A Geek History of Time - Episode 209 - GI Joe and Latchkey Kids, Reaganism vs Reagonomics Part I

Episode Date: April 29, 2023

And we begin with good days, sir! Geeks come in all shapes and sizes, and that they come into all kinds of things that they've got. I was thinking more about the satanic panic. Buy the scholar Gary Guy-Gakse. Well, wait, hold on. I said good days, sir. Not defending Roman slavery by any stretch. No, but that's bad.

Let him vote. Fuck off. When historians, and especially British historians, want to get cute, it's in there. OK. It is not worth the journey. 1.5-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1- This is a keep this way of time. We're a week and a half and her day is teaching real world. I am a playwright, a history English teacher, a sixth grade model in Morgan California, and just yesterday, as I was taking my son to his daycare because I had the week off because my district gives us a

whole week for President's Day, President's Week, whatever. As I was taking him to daycare in the morning, he in the back seat started just kind of nonsense singing. And what was coming out of his, the syllables he landed on were call, lakul, lakul, lakul, lakul, lakul, lakul. And as I was getting him out of the car, I said to him, you know, when you do that, you sound like a fin. And he said, what? I said, that sounds like finish. You're teaching. I've said racist. The color. Cool. Well, no, it's that's the language. I know how you feel about the fins.

Yeah. Well, yes, there is that. But I said it to him with a smile. Okay. I'm not teaching him my prejudice against the fins. I'm just telling him he sounds like a fin. God damn it. I'm a flander. You know, you know what know what it's not the Tommy people I have a problem with I know Sound like a mother fucking freezing Baster And it's actually just one extended clan of fins that I really have a problem with But specific racism

Well, it's not even though it a problem with. Um, but, specific racism, almost, well, it's not even, you know, it's one family. Yeah. Anyway, um, so your son comes out, so my son is making these noises, and I, and I told him,

you sound like a fin, and he said, what, what is that? I said, well, you know, Finland is a country, and they speak Finnish, and that sounds like that language. And, you know,

I go to Unbuckle, I'm out of his car seat, and whatever, and he gets down, and he looks at me with his quizzical look on his face. And he says, so, that sounds like the fish people? He said, no, not fish. Finns, two ends, Finland.

Oh, okay. And then we went to school with no further, pretty thing about that, but the fish people, you, you, you didn't meet the woman that daddy was marrying to before your mommy, but you're not far off. Um, and so again, it's not really about the fins. It's just about one family. So anyway, how about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony and I hate Swedes. No, uh, so I don't. I'm my best friend. I'm dating harmony. I'm a Latin and a high school US history teacher up here in Northern California. Uh, and today, um, my, my children, they, you know, how they get to pick a meal

every week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My daughter wanted to make everything soup, which is out of the hero's feast, a cookbook for D&D nerds. And it's something that halflings cook and let's do all day in the hopes that a visitor will come by. That's part of the, the lore behind the story, right? Or behind the, the recipe. I walk downstairs because I help my son do something. I walk downstairs because she's cooking like she's 10. She can do all the cooking herself now as my children do and she's you know chopping leaks and you know curating this and just all kinds of wacky and I come down stairs and I'm like oh my god it smells amazing. She's like I can't. I was like, walk outside and then walk back inside. She does. She's

like, Oh, it smells great. I'm like, doesn't it smell like three adventures or about to show up? Nice. It was my house smelled like adventurers were coming. Very cool. I suppose that's better than you have smelly like adventurers had just arrived. I suppose that's better than you have smelly like adventurers had just arrived. Because that would be the smell of copper salt, mud, oily leather. Somebody trying to express pharaoh mones toward the barmaid. Yes. Yeah. Yes. It's just the small dust of Cheetos.

No, that's that's that's players, not necessarily adventures, but yeah. Very cool. I kind of I kind of want that recipe because I'm intrigued. Yeah. Well, she had a lot of fun ripping apart the rotisserie chicken that goes into it. So yeah, okay, I'm down. I taught her where the oysters were. Oh, yeah. So yeah. So it's good living. It's good life. Yeah. Your your boys five, give him literally just two more years and you can start cooking. That's I think that's how old she was when she made banners and smash. All right. Which is a dwarven meal that goes on top of the forge. And also cooks all day. Oh, all right. So yeah. So cool. making my son, uh, my daughter, Julia made soup. Tomorrow, my son, William is making gingerbread cake. So it should be good.

Oh, man. Yeah. You have the fat guys attention. Holy cow. Maybe I'll save you some because I don't really like gingerbread. Um, All right. I'll save you some because I don't really like gender red. All right, all right. Cool. Man, it's going to be a little bit of cannibalism, but you do you.

It's fine. We'll play. Thank you. We'll play. So, um, I got a question for you. Yeah. What do you know about Ronald Reagan? You had. What do you know about Ronald Reagan?

Well, let's see how Ranty versus historically accurate do you want this response to be neither? I just wanted you primed for for what we're doing. Did you know that Ronald Reagan about Ronald Reagan? How many times have we talked about that chuckle fuck on this show? I think there are a few episodes where we don't. Yeah. Then episodes where we do or it's based on parity. Yeah, based on our age. Yeah.

And experience. Yeah. All right. So you know that he is at once divorced women's best friend and worst enemy. No. It turns out Ronald Reagan is quite often. once divorced women's best friend and worst enemy. No, it turns out Ronald Reagan is quite often the good guy and bad guy in every story. So tonight we'll be about that by way of cartoons.

So in 1969, governor Ronald Reagan signed into law an important bill. One that he later said was the most regrettable thing he'd ever done. So you know, it did something good for women. And for a man, of course, what's that? No fault of worse. Yes.

