Over on Quiche Moraine I’m writing up a series of short posts on the influences of 1960s and 1970s TV on the sociocultural growth and development of Ammerican Yoots of the age.

If you follow my facebook feed, you’ll know that as apart of the rehabilitation of my knee (the cause is indirect) I’ve been watching a lot of old TV shows on Hulu. Some of these old shows are only on the very edge of my memory, others I remember viscerally and a few literally. In may cases, I note depictions or portrayals, or models, that represented expectations for behavior or though process, or that indicate in some way change in culture. (I’ve been “status updating” some of these observations.)

For instance, there is an episode of Adam-12 where the cops (Reed and Malloy) are visiting a school and chat with a young miscreant middle schooler who happens to be, on school ground during the school day, playing around with his 3 inch pocket knife. Nothing is mentioned about the knife in that conversation. The knife does play a role in the plot, but the laissez faire manner in which the boy toys with the knife as the cops chat him up is a shocking contrast to the last two decades, during which elementary school children have been routinely thrown out of school for having accidently brought a plastic knife instead of a plastic spoon to eat their pudding.

Anyway, the first installment of this series is How We Got This Way

Please go have a look.

Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:

In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle or Paperback
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