Things as they were, and never were

There have been a lot of cartoons about Playboy ratcheting down from soft porn to its original "men's magazine" format, but not a lot worth passing along.

Actually, ditto with most of what Rob Rogers manages to capture in a cartoon that is worth passing along.

It is popular to point out that the Good Old Days weren't so good, particularly for women, minorities and the poor, and that's true. 

But it's predicated on the theory that, in the Good Old Days, we thought everything was just hunky-dory, and that's not true.

Every generation has looked back on a Golden Age that they saw through a gauze curtain of nostalgia and selective memory.

"Out Our Way" regularly tapped that sentimental vein, as in this piece, which I don't have a date for but, given the Davy Crockett getup on the kid, I'd peg in the mid-50s.

Back when people took the flag down at night, or when it rained. And flew it outside a bank but not outside every store that wanted to cash in on patriotism, because that would violate the Flag Code.

Even then, Williams noted the old-fashioned nature of such respect.

And, by the way, I doubt any of his readers thought the fellow taking in the flag was the president of that bank. 

If nothing else, things sure looked rosy when you were too young to be sitting at the kitchen table at night trying to figure out how you were going to pay the bills, and that's only the tip of that iceberg.

Still, there's a difference between being young and being a total nincompoop.

Ed Stein's Sleeper Avenue is an ongoing journal of how a young boy in the 1950s became aware of issues in the greater world, and it's a good antidote to the faux vision of those who pretend we lived then in a cocoon of uncaring.

The current story is about how young Eddie, then nine years old, first heard of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and began to question the Jim Crow status quo.

That was in 1955, when Playboy Magazine was a year and a half old.

So I guess if Playboy belonged to an innocent time, it was an innocent time that didn't last long.  

Stein frequently draws on his own experience as a Jewish boy growing up in Waco and remembering both the general racism and insensitivity of the time and place, and the specific antisemitism he encountered, as well as other large issues that impinged upon his small world.

As for Playboy, yes, it was considered a "dirty magazine," but the jokes about reading it for the articles ignore that fact that it actually did have interesting and even important articles, interviews and fiction. 

Maybe that was more insidious: The notion that men who were interested in fine wine, who dressed well, who drove nice cars and were current on current literature, national politics and world affairs, also liked to look at naked ladies.

But at least Hefner promoted the idea of treating women decently, that both partners should enjoy the evening, the night and the morning after, and that a gentleman does not discuss the details with anyone else.

Nor did he celebrate ignorance and uncouth behavior as a sign of anything other than ignorance and a shameful lack of the social skills a good man aspires to.

If he'd shut down the magazine in about 1975, it would be remembered warmly. Oh well. I guess we'll see if he can pull the chestnuts out of the fire now.

Finally, those Republican longshots: I'm not sure I agree with putting Rocky in the "longshot" category except on this basis: When he divorced his wife and married Happy, I remember people saying it would sink his political future, because nobody would ever vote for a divorced man.

What I remember more, however, was my father's heartbreak and disillusion when the governor he respected as a thoughtful, moderate, decent man blew the handling of the Attica riots on such a ghastly, tragic, avoidable level.

And yet Congress approved him as our post-Watergate vice-president.

That was well after the innocent 1950s, which is to say, by then I was an adult and, oddly enough, not as easy to disillusion as my dad, who had served in the war that Rogers features as his third example.

As noted before, one of my concerns about my generations' war came when a friend who, while some of our high school buddies were in the mud at Khe Sanh, was killed on the DMZ in Korea.

It made me wonder if we would ever get out of Vietnam either.

Which we did. But apparently without learning much, though the Bush who had actually fought in his generation's war had the good sense, when we got to Iraq, not to let his reach exceed his grasp.

Ah well.

That was nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Y'know: Back in the Good Old Days.

 

Superhero

If he remembered what he had coming up today on Tank McNamara, Houstonian Bill Hinds must have blanched when he saw the local news Thursday.

 

Yup. That's Houston Texans player JJ Watt, at Texas Children's Hospital.

Right guy, wrong comics franchise.

By the way, he does this kind of thing all the time, sometimes with cameras, often without. 

If you feel like the Good Old Days are over and the world is full of jerks, maybe you need to watch a few superhero adventures:

 

 

Start here

 

Still grumpy? Try this one.

 

And the ultimate superhero story.

Note that this one, from his rookie year, went on for some time before the publicists knew about it (and told him he didn't have to buy the kids Texans gear, that the team would have donated it).

 

Comments

[Richard John Marcej]

Call me one of those odd ones, but even as a young man (and before that a teen) I did enjoy READING Playboy magazine almost as much as looking at the nude photos.

Then again, I do love reading comics and cartoons and Playboy usually had a good selection every month and I did enjoy reading the interviews too. (to nitpick, let's change the year you mention about how warmly the publication would had been remembered if it had shut down from 1975 to 1981. Because that way I wouldn't had missed this. As a Beatles fan one of the best interviews I'd ever read with any of the quartet was the Playboy Interview with John Lennon in late 1980. In fact, it was so good they published a book featuring the unedited, entire interview later on.)

[Ben Fulton]

I've never heard of the "Out Our Way" cartoon, so when I saw it I assumed it was a rather clever riff on Ludacris and "Get Out The Way". Maybe it was the other way around...