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| That thing behind my back in 1974 was called the One-Eyed Monster. |
Did you read Orwell’s 1984 before the year 1984? Did you see Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey before 2001?
What
were your top seven media events through high school?
Here are a few of mine:
1. November 1963: Kennedy Assassinated
Watched the funeral on black-and-white
(monochromatic cathode ray tube), analog television (TV) in a small apartment
in Mineola, on Long Island, NY. Cried for three days. I was in kindergarten.
Launched my mistrust of the human species.
2. Circa 1965: Vietnam War televised
Initially watched on black-and-white TV, then in
living color every night on the evening news in Westfield, NJ until we moved to
France in 1971. Horrifying.
3. April 1968: Martin Luther King Assassinated
Listened to a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King delivering
“I Have a Dream” via record player in my fifth grade class in Westfield, NJ. Inspired
with hope listening to his speech. Devastated by his death. Record players were
machines with cords that plugged into the wall to access electricity. The
electrical power spun a turntable upon which a disk rotated. A needle with a
diamond point followed grooves in the disk as it turned to transmit recorded
sound into a speaker. This particular disk was of floppy rubber and square in
shape. It was from inside a National Geographic magazine our fifth grade
teacher had brought to class.
4. Summer 1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Saw it in color at a movie theater in downtown Westfield,
NJ with my dad and a couple of friends. Trippy. Seeing color on the big screen
was remarkable at the time. I don’t believe we had color TV yet.
5. July 21, 1969: Neil Armstrong walks on the moon
Saw it on black-and-white TV in an isolated rental cottage
in the woods in Cape Cod, Mass. Amazed. Watched the next six Apollo lift-offs
over the next few years back home in NJ. They were a big deal. Whatever we were doing, we would
stop, gather around the TV and wait for the countdown.
6. 1969: "In the Year 2525"
This song was #1 on the Billboard charts. That
meant wherever you went in the US, if a radio was turned on, you probably heard
this song. I thought this was the anthem of my generation at the time. I was
ten. Transistor radios were portable and there were radios in cars, too. Billboard was the name of a magazine in
the 1930s that first published a list of songs ranking them by popularity. I
had to look that up; I wasn’t around at that time despite what my kids think.
(1971-73: Lived in France. Read books mostly,
newspaper for news.)
7. 1974: Nixon resigned on TV
Read Orwell’s 1984
(written in 1949). The year 1984 seemed impossibly far away. I wasn’t sure I’d live until then as I reeled from the culture shock of US high school. We
were living in Denver. Nixon’s resignation in Washington, D.C. seemed as far away
as 1984 because the political shift in Washington did not stop cowboys from
bullying me in Colorado at the time.
As a child, I thought Civilization had
rules to guide people so we could work together to create a better world. In
high school, I observed that lots of people didn’t follow rules either because
they had different ideas or because they were mean. I subsequently decided that
human beings collectively constructed Culture.
Now, I seek the inner essence within individuals. This spiritual core has more endearing and enduring significance than any collective. I
am grateful that no single hegemonic culture or civilization can possibly
contain us as a species. I just hope we have enough wisdom not to wipe out
ourselves and the planet.
~*~