Oh, and for a man who reflected very little on his long and regrettable career in both film and politics, It's pretty on brand. Just prove me wrong, children. Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, no argument. Just yeah, I wish there were mummies so that we could revivify him and everyone could slap him. Like, you could make so much money. Just charge. and everyone could slap him. Like, you could make so much money.

Just charging you, you know what you could do? You could eliminate the national debt that he incurred. That's true. You could get pretty close anyway. Or you could put like those things that generate electricity off of movement, put them like inside his corpse as people slap him. Yeah, just as people smack around, and that'll make up for the

the solar panels that he took off the White House. Yeah. Oh, Jesus. So it's on brand because the legislation that he signed into law, in fact, was the nation's very first no fault divorce bill. Okay, awesome. As a result of this, couples didn't have to fabricate reasons for splitting up. They could just divorce. Yeah. And it's entirely likely that he was trying to do two things. Right what he'd felt was a wrong done to him, as well as liberate men. Yeah, men who were so terribly awfully shackled by the institution of marriage prior to that.

Yeah, well, we'll go for the first part first then. Okay, yeah. So Reagan had been accused of mental cruelty by Jane Wyman in her divorce papers. And if you peel that back a little bit, you'll find that she actually could have been credibly accused of the same in her efforts to get him to marry her, because she reportedly threatened suicide if he didn't move forward with proposing marriage. Then she took a bunch of pills,

and then when he bulked at that, then she banned him from seeing her in the hospital until he barged into her hospital room and didn't leave until they were engaged. So clear cut case of a couple who should have either broken up or gotten married, and that always means they should have broken up. Oh yeah. Wow.

So they were married from 1941 to 1948 when she filed officially ending their marriage in 1949. And almost as soon as they were married, he began to do all he could to jumpstart his career and elevate himself. And he she often accused him of being a boar and neglectful. Now this is not without grounding. He recorded an album where he's screeching against Medicare or a version of it and communism and playing it at parties. But also the two of them had a daughter named Maureen and they adopted a son together, Michael, and they were trying for a third. And their daughter Christine was born premature and died the next day in 1947. And unfortunately, statistically, this is often a reason for divorce. Yeah. Now, Jane Mime, why men would go on to star in Dallas, Dynasty, and not landing competitor Falconcrest.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So just just to be sure, she starred in Falconcrest, the competitor to those. I just occurred to me that it sounds like there's almost a list. Yeah. Which was a show about wealthy elites and all the drama that came with it. Earl Hamner, the show's creator, saw it as an inversion of the wholts of the Walten's and she played the female version of J.R. Ewing. The show ran from December 1981 until May of 1990.

Funny that. Yeah. Well, really 1981 until 1990. Anyway, Ronald Reagan. Yeah. Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan. Go on. Go ahead. Sorry. During their marriage, he did all he could do to represent the military and patriotism without actually doing anything of the sort outside of Selya Lloyd.

He got himself stationed into the Provisional Task Force show unit, which was located in Burbank, which allowed him to continue pumping out mediocre movies like this is the army. He also produced over 400 training films pretending at the very thing that his opponent turned running mate actually did. Mm-hmm. In 1947 Reagan ascended to the head of the SAG, the screen actor's guild, and began doing all he could to quote, keep the labor unions clean, unquote, along with Walt Disney. Great company there. Yeah, for the government. So as the, the, the head of a union of artists, he was doing all he could to keep it clean on behalf of the government,

blaming all labor conflicts on communists, while giving very good lip service to Jeffersonian democracy, when called in front of the HUAC. Now, it's 1948. Shortly after that divorce, he meets Nancy Davis, who had been accidentally placed on the Communist Blacklist. And he used his position as the SAG president to have her name removed from it. They were literally chasing down a different Nancy Davis. Kidding. Yeah. Wow. And the two of them married and had two children, Patty and Ron. Right. So my math has that he's got four children of fifth, if you count the one who is stillborn. Right. So anyway, he shifted rightward to support Eisenhower and again when he supported Nixon because he saw Medicare as a great threat to American freedom. You got to keep in mind we take shit for granted that at that time most people were begging for and that's different.

So yeah, yeah. It's all right. Now Nixon lost his bid for the presidency by just a few thousand cemetery votes. And then he lost the race for governor in 1962. You're right. Yeah. So, but that didn't stop him. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so but that didn't stop him. Yeah, he kept he kept trying to get himself in the public limelight advertising himself is very much a statesman and statement like becoming kind of the go-to hard-nosed who would go talk to communists building his brand that way. Yeah, um, and so never let people telling you know get in the way of your ambition, kids, because

Nixon in 1968 would then become president. Yeah. Now, because of Jerry Brown's, Jerry, no Edmund Brown, I'm sorry, because of Edmund Brown's and Barry Goldwater's losses, Reagan saw himself as the great right hope, uh, and he ran against, I'm sorry, Pat Brown. Yeah. Edmund is Jerry Brown. I'm saying he goes right, Jerry, I'm sorry, Pat Brown. Yeah, Edmunds is Jerry Brown. That's he goes right. Jerry. I'm sorry. Yeah. Pat Brown is the dad, Jerry Brown,

Jerry Brown, Edmund Brown. He has a son. Yes. So, so he ran against Pat Brown for governor in 1966, and he was banking on white resentment and agreement at the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But he was also positioning himself as the not big at Republican who was only worried about the liberty of private property, and he managed to outperform the last Republican San Francisco mayor, George Christopher. George Christopher had run as a modern Republican

and cast Reagan as an extremist, whom he then turned around to help in his bid for governor against Brown. extremist whom he then turned around to help in his bid for governor against brown. Right. Yeah, well, because party politics is a thing. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Reagan ran as an outsider who didn't want to compromise and do politics as usual. And he painted Pat Brown is one of the responsible, one of the, as the one responsible for the Watts riots and being soft on crime. Okay. Wait. Brown. Mm hmm. Responsible for the Watts right? Yes. Right.

