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This is Antediluvian Attitudes, a Substack constructed by a person who lived before the Flood.
Once upon a time, there was a Disney Future; Orbit City, the Skypad Apartments, home of George and Jane Jetson, and their teenagers Judy and Elroy. Once upon a time there was no Dystopia.
True, they lived in the sky because the Earth was a sea of toxic smog but, Judy wasn’t taking hormone blockers to be numbered among the cool kids at Orbit High School. True, George was bored with his job, pushing the same button over and over for 3 hours but, he wasn’t forced to become a corporate lab rat or to sign an Anti-Racism Pledge to keep his job.
It was how we saw the future from the 1950s, the Golden Age of Capitalism, a time when it was OK to physically punish children under the medieval proverb, “Children should be seen and not heard." Parents and school teachers could cultivate a style, some using a bare hand, others a hairbrush, or a belt struck across bare skin. The Dean of my Sligh Junior High in Tampa, Florida had a wooden paddle which he used to administer “licks.” Yeah, I got ten licks for getting caught smoking in the bathroom.
There were only two drugs and three TV channels; nicotine, alcohol, ABC, NBC, + CBS, and nothing to watch after midnight but the test pattern. The river simply ceased to flow when the clock struck twelve. It was the National Anthem and goodnight. The broadcast card that held screen space until 6 am was created by RCA in 1939 to calibrate their TK-1 monoscopes. It featured the head of an Indian chief. I loved that semiotic symbol and collected Indian Head pennies, one-cent coins pressed by the Mint until 1909. They were rare but not impossible to find, like the 50 arrowheads I had patterned in a frame.
I was only a young boy but I knew there was something wrong with the mythology, so I started to create my own, a wayward drawing always colored outside of the lines.