I Didn’t Like Tipper Gore, Either
In 1968, just two years after yours truly was squatted out, the world suffered a pandemic (dubbed the Hong Kong Flu), America went through massive civil unrest surrounded by both the Vietnam conflict and civil rights, and was saddled with a corrupt Republican president. Sound familiar?
Four years later, Nixon resigned rather than be impeached.
By ‘73, we were in a recession. By ‘76, we were so beaten down by unemployment and skyrocketing gas prices, I remember sitting in my mom’s brown AMC Gremlin in a gas rationing line for hours one day in the summer.
Then came the 1980s. Ronald Reagan. A more solid economy. The death of disco and the USSR. The AIDS virus (another pandemic but mostly ignored because of bigotry and careless cruelty). The debut of MTV. HBO and Showtime. Union-busting. Blockbuster Video stores were stocked with plastic VHS movies. Prince, Madonna, Whitney Houston, and Michael Jackson. Donkey Kong and PAC Man. Leg warmers and eyeliner. Lots of hairspray and parachute pants. Apple home computers, big clunky cellular phones, and Wayfarer sunglasses. The internet was still yet to come.
The 1980s was in so many ways a backlash against the dark realities of the 1970s.
As with any societal celebration there almost always comes a smaller, more vocal backlash in response. In 1979, Reverend Jerry Falwell decided that the gays were exerting too much influence on our moral values and launched the Moral Majority.
Randall Terry was so incensed at women having sex with no consequences and killing babies, he started Operation Rescue, an organization with the slogan "If you believe abortion is murder, act like it's murder."
Tipper Gore, wife of Vice President Al, bought her daughter a Prince album and was shocked—SHOCKED—that it contained a song about female masturbation, so she instituted the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and launched a campaign to use “Parental Advisory” labels to warn parents against music with explicit, or “obscene” content.
The Puritans had returned.
I know—calling any strident bunch of moralists Puritans is a bit like comparing any authoritarian politician to Adolf Hitler but if the shoe fits...
I wasn’t particularly vexed by these religious zealots because I was suffering my own sort of audio hell—The Shatter the Darkness Ministries. These were a set of cassette tapes my recently Christianized mother bought for me to demonstrate the powers of Satan through backmasking—the supplanting of secret Satanic messages only decipherable when a rock song is played backwards.
No one ever explained me why someone would play a record backwards but, according to the tapes, it didn’t matter. Satan was in there and the only way to escape was to destroy all your albums. I did not destroy my albums. My general reaction was mild disdain and an eye roll. How seriously should any thinking person take these morons?
Today, we have an equal and opposite set of morality patrol who have decided that it all must come down in order to combat their twin evils of the moment: racism and sexism. A moral majority with just a slightly different costume. Same game plan for a similar goal—dictate an acceptable version of behavior and language to the unwashed masses.
A pandemic, economic fallout, a corrupt president. Plus the blinding speed of the internet. The recipe replicates that 1968–1979 stew of intolerance and demands for moral control but cooked up in the microwave of Twitter. It is, however, still the same meal.
In the early seventies the New York Philharmonic began holding blind auditions as a response to a ridiculous lack of diversity amongst its membership. By taking the auditionee and putting him/her behind a screen, auditors could not be influenced by gender or race. Defanging the bite of discrimination blind auditions resulted in a dismal six percent of players being women to nearly fifty percent today.
Because the change did not garner similar results with Black and Hispanic musicians, the blind audition must now be “altered to take into fuller account artists’ backgrounds and experiences.” No longer blind auditions but auditions that tap into racial stereotypes that the Left have been trying to eradicate for decades.
A New York City Congressman who calls for all history to cease being taught in schools.
The belief that puberty is an oppressive social construct invented by fascists to uphold cisnormative hegemony.
Making eye contact is sexist. Avoiding eye contact is racist.
This new breed of Morality Patrol may not adhere to the all of the teachings of pseudo-theologians Kendi or DiAngelo but have creepily adopted the binary that everyone is either an oppressor or oppressed.
The Jerry Falwell-style campaigns against Twisted Sister or Hustler were founded in the fears of adults about the world damaging young minds and a desire to control that narrative. This new group is the opposite: young people composing a fearful narrative of imagined harm and the seduction of bizarre academic theories in order to control what they have determined are egregious breaks in their new societal protocols.
Unlike my reaction to the Puritans of the 80s, these new McCarthyites have infuriated me. Maybe it’s the speed of their influence or that I’m old and have been through all of this before but my annoyance has become near-constant.
Of all the similarities between these prudes of the 80s and these self-righteous zealots of today the most devastating is their lack of any sense of humor about almost anything reflective of themselves. I didn’t find that inspiring then and I don’t find it persuasive now.
And so...
I will try to remember my mild disdain and eye roll. Falwell was only as successful in his Moral Majority stance as he was taken seriously. Tipper made an absurd argument and got her labels because people took her arguments without question. Plainly, I’m no fan of the self righteousness of those seeking control. Make no mistake, the neo-puritans of social justice are not looking for much more than power for themselves. Like the GOP and the Moral Majority, it is not in their interest to solve the problems. It is only in their interest to utilize the problems for their benefit.
I will not take them seriously because I do not destroy my albums.