Okay. Yeah. And yeah. Okay. Republican Republican politician. So yeah. Okay. That traps. All right. Yeah. And Ronald Reagan had already been in people's eyes for quite some time, given all his media exposure. And now he's running for a public office and he's blaming a incumbent Democrat for a problem that other people had been a huge part of. I'm not saying that Brown's policies did not lead to Watts. I certainly believe the white supremacy was baked in. Well, yeah. Yeah. And the, the, the, also the governor can't necessarily tell a mayor,

hey, tell your police commissioner to stop being such a shit because the, the constituents in LA seem to like that. Yeah. If they weren't black. So, but it is interesting that you have a candidate who is underperforming on the left, who then gets blamed for a big crisis. And then you also have a guy who steps in,

who's not gonna do politics as usual, who's an outsider and who's a media figure, who then beats a guy who had called him an extremist, and then that guy lap dogs to him and helps him win. It feels familiar in ways that I don't repeat itself, but it does fucking rhyme, don't I? All right. So are you thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger? Well, yeah, I mean on the group editorial level. Yeah. Oh, there's another. It's screw you. You know, full well, what you're doing. Don't

ask that way. Come on now. All right. Reagan had tons of television and media exposure. He was a familiar face. And despite having been mostly a mouthpiece and an empty vessel, he defeated the Democratic candidate who was very qualified, who also couldn't shake looking unpleasant and unattractive to the left, and to moderates who didn't like the direction that things were going, as moderates are secretly not. He then turned around, and as governor, raised consumer taxes and excise taxes while lowering property taxes. Now, who does that help? Yeah.

Could you imagine? The result was that most of the Californians who would feel it the most felt the biggest tax hike a governor had ever presided over. He also restricted the gun rights of Californians so that white folks would feel better about the black panthers who were following and patrolling the police who had previously gotten away with a lot of brutality. Yep. And then in 1969, he signed the first no fault divorce bill into law. In the next 15 years, almost every state would follow suit.

Now I got a lot of the statistics from it's interesting because you know how you can like wrap a lot of bullshit up in the truth. The most reliable source I got on this was from a far right like anti-divorce rights activism website, but their ship was impeccable as far as the stats. What they then said about it afterward was hot garbage. So they're not going to be able to do anything. Because there's lies, there's lies, then there's statistics. You can quote statistics perfectly. Yeah. And use them in a way that

is absolute and utter bullshit, which they did. So for their numbers, I I took from them. So from 1960 to 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled from 9.2 divorces per 1000 married women to 22.6 divorces per 1000 married women. Okay. Turns out a lot of women wanted the fuck out. Wow. Yeah. In the 1970s, half of all couples who married that decade would they would later divorce. It's also meant that 50% of kids born to married parents

saw their parents divorced. Okay. Churches responded compassionately to this too. The United Methodist Church in 1976 stated, quote, in marriages where the partners are even after thoughtful reconsideration and counsel, a strange beyond reconciliation, we recognize divorce and the right of the divorced persons to re-marry and express our concern for the needs of the children of such unions. To this end, we encourage an active accepting and enabling commitment of the church and our society

to minister to the needs of divorced persons. Excellent. Yeah! Marriage was now volition, not tradition. Yes. The marriage was seen as a vehicle for self-oriented ethics of romance, intimacy and fulfillment in the 1970s. I'm doing this because I want to because it will make me feel good to do this. I'm not doing this because I don't need

to do this to feel good and because I don't want to. Those now become the guiding principles to getting married instead of, well, I'd better get married soon. I'm almost 26. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So soulmatism grew, not starting a familyism grew. Yeah. This meant that those who felt that they were in unfulfilling marriages, not what their soulmates after all felt obligated to divorce. It's not good for me to be in this marriage. I should get divorced. Not just this this final option. Yeah, this relationship is unhealthy and right. I need to get out of it. We need to get out of it. Yeah. And it's no longer like, well, you know, he's always

going to have a job because he's the town's undertaker. That ceases to be the reason, right? Like there's there's there's a lot less like this is my ticket to financial security and what else am I going to do? Yep, I'm almost 23. And now it's so I have to interject here. Yeah, I have to interject here. Sure. Because when my parents got married was when my parents got married, they married in 1970. Okay. And my dad was born in 44. My mother was born in 45. So my mother was 25 years old. Oh, she just when they got married. And and understand that was literally that was no shit. What my grandmother was was starting to say to her. Yeah. And the phrase was, you're a Christmas cake. Well, I don't think they used that one. But I know they used that

in Japan up until like 20 years ago. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. But it was, you know, because all of her older, older sisters had already been married. And it was like, you know, Linda and then my aunt, my, my one remaining aunt. And while my one remaining on, who's not in the care home. Anyway, this is important. This, this part is definitely an important detail. The audience might not understand otherwise. Yeah, I'm sorry. But anyway, yeah, she was literally getting that from the other members of the family. It was like, you need to figure something out. And then she brought my dad home and her older sister was like,

you're robbing the cradle, aren't you? And at the conclusion of my dad's first visit with his eventually in-laws, as they were saying their good're goodbyes. Um, there was a lull in the conversation. And my grandfather, God bless him, looked my father right. And I said, so when you two going to get hooked up, just look. And my grandfather did it to get a, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,

out of my dad, my grandmother apparently kicked him in the shits. Good, good. But yeah, no, that was truly like a, you know, we talk about, you know, oh well, we speak of it sarcastically now. Right. But it really was a thing. It was a pervading reality.

