(06-12-2018, 08:55 AM)David Horn Wrote:(06-11-2018, 10:49 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: But in that "traditional" America there were, for the most part, no stores open on Sunday. Don't believe we have returned to that meme anywhere even in red America, Chick-Fil-A notwithstanding.
I seriously doubt though that the Millennials will make like the last generation of its archetype, the GIs, and return us to the days of the Organization Man/Suzy Homemaker lifestyle. Someone here mentioned nostalgia for the days of Mom and Pop shops on Main Street. For said return to happen many would have to be willing to sacrifice some of their conveniences.
Returning to "sense of things" doesn't require returning to the last implementation of that sense. Millennials appear to be the first generation to reject the merchant-customer model. They may come to regret it, but deciding to reverse course is less than likely. They have no emotional tie to that model, so it would be a faux nostalgia for a time gone by.
Boomers grew up watching GI-produced Westerns on TV. Almost none of that generation had actually lived in the West they portrayed. Few if any were actually realistic. All the gritty Westerns came later.
Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Rawhide, The Virginian, The Rifleman, Bonanza, and F-Troop had to be written to meet the TV code; as a result they had to tone down violence and sex. The high-quality Westerns on TV crowded out the cinematic Westerns , an dthe cinematic Westerns that began appearing in the 1960s (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; The Wild Bunch; and Once Upon a Time in the West emerged as alternatives about when the Production Code of American cinema broke down.
The last generation to know the Wild West was the first generation of actors, including Tom Mix. Lost actors such as Walter Brennan and even early GIs like Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart (who both appeared in some) and John Wayne (who starred in so many that he was practically typecast) could have never known about the Wild West from people who were there. For someone like Clint Eastwood, Wild West figures were fully ancestral in his time.
....
Stores closed on Sundays? Stores opened on Sundays to accommodate the expanded workweek and people working multiple jobs just to survive. For many, retail work on the weekends was and is a second job. When robotic work becomes a norm (and retailing will be made robotic in the sense of having mechanical robots instead of people ground
into the role of robots), people might not need to go shopping on Sundays.
(I remember the blue laws in Texas. It wasn't that you couldn't buy things on Sundays; it was that you could not buy only food, motor fuels, and medical necessities on Sundays. I once got an exemption by claiming to need a pitcher for water for my diabetic grandmother then visiting).
It could be that the current American economy runs on the principle: "we only pretend to pay you, but we certainly crack the whip", which reminds me of the old Soviet joke "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.