being also fine and good as opposed to permanently destructive of things that matter to you.

With Sendak as with all complex lit, there exist myriad readings, of course.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

There are many possible readings of the book, and I'm sure yours is richer than my rather reductive one. But still, that's the way in which I react to it as a child. Rage, rage all you like, but when you've finally blown out your little tempest you'll still be stuck in your room, kid, only now with a touch of Stockholm Syndrome (okay, maybe I'm just channelling Stewie Griffin at this point...).

[gillo]

When the Boom actually was seems to be a movable feast - I've seen it dated as late as 1965, which seems ridiculous to me. I was born at the end of 1955, the year rationing ended, which seems as good a cutoff as any to me - Baby Boomers had NHS orange juice and free school milk all the way into sixth form and were old enough to scream at the Beatles.

I have to say, my memories of the 70s are affected by the fact that, for the first time to date, my parents lived in the same house for more than two years, a major advance from my perspective. I was in the fifth form in 1970, so this was the decade I took A Levels (and O levels), went to university, discovered sex and folk clubs and, yes, got married and started paying a mortgage. But I was a child-bride, I swear.

I enjoyed the programme enough to want to see the rest of the series, though it's still odd seeing a historical treatment of stuff I remember as "ordinary". They did have that excruciatingly painful clip of Ted Heath talking French when we joined the (then) EEC. Painful because of his accent, that is.

I felt and still feel it was a better decade than the 80s, in which the Evil Witch-Queen dominated and there seemed no hope for society. Much like today, really. ::sigh::

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Ah, I had one term (or possibly one year) of free school milk before it was Snatched.

Well, I shall try it again, but I've a feeling that the 1970s as I remember them aren't going to appear on our screens any time soon. Perhaps I'll have to write it myself?

[gillo]

It was the Death of Milk by a Thousand Cuts - she took it from secondary-age kids first, then the rest. Mind you, I have vivid memories of being forced to drink nearly rancid milk which was delivered to the school first thing in the morning and then stood outside in its crates till playtime. Sometimes that meant frozen milk, too, with little ice-mushrooms pushing the caps up.

You could write it yourself, indubitably. It wasn't as bad a decade as they all claim. Even the Winter of Discontent had patchy effects, as I recall. Whereas the Miners' Strike left untold scars.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I always figured it was a question of having parents who were in WWII. Hence I (as the youngest child of parents in their forties) would be a boomer, but my classmates who had parents fifteen or twenty years younger would not.