Like, yeah, it was a thing like consent is a thing now. Yeah. Because that was how you got consent back then. Yeah. But it's also true. Yeah. Man. Man. Anyway, so, okay, so you come from the, what they're not boomers are they? What my parents they are they barely well my dad No, they are not there. They're happy to be home. They fucked. They had yeah, well, okay So my mom was the tail end of that she was 56 and my mother I think was like 57 or 50 Yeah, I think he was 57 because there's what are different

They got married in like 75 76 Okay, not too long after your parents um, but they got married at like I think she was 20 and he was 19 Oh wow. Yeah, yeah um my great-great-aunt um, aunt Ella who had been born when there were horse and buggies. And she died after we got to the moon. Oh, damn. Yeah, she died. I think she was like 97 when she died. She was like 1888 or some shit. Holy crap. Yeah. She was twice divorced. No, she was widowed and divorced. Okay. And it was whispered that she was divorced. She's divorced. Oh, yeah. Who will be like like this is like nobody here, but our family. Oh, yeah. Well, it's the same way. Yeah, the same way that in some

circles, you know, you talk, well, you know, he got cancer. You know, it's the same. It's the same kind of we don't want the evil eye to find. Yeah, we dare not speak its name. Yeah, Voldemort Voldemort Voldemort. God damn it. Fucking Voldemort got divorced. Her husband was a drunken and asshole. She divorced.

Yeah. Like what's the problem here? Yeah. Like you know, statistically that's what it was. Statistically that was it. Yeah. You know, it was, she was in fear for her life. Right.

Right. Because again, you have, it was, she was in fear for her life. Right. Right. Because again, you have to go before a legal person and they get to decide. Yeah, they get to tell you whether or not you get to get divorced. And here's what's wild. That was a progressive step forward from 100 and something years prior. I think 150 years prior, you had to get an active legislation. Oh, yeah.

You literally had to have the legislature meet during their session to make you a divorce. Oh, yeah. Like it was, it was bullshit. Yeah, it was, yeah. So I think there's a huge step forward and I get props to Reagan for this. Does, and frankly, look,

people can bring their baggage to their job. That's how it works. Yeah. I think he was recasting himself. I think he was genuinely trying to kind of like how we made Rambo 2 to feel better about losing Vietnam. And he was doing that regarding divorce. So you understand that.

Yeah. You get this idea of the soulmate model or marriage. And by the way, at this point, you get the newlywed game. Um, but, uh, they have tracks. Yeah. Well, and also this is the point at which the sexual revolution has well underway. Yes. And so there's a whole there's a whole generation after Reagan. Yep. Who who are not tied up in the same ideas about, well, you know, you got to get married. Right. Where you go, you know, doing that stuff. Well, and they're shaming their parents, but they're just like, because their parents are like,

you're living with it. You're not married to them. Yeah. Can't don't you have the decency to at least be hypocritical about it? Like, yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, soulmatism is kind of a thing. And with this new model,

divorce could be reframed as an opportunity for growth for children as well. And this is where this website kind of went off the rails because they're like, oh, and they lied because they said blah, blah, blah for the children. It felt very Dr. Laura E. But I think they have something in their core that they accidentally tripped over.

Because instead of tradition, happiness was now the guiding factor. And if a child is seeing a shitty marriage, it is your duty as a parent to remove that from the child's view and show them like, hey, we're going to struggle for a while, but you deserve better. But in the end, we're going to buy a much better place. And by the way, this is how self-actualized independent adults take care of themselves. Sometimes you have to say, we were either we were wrong to do this or we've come to the end of the road. Yeah, we both things can be changed. Yeah. to the end of the road. Yeah, we, we, things can be changed. Yeah, since Ben aren't dying at 46. Uh huh.

That's the other thing. Yeah, yeah. Life expectancy is also going up. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, having witnessed children in those situations, you know, I am constantly grateful that my first wife and I never had kids.

And having seen friends in unhealthy situations who have kids. Yeah, my attitude has been, you know, looking at them and telling them, okay, no, you need to get the fuck out of there. Right. Because it is okay to get out. It is okay to fuck out of there. Right. Because it's okay to get out. It is okay to get out of there.

And one of the arguments has been, do you want your child being surrounded by this level of toxicity? It's really clear, neither one of you is happy. Mm-hmm. You know, it's better for them to see you as an adult, say, okay, no, I'm removing myself, and then deal with whatever else comes after that. Then to continue seeing you and your partner

positively hurting each other. Yeah, like that's bullshit. Yeah. And again, your child will see themselves in you, therefore, right? So yeah, the view was that a divorce could protect the emotional welfare of children by allowing their parents to leave marriages in which they were unhappy. And there's a lot of truth to that, like you were saying. But also, it's also really easy to cocoon yourself in that truth and pretend that the kids are better off by the decision that you happen to endorse. So there is kind of a reverb going on there. Okay. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. It's there. It's absolutely there. And it is hard to do objective longevity studies because you're dealing with a lot of emotional shit. You're dealing with,

like, how do you measure happiness index? You know, like, you can't just be by finance because what if the family business had failed and you guys had stayed together? You know, like, you can't just be by finance because what if the family business had failed and you guys had stayed together, you know, like, there's so many, there's so much to it. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a, it's an immensely complicated, there's so many variables involved. Yeah. But you can take a look at surveys year over year. And so in 1962, about half of American women agreed with the idea that quote, when there are children in the family, parents should should stay together even if they don't get along. Okay, that's about half now that's 62 by 77 that number dropped to 20%.

