Warning: this is an extremely idiosyncratic and self-indulgent post; feel free to tell me I'm delusional or incoherent.
Lately I have been thinking that I grew up during a time of cultural richness that was perhaps unique for generations of American children. Most people my age, I think, are aware of most of the things I'm talking about below, but there's not much comparable that I've seen among younger folk, and to a lesser extent maybe not as much among older folk (the edge over the latter being that in my time high culture and politics were mixed in with popular culture for kids as a matter of course). But this seems absurd, and has never occurred to me before, so maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic.
The Seventies and early Eighties seem from my current vantage point to be a golden age to be a child. I kept up with the current Marvel comics, but it was by no means an atypical occurrence when I bought an omnibus edition of the early Hulk strips at my local drug store for a couple of bucks. Something similar is now selling on Amazon for 90 bucks and will fall into the hands of adult collectors, no doubt.
I also grew up on the Pogo comic strips which were then 20 years old or so but still freely available in book form. Those books are now priced into the stratosphere, again, chiefly for collectors. Pogo taught me about what had been happening politically in the 1950s and to a certain extent the '60s; my first exposure to Joe McCarthy and Nikita Khruschev came from reading Pogo. And of course there was the contemporary strip, Doonesbury, which fulfilled a similar function in regard to current events; although Doonesbury still runs, it was actually very funny and wildly entertaining back then, not the equivalent of eating your lima beans as no doubt its current incarnation would be for a 12-year-old now (I doubt any youngsters read Doonesbury these days, but I can attest that it's boring for a 43-year-old). My first inkling about things like Nixon's visit to the Great Wall of China ("It is indeed a great wall"), Mao's Cultural Revolution, William Sloane Coffin (whom I later met), communes and even Hunter S. Thompson came from reading Doonesbury in the 70s and early 80s.
Mad magazine was not exactly in its prime in the 70s, but it was still really great, and Don Martin was still around which meant that there was some actual work of genius in nearly every issue. I remember buying issues of Mad that had comic-book sized inserts of the original magazine from the 50s, which nowadays are also only available to adult collectors, unless a kid's paper route is enough to get them 32.50 for a volume of the collected early Mads.
Creem magazine was my major reference for music criticism then, and it's hard to imagine the wimpy journalists crying about rockism and 'deconstructing' Lady Gaga measuring up to the likes of Lester Bangs in his heydey. National Lampoon was like an adult version of Mad, complete with dirty jokes and surrealist comics. An entire sensibility was formed around these touchstones...by the time I picked up James Joyce in my teens, the language and humor were already familiar from Pogo and John Lennon's In His Own Write, and this sort of punning slant on everyday reality blended with the absurdity of Mad and Creem always seemed more revelatory than the earnestly ideological psyche-plumbings of surrealism, much less the flatfooted, merely dishonest language of politicians and editorialists.
There were enough cultural and political references in the above material alone to provide a reasonably curious youngster with the basis for a decent education (certainly more than I ever got in school!). When I see how ignorant and uncurious about the kind of things that interested me (note, not necessarily about everything) most young people are now (and I'm exposed to a lot of them), it's puzzling. But after years of pondering it, I am beginning to suspect that they have been raised in an era that is, for youngsters, culturally impoverished, for whatever reason.
The popular music on the radio was not always good, but it was so much better than it is now that it's not even possible to compare, really. By the mid-70s there was some drop off from the late 60s-early 70s barrage of classic music, but the albums that came out in 1975 included: Blood on the Tracks, High Voltage, Blow by Blow, Katy Lied, Toys in the Attic, Red Headed Stranger, Tonight's the Night, The Basement Tapes, Sabotage, Born to Run, Blues for Allah, Wish You Were Here, Physical Graffiti, The Who By Numbers, Dreamboat Annie, Nighthawks at the Diner, Still Crazy After All These Years, Zuma, A Night at the Opera, Horses, Northern Lights-Southern Cross, Fandango!, Young Americans, The Last Record Album and Mothership Connection, and these were chosen from the Wikipedia list because nobody my age would need to have the artist identified upon hearing these titles (for you whippersnappers that's Dylan, AC/DC, Jeff Beck, Steely Dan, Aerosmith, Willie Nelson, Neil Young, Dylan/The Band, Black Sabbath, Springsteen, Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Heart, Tom Waits, Paul Simon, Neil Young, Queen, Patti Smith, The Band, ZZ Top, David Bowie, Little Feat, and Parliament). Not to mention three albums by Lou Reed, two by John Lennon, two (admittedly bad) by the Kinks, two (admittedly by Rush) by Rush, plus work by Merle Haggard, George Jones, Ted Nugent, Thin Lizzy, The Allman Brothers, Paul McCartney, Kiss, Lynyrd Skynrd, Smokey Robinson, James Gang, Elvis, Gil Scott-Heron, Richard and Linda Thompson, Jackson 5, Elton John, Frank Zappa, Todd Rundgren, The Meters, Al Green, and the debut album by The Dictators (with the Ramones debut one year away)... even the worst stuff out of the above is way more engaging than almost anything I hear on the radio now, and that's being generous. Can anyone seriously dispute this? I may seem like an old crank, but it seems seriously deluded to even make the argument. I would actually suggest that anyone making it has simply never developed the requisite taste in order to make such judgments, due to being reared in such an impoverished age.
The Beatles had only broken up a couple of years before I started listening to them, and the music of the 60s was still fresh enough that every discerning adolescent was very familiar with it. Back then it was not only acceptable but common for popular musicians to question the dominant values and political ideas and priorities of the time, and exposure to rock music led to a lifelong commitment to rejecting conformity (not always merely to replace it with "non-conformity," of course!), and as corny as that sounds it's nevertheless the first and unsurpassable condition of a decent education and the formation of a reasonably healthy character. Needless to say, nowadays even the "punk" bands support the troops.
Not that my youth was all comic books, magazines and records, but I have deliberately avoided discussing the high cultural artifacts that are available to everyone at all times. Anyway this is long enough for now, I'll ponder what more should be added and perhaps write a future post continuing this train of thought.
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