#123 One for the Road

Some people use the term paradigm shift to describe a time when a culture seems to suddenly come down on a different side of a given social equation than it once did. We start to see the world through different eyes. In 1950 it didn’t bother very many white people that in the South and many places in the North it was the norm for drinking fountains and bathrooms to be segregated. Your average Joe and Jane simply didn’t question the notion that a black man and a white man couldn’t share the same stream of water jetting from a faucet. Today, no one, except perhaps a few famous potato holdouts, can believe it ever happened. That’s how far we’ve come.
My favorite scene from the movie “Forest Gump” is when he is a child and being examined by a doctor. Throughout the physical, the doctor has a cigarette dangling from his lips and Forest and his mother are enveloped in a cloud of blue smoke. Doctors actually appeared in commercials back then and recommended certain brands as being less harsh than others. You don’t see a lot of that today.
I saw a rerun of Laugh-in the other day. In the late sixties it was the first show to use quick cuts and one-liners to flash between jokes. It was groundbreaking. It was also sexist as hell. The American culture was in the throes of a paradigm shift at that moment and the notion that women are or could be equal and that they’d actually have the effrontery to demand to be treated seriously was dismissed with many a “bless her pretty little head” patronizing jibe.
This last shift is still convulsing. I know lots of fellows to whom the notion that women are just plain equal, no second thoughts about it, is strange. And their retro-idiotic spokesman, Rush Limbaugh, is a prime example of how tenacious a prejudice can be and how tolerated a prejudice can be if its swathed in funny buzz-words like femi-nazi. Oh, but they’re so obnoxious about it. I wonder, was Martin Luther King a afro-nazi because he asserted and insisted on the equality of African-Americans? It goes without saying that there’s no need to assert a right, obnoxiously or otherwise, if everyone takes it for granted. Of course, I wouldn’t expect fuzzy-thinking Rush to grasp such obvious subtleties. He thinks taking oxycontin illegally is better than taking illegal heroin because, after all, oxycontin is a prescription drug—even though he acquired it illegally and used it in an illegal manner. A car is a legal mode of transportation too, but driving a stolen one will get you sent to jail. Even if you had your housekeeper steal it for you.
Cultural paradigms are like language. Some people, when they learn a foreign language, are always translating it in their brain into English. When you’re really fluent in a foreign language you actually think in it. Anti-sexism isn’t quite a paradigm shift yet, it’s more of a mono-digm shift.
I heard another one of those shift indicators in an old movie the other day. Two guys were drinking in a bar and getting ready to leave. The bartender asked: “How about one for the road?”
Don’t hear that much anymore...
America, ya gotta love it.