Okay, that tracks I can see that. I think we're seeing a by the way, that's the year I was born. My parents were divorced little little after I was born about 10 months later. Um, but I think we're seeing a confluence of things. I think we're seeing, uh, real data for the first time where women are actually able to talk candidly about their feelings without fear of reprisal, without fear of judgment, and without fear of financial and social ruin. Um, I also know that there was a study in Britain, and I'm sticking to America for this, but there was a study in Britain in 1954 where they asked

women how important is sex in a marriage. And I think it was like 20% yeah, we've talked about this entirely or episode. Yeah. Yeah. And then by 74, it had gone up to over 50%. And I don't think British men got that much better at fucking from 54 to 74. But like women were evaluating their orgasms. Yeah. Women, women were now in a better position to be able to say, Hey, you know what? I, I deserve

some, some attention. Right here too. You know, I also I deserve pleasure and it is my right. And you as a husband should provide that for me. I should not just lie back and think of the queen. Yeah. So there was as is inevitable the prevalence of a rubber band effect when it came to the necessity of fathers as a result of this. But in fairness, I don't think the necessity of fathers as more than breadwinners was really dripping from the pages until women got to leave either. So I'm going to call bad faith on that. Oh, no, it totally wasn't like, I mean, look at, look at all of the stereotypes that you see in media from the post war period.

Oh, yeah. You know, men are like, okay, well, you know, I'm home having dinner and then going out to the bowling club, you know, bowling club for turn organization, go to the bar, that bar. Yeah, doing everything they could to get out of the fucking house because they felt stifled and they felt trapped. Right. Because the institution of marriage was this obligation. And it was, you know, it was, it was as, and their role was so nucleally defined as in you are the proton, wife is the neutron your children are the electron so you don't get to do anything other than be the bread winner. Yeah, you don't get to do anything other than be the host house house house maker and the children, you know, don't do it to do anything other than run around outside. Yeah, like it's so. Yeah.

Oh yeah. And that's dominant culture. That's not even what everybody had to deal with. But that is the dominant culture in the dominant paradigm. Yeah. And it's bullshit. Like, you know, you see, you see echoes of that even today, you know, 70 years after the 50s. You know, the, the number of cake toppers, like when, when, when Lena, we were getting married, you know, trying to shop for a cake topper, you're like, there's so many of these.

We don't like we want something that's a little bit funny or a little bit cute. But all the ones that are trying to be funny or cute are like she's dragging him to the other. She's dragging him to the other. She's you know, clapping handcuffs on him or something. Right. He's trying to cry. He's weeping. It's like I want to be here. Like this is personally insulting to me. I like what the fuck, man. You know, and so yeah, no,

that there are those aspects of our culture that still haven't gotten fixed. Mm-hmm. Yes, there's a friend of mine who's a comedian, his name's Corey Baringer, two Rs. in the middle, there's also an okay, and I believe um, but he uh, his like a lot of his stick is I love my wife. And it's so wholesome that it's funny. Uh-huh, because you keep expecting him to hit you with the reversal. And he's like, Oh, no, there's no reversal here. She really gets me. And I love her. And like, you're like, okay, this is funny. Like,

it shouldn't be this funny, but this is fun. But, but our, but our social expectations are such that like exactly. And he can just keep going on it. Uh-huh. And yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's a lot of fun. But yeah, that's, that's precisely like, so yeah. Um, in 1974, there was a book that said, quote, when fathers are not available, friends, relatives, teachers and counselors can provide ample opportunity for youngsters to model themselves after a like sex adult. Now, that is a book that that occurred at the time. That was a snapback against the, what are you going to do with the man leaves, you know, kind of thing? What are you going to do that? You're on your own own Janice. Um, but again, I don't think that that can be

taken wholesale since examinations of how many nights out a week day, a week dads would spend in those same homes 10 and 20 years earlier. Not really counted like we were just talking about. Yeah. The fact is the institutional model of a marriage as a goal, especially for women, was no longer a forever institution. It was one of volition for both parents and this meant that mistakes could be corrected. If you add this to the fact that with the availability of safe and legal contraception starting in 1966, everywhere, and safe and legal abortions starting nationally in 1972 remember those days Family life in general was more and more an active volition and there were more and more definitions of what that family was Yeah, a lot of folks will point out that the idea the idea that a no fault divorce hasn't enhanced people's marriages who choose to stay married And that may be but it's not so in a vacuum idea that a no-fault divorce hasn't enhanced people's marriages who choose to stay married.

And that may be, but it's not so in a vacuum. Okay, hold on. Let me, let me, let me backtrack on that statement. So it has not enhanced marriages for people who choose to stay married. Right. So they're claiming that that's not a, so therefore divorce is not good because it hasn't enhanced on people who stayed together. And I actually kind of think it has.

Because you all get to stay together on purpose. Yeah. It's an active choice, an exhausted choice, but an active choice. A very, very tiring choice. But yes, I don't even get like where that argument, like, well, this has an enhanced marriage, so it's no good. Well, okay, Bob, the idea wasn't to enhance marriage. The idea was to make it so that if your marriage sucks, you can get out of it. Right.

We're not trying to help and hence the experience for people who like were happy. They were fine. Right. It feels like survivor paradox, doesn't it? Like survivor fallacy. Yeah. Like, oh, we better arm our up the parts that got shot. Why?

Those parts didn't cause them to crash. Yeah. Those, those are the parts that you can get shot up. Right. Let's look at all the places like, Oh, hey, these parts near the fuselage in the wing, that's where the fuel tanks are, did shit. Maybe. Let's look at the ones that crashed.

Yeah, let's look at the, yeah. Yeah, the people, the people whose marriages worked are not the problem. The problem is everybody who is stuck in a marriage that was making the miserable and in a shockingly high number of cases actually killing them. That's a thing that's happening now in older care facilities. There is an enormous, there's like this whole underground like Twitter, TikTok, whatever, or social media is like caregivers of TikTok or caregivers of Twitter, whatever.

