Well, you know, I did not come to argue that somehow it would be better for all of us if we could crawl back to the feel-good post-war-boom womb of 1961. Lots of things about 1961 sucked monkey ass. Segregation still seemed perfectly sensible to a worrisome number of people, and homosexuality was regarded as a psychiatric disorder (about which the afflicted person was still expected to feel great shame, as if he or she had, in answering some deep spiritual call to perversion, caught the disease on purpose). In medical science, the jury was still out on the question of whether women could have orgasms. Yes, really. And so it’s good how we’ve all come walking hand in hand into the warm bright light of the new day, and all that. The modern world has meant a roof against the rain and a safeguard against disease for countless millions. I am all for it. |