Other than that, I concur.

Big Oil, corporations and trusts ran the politics of the country and dictated what wages, hours and conditions we worked and hand-picked our leaders.

We fought wars against petty opponents for false reasons and established overseas colonies to exploit resources there.

The press was a tool of the rich and fomented the wars by ceaselessly and uncritically repeating and “reporting” the lies of the rich and the government, or just making things up.

There were no income, estate and capital gains taxes on the rich and their assets which they were free to devolve upon their scions so as to maintain hereditary powers and privileges, and force the rest of us to pay for their protection.

If you didn’t agree with all of the above, you were “anti-American”, a “socialist” and “unpatriotic”, a “seditionist” and were unprotected from unreasonable searches and seizures of your person, effects or homes. The Courts did not require you to have access to an attorney or even to be tried in an open court, assisted by competent counsel of your choosing, or any attorney at all.

Slaves and their families were forced into small communities in marginal areas of the economy and completely unprotected from the harsh elements by their masters (especially in the South).

Oh, yes! The Right wants the ’50s back but, it’s the 1850s! And it’s 1850 all over again, already.

Feminists railed against Playboy in the 70s and 80s for holding up a female standard no one could live up to. But frankly, if one read the articles (instead of “just” looking at the pictures) Playboy strongly urged people to drop the false standards of the uptight 50s image and learn to relax, pursue your bliss, and stop being so damn negative about ones own desires.

Point being, we have gotten into the habit of picking an Image, failing to achieve it, and then bitching endlessly about how unfair the Image is.

Television. “Buy our product and you too can be as cool, calm, sexy, together, and successful as these ficitonal characters.”

As Erika says, the “good old days” is another example. This phrase appeals to people who long for the days when Americans were financially prosperous, wildly optimistic about the future…and deeply segregated. When I say “segregated,” I don’t just mean separation of the races. America in the 1950s had very clear lines between the sexes, between ethnic groups, between financial strata, etc. American society was highly compartmentalized and everyone “knew his place” in the hierarchy. In particular, everyone knew that wealthy white men (and their well-kept wives) were at the top of the hierarchy, which is perhaps why so many wealthy white men (and their well-kept wives) are leading the charge to return to those days. Are you listening, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, George Bush…?

Unfortunately, human memory being what it is (i.e., strongly biased in favor of remembering the good and forgetting the unpleasant), today’s view of the ’50s is a gross distortion of what it actually was. For example, while America had far fewer problems with drug abuse than today, it still had significant problems with alcohol abuse, smoking, unprotected sex, unwanted pregnancies, unhappy marriages, etc. Also — and here’s where the conservative right conveniently looks the other way — America had a much smaller gap between its rich and its poor. Unlike today, anyone with a high school education could get a good-paying middle-class job, buy a nice house in the suburbs, and raise a family with the wife at home. However, those days are obviously gone and they are never coming back, which makes the dreamy desire for the “good old days” just another romantic fantasy — right up there with the “good old days” when women wore ankle-length outfits to the beach and had no right to vote, or the “good old days” when plantation owners could buy and sell slaves. Every generation has had its “good old days,” and, in every case, what was “good” had very little to do with reality and very much to do with who was doing the talking.