Is the amount of elderly women admitting to murdering their husbands? Is remarkably high. I wasn't even thinking of it from that side. I was just thinking of how many women were murdered by their husbands through domestic violence, but also that? Yeah, that, okay. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, when society doesn't give you an option. You know, if you are in fear for your safety, your children's safety, your life, you know, yeah, you're going to find a way to slip rat poison in the ragu. Like, it's going to seem like a good idea because you were on infetimines the whole time. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, there's also mothers little helper might have made it a little bit a little bit easier to follow that track of thought. Oh, man. Yeah, it's important to remember that after a certain point, members of the greatest in silent generations were kind of all on drugs. Yeah, he's on the downer. She's on the uppers. Yeah. Yeah.

The secretary gates in the middle. Um, so this brings me to another Ronald Reagan milestone. Uh, his election to president. Okay. He once he was elected to office and the world began kneeling right or not kneeling. Keening. Keening right word. Keening. Keening right word. Okay. The Charles kneeling five. No, uh, keening right word.

I have not found a way to to like a lot of people have said, oh, well, you'll find a way to slip this into anything. And I haven't. I don't do that. But I would like to slip the SNL scandal into some some sort of like, Hey, do you remember that that Marvel team up issue where yeah, Iceman and and like the shadow got together. That's just like Charles Keating. And here's yeah, that's a hard one. That's a hard one because that was yeah Esoteric oh boy on a certain level. Yeah, but anyway, so anyway So the world started keening rightward Another really important factor changed how families were structured He Ronald Reagan institutionalized or instit, did I dare say institutionalized unfortunately.

A Calvin Coolidge-style fiscal policy, following the advice of Arthur Betts-Laffer, and outspoken critic of Keynesian economics who insisted that tax cuts would raise tax revenues. And we just all agree that when you're dealing with a large enough economy, Keynesianism has been proven to actually work. And can we all just get together and go, okay, Richard Nixon agreed. Yeah, I fucking know.

We're all Keynesians. We're all Keynesians, like, because it, because it fucking works. Great. So, for the own economic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Noted. like because it because it fucking works great social down economics and yeah, yeah, noted. noted pinko commie Richard Nixon socialist avatar Richard millhouse Nixon. I just love hearing the middle name Richard millhouse

next. Yeah. It just sounds like milk toast. But but like and can can we just agree? Can we just find a way to agree as a society that when you're dealing with the world's largest economy, maybe Keynesianism has shown that it's a model worth following, maybe. Nope.

Nope, because where do you learn that? One of those pussy libraries where you can read books. God damn it. You sound pitch perfect too. I know. That's the line. God. I have to be careful where I keep my phone because of what

starts getting advertised to me because of the research that I do for the show and because of the things we discuss. Like I could not figure out for the life of me why gun t-shirts and like American flags made of guns and as designs on a food prepper bucket was being advertised to me for the longest time. And then I realized, Oh, Christ, it's all the shit that I look up for the show. I'm damn it. Another browser. That's funny.

Yeah. Anyway, terrifying. But anyway, yeah. So, uh, economist regularly derived this as poppycock of the highest order, by the way. But because it's the United States, uh, laffer won the presidential medal of freedom in 2019. And his theories were again put into practice in Kansas under the brown back administration in 2012, leading to economic disaster there, turning a budget surplus into a $200 million deficit, forcing brown back to run on culture war bullshit about strip bars instead of facts leading to infrastructural and educational cuts that

threaten the viability of those very schools and infrastructure. Lafer got $75,000 for his advice to Kansas. And of course, he got the congressional middle of freedom in 2019. Oh, why is there like, is that a math thing or what? No, no. So rotting mango of a human being anyway, Laffer advised Reagan, who then went all in on supply side and tax cuts for the rich, something that bush

himself called voodoo economics. In a single year, the government cut the top marginal tax rate from 70 to 50% and cut the capital gains taxes from 28 to 20%, which if you just think about it as simple percentages, I could understand fooling yourself, but if you think about it as going from 70 to 50% just means that they can buy more yachts. Because they're not starving. And also now if you start taking a look at the amount of money that gets taken out of the budget for social safety net programs, then you start to, but no, let's just, wow, 20% cut. That's not that big a deal. That's a fifth big deal.

I would love to lose a fifth of my taxes. When he, okay. Yeah. 70 to 50. What? Like, there's no, and again, it's money that they would never fucking see. Like, because there are other money stacked on top of it. Like, they're never going to see that money. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and when, and when you, and when you hear, well, oh my god, they're never gonna see that money. Yeah. And when you hear, well, oh my God, they were being taxed at 70%. No, their income over a particular level was being taxed at 70%. Right.

Like every dollar you make over 10 million. Right. You're only seeing 30 cents of. But when you look at the scale on which anybody who's making that kind of money operates, that 30 cents on the dollar still means they're making another three million a year. Exactly. Like it would be great to take the Eisenhower speech about the cost of a bomber Yeah, and convert it to the cost of cuts on billionaires.

Mm-hmm. You know, 1% cut means an entire town's power for an entire year. You know, a 2% cut means eight hospitals, fully staffed. You know, that kind of shit, you know, or 50,000 bushels a week. You know, that, I think that would be helpful. Anyway, but they also cut capital gains taxes from 28 to 20% and and again, most people will never see capital gains or know anything about that. So most of us would not give a shit, but of course, we're all temporarily embarrassed

millionaires. So we think, oh, I could use that extra 8% someday. It's like you could use that extra 8% now. Yeah. Because it would have come to you. Well, it would have, number one, there's all kinds of ways it would have come to you. The highways that you bitch about being in bad repair. The bridges and overpasses and everything else that are literally falling apart across our country. The, the, you think that would have held sway into coma?

You could think. Nice, nice, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. That took me a moment. That joke. Yeah. That, you know, I saw a documentary on that bridge.

