Reagan played off traditional conservatives against the Counterculture. He reversed the role of rigid GI's as brittle targets of younger, more idealistic and hedonistic challengers of assumptions of a stagnant culture that reflected itself in such expressions as "easy listening music". Do you remember that awful stuff? It was instrumental arrangements of pop tunes, advertising jingles, and movie or TV themes into bowdlerized versions that sounded good for thirty seconds and made one want to listen to some honest-to-Brahms orchestral music or to the original pop music. It is easy to take swipes at this sort of music. Lawrence Welk, (how time flies! "Welk" no longer passes my spell-checker!) with his gimmicky orchestrations of pop tunes. Accordion and harpsichord together? He was a portent. Good reason exists for keeping the two apart. It is easy to find once-precious records that GI's had of this bowdlerized music at Goodwill after the original owners have passed on to that great Woolworth's in the sky. (The American version, of course... there is a Woolworth's in Australia, and it is big there, but it has no connection to the old F. W. Woolworth whose successor is Footlocker).
The 1960's counterculture itself became a brittle target for younger iconoclasts and for older people taking rearguard defenses of their "square" assumptions.
The 1960's counterculture itself became a brittle target for younger iconoclasts and for older people taking rearguard defenses of their "square" assumptions.
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.