A world pre-TV, pre-war, found that somehow it was a good idea to have women dress up in majorette costumes to serve refreshments to cars in drive-in movie lots.
This turned up in a collection of odd Life covers and it made me think a little. Things change, is what it tells us, and what we consider bizarre and unusual in history are just missing context.
Pat Buchanan is going around hawking a book forecasting that in a rather short period of time the white european-born culture will be at a severe minority, and much of it will be lost when that happens. He is, of course, insane. Culture changes; values are replaced; societies move on. It's a constant process, probably accelerated by our newly-found ability to communicate. Lamenting its loss is time wasted. Sure, there are valuable ideas that may be lost too, but I can see nothing worth *preserving* in the above photograph other than the idea that it DID happen and is now permanently a part of history.
And, at the time, surely there were scores of people who were mad that *their* culture of books, radio, and piety was being "replaced" by drive-in movies with waitresses in scandalously short skirts.
02-11-2002, 10:08 AM
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