Didn't hold up. Didn't. I'm not feeling very harmonic after all that. I have to tell you. I'll done. They also increased the inherited money exemptions from real estate and corporate taxes by more than 300%. So there's four exemptions. Say that again. So inherited money, right? Yeah. They increased the exemptions. You could claim in that by over 300%. They increased exemptions from real estate taxes by 300%.

Actually, I mean, we had Prop 13 out here in California. We did that to ourselves, but that means that Disney, who currently makes, like, $15 a month from everybody who has a subscription, right? And there's like 12 million subscriptions or something. Like they're just making free money. And they're still paying on their real estate for Disney world and Disney land, $19.75. Yeah. Whatever it was. Well, for Disney land, I don't Yeah. Whatever it was value.

For Disney land. I don't know how Disney world good point because that's in Florida. So they're probably saying nothing. But, um, yeah, which is even worse. But yeah, so Disney land, they're, they're paying, I think it's 1973 dollars. But California did that ourselves when we keep continuing to not fix that. Well, and, and yeah, just just in the last major in the 2020 election, I remember my union, and I'm sure yours too, was pushing really hard to support an amendment. Yeah, it was a big property. Yeah, yeah, that would say, okay, no look for business for business.

Just for business, just for business value. You know, three million dollars. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you want a home, this isn't you, not you. We still defeated it as a state where idiots. Yeah. Well, and the thing is, I actually, I got into arguments with friends on Facebook about it. And they were like, no, no, this is, this is, you know, this is just, this this is just this is getting their foot in the door And yeah, they're gonna they're gonna and it was literally they're gonna kick my mom out of her house Right because she won't be able to report a for-to-payer property taxes. It's like no, that's no read the bill. Well, no, I know what the bill says which they didn't but right right now and and yeah, no, the noise machine, because as a culture, we're, we're afraid of taxation.

Yeah. Which is really weird, because we're also afraid of the homeless people that a lack of taxation creates. Yep. So, yeah, we screw ourselves both ways. Mm-hmm. So, you know, it feels like, it feels like those kids that I see

that were Harvard sweatshirts around school, at high school, Harvard Yale, Princeton, all these sweatshirts that they had to pay like 50 bucks to buy. And then they also spent another $55 to apply, to get told no. So, they've given that institution a hundred dollars and they won't ever get to go there. Yeah. Like, you know, and they're advertising it to others. So there's yeah. Other value added there. Like, yeah, I actually have this idea for a while and I still

kind of want to do it where I make college style sweatshirts. Mm-hmm. But they say things that like eyes and adult will never get to since the kids are wearing shirts for schools and never get to. Yeah, like self-respect or true happiness or debt-free, you know, shit like that. Yeah, see my toes, you know, stuff like that, like just, but yeah, anyway. So, so yeah, he's just just wholesale wonderful for business, you know, and like I said, it's it's it's very Calvin cool, a desk in 1985, the top mar back to what they were at 28% so you know for those who had the highest incomes So fairs fair and the lowest tax bracket went up from 11 to 15% that's only 4% I mean no big deal except that you're living Completely into our juice like Yeah, and that That part, that 4% increase to help fund the, or help like make up, you know.

May have been the linchpin to the whole reason why marriages weren't getting better, even though they were now much closer to being purely acts of volition. In 1970, the amount of households that had children with only one income earner in the family was around 60 percent. By 1985, that number was closer to 40 percent. That means that around 1981, the two ships passed in the night with dual income households surpassing single income households. Marital happiness may not have been on the rise because both parents were out working.

And if you add to that, the amount of households where it's a single parent, that means 100% of the adults are likely working outside of the home in those houses. And there it is with the cuts to the tax rates paired with the cuts to Medicaid funding for food stamps, school lunch programs, unemployment benefits, job training and retraining, and Reagan's constant attempted murders on social security. All of this to pay for the difference in the tax cuts that he created, we're starting to see what's really happening.

Paradoxically, we're seeing every year that he was in office, the GDP rose as did the amount of our national debt and the percentage of the GDP or as the percentage of GDP. Further, only two of his eight years saw a reduction in deficit spending and those were still reductions from higher years the previous year. So I kind of don't count that. I mean, mathematically, yes, it's a reduction, but it's not an overall reduction. It's never below what he started with. No. In other words, yes, he reduced the deficit spending from 207 billion down to 185 billion from 1983 to 1984. But he came into office with it pegged for two years straight at 73 billion. He never got below 73 billion.

it pegged for two years straight at 73 billion. He never got below 73 billion. So even when it was lower, it was a hundred billion dollars more. Yes. And by the time he left office, it was still more than double what he had been, what it had been when he'd assumed office. So so what we're saying here is because because a big, a big huge part of that was, you know, military program spending. Uh-huh. Huge, huge, huge part of it. And, and that military spending is. I want you to remember that. I want you to remember that specifically. I'm gonna, yeah, believe me, I'm gonna. But a, a significant number, I don't know if it's a majority, but I know I've heard enough times that I know it's a commonality of historians point to the incredibly inflated military budgets of the Reagan and then the, you know, Bush one years, right, as being what essentially put the nail in the coffin

of the Soviet Union, because they couldn't keep up with us, you know, spending-wise, militarily, and they were their economy tanked, trying to, which is an oversimplification of the argument, but, you know, broad brush. So what you're telling me is we drove the Soviet Union into the ground by running up all of our credit cards. Not only that, but at first off, I think that's a bullshit argument, to be honest. It's not one we can litigate here. But so I disagree that that's what causes so even in the fall. Okay. But let's assume that it is just for a second because I can still make this point. We mortgaged that victory, which I disagree existed that way. Yeah.

We mortgaged it. I mean, cause we certainly spent up, right? Yeah. I just don't think it had an effect. But we mortg mortgage that victory on the backs of poor mothers. Okay. Yeah. It's not unlike when Sarah Palin was complaining that she couldn't have the Cadillac treatment if other people got an old mobile. Right? So in order for me to have my really good health care, some of y'all are going to have to die. And that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. So even if that was true, even if we outspent them and that's how we won the Cold War. And I certainly think we were trying to.

I'm not saying we were trying to. That was the strategy. Right. It was actually what worked. Right. Right. But that strategy was built on fucking the underclass. In order for it to work, you had to start to have the orphan, you had to

have the orphan being tortured at the core of the city for everybody else in Omellas to be there you go. Living in Utopia. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So by 1990 the population was roughly 248 million persons 26.5% of the 91 million total households. So 240 million people. That's 91 million households. Okay. 25.6% so a quarter of those households had children and both parents in the home. Okay. So out of all the households, only a quarter of them had children and both parents in the home. Okay. So out of all the households, only quarter of them had children and both parents. Now keep in mind, there were plenty of households without children.

So, you know, you shrink the number. But roughly 60% of those households had parents who both worked. Yeah. Okay, so the ones that had two parent households, 60% of those, both parents were at work. Okay. This means that the 6.6 of those 91 million households who had just the mom at home. So that was only 6.5%. Wow. In 1990, they didn't keep the data on the single dad households interestingly enough. But 6.6% had keep the data on the single dad households, interestingly enough.

But 6.6% had a vast majority where the parents worked too. In other words, mom was working, right? Yeah. This adds up to roughly half of all kids came from divorce tombs. Okay. About 40% of those kids were living as what was referred to as latchkey kids. Kids who spent, by definition, three or more days per week with two or more sustained hours of unsupervised time alone. Add that to the amount of kids whose parents were both at work after school for a few hours and the number is actually unimpressively small relative to the amount of media attention and focus. Taken as a whole, roughly two million kids, eight to 10% of nationwide kids were latch

key kids. That's about it. Okay. We grew up with like that being the great plague, you know, and Satan, of course, but there's some important. No, no, no, that was role playing games. Don't get it twisted. That was D&D, right.

Yeah. Which kids would do if left home alone, which would have left home a lot. Well, God knows I did enough. But it has neither here nor there. It was okay. Yeah. It's not that many kids. I'm trying to, yeah, I'm trying to run the math in my head. So, okay. So we know that a, a, a very significant number

of those households, we're single parent households, where parent had to be out working to pay bills. Right. That's roughly six percent, six and a half percent of the households in America, where a single mom households and a vast majority of those had her working, of course. Yeah, well yeah. Right, okay. Okay, so that's roughly six and a half percent

of total households. Okay, okay, of total household, all right. Uh huh. Wow, all right. Yeah, that's... It sounded like so much more growing up, right? It really did. Okay, of total household. All right. Wow. All right. Yeah. It sounded like so much more growing up, right? It really did. Now, don't get me wrong. If you lose like a million people in a year, that's only one 300th of the country,

but, but you shouldn't turn your nose at that. Yeah. No. Well, what were their comorbidities? Like you should absolutely see that as the crisis that it is. Yeah. Now, I haven't said that. Yeah. The way that it was focused on when we were kids. Oh, yeah. God knows God knows what was going to happen to us being alone in the house for, you know, two hours and afternoon, you know, three days a week. Right. Now, here's the interesting part. The higher percentages were found in the middle

to upper middle class households. Okay. Kids who lived in poorer areas and poorer homes often had multiple generations living in close enough proximity and or in the house with them. So you'd go down the street to your auntie's house until mom came home. You go down the street to grandma's house or grandma's already home and mom's

taking care of like all of that is there. Those are things you have multi generational homes because people are poor. And that's how that works. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's really the middle class and upper middle class households, the nucleus families that they were and the ones that were the dominant culture, you see a higher prevalence of latch key kids amongst them,

which means that you see a higher percentage of white kids as latch key kids. What you don't have, or where you don't have that, that multi-generational homes, is the families that can afford to live that nuclear lifestyle. Even if it's at the cost of both parents working don't have that multi-generational homes is the families that can afford to live that nuclear lifestyle, even if it's at the cost of both parents working outside of the house.

Okay. So that's why it's getting all that attention. Two million kids. Two million kids were used to, that's your latch key. Yeah. Two million. Which again, that's a lot of fucking kids. Yeah. But it's also, if you take a look at the total number,

like percentage, we're doing all right. Now, you know what, would help with that? After school programs, all the shit that got cut, like all those fucking things that existed prior to Reagan. Yeah. But here you go, two million kids. And old boy, was there a ton of attention given, which is weird since it was Gen X. And we're used to being ignored. But pearls must be clutched and voles must be dropped. So the demographics

that led to the overly proportioned media coverage of latch key kids in the 1980s centered on two factors, socio economic status and the race of each of the latch key kids. In the 1990 census, they identified suburban kids as being twice as likely to be latch key kids as children living in urban centers. And since that meant more white than non white, it wasn't an issue that could be ignored because it was only amongst, or it wasn't only amongst the poorer urban areas where predominantly black, Hispanic, and recent immigrants lived. This is happening in our which is a neighborhood downtown. Well, that's not really, I mean, I get people down there. I mean, yeah.

Yeah, you get to the, I was teaching my daughter while we were cooking, the problem of intuition and just begging the question. Now, in the 1980s, the amount of TV hours spent hovered just around seven hours per day for the decade. And the amount of households with at least one color TV by 1985 was 90% of households.

This meant that if the unsupervised kids weren't in the park or on the street playing with their friends, there was a solid chance that they were watching TV after school. Yeah. Because of the whiteness of this problem, it had to be focused on and had to be solved neatly and effectively, but most importantly, it had to be marketed to. And that's what this episode has really been about. Wow. All right.

But first, a note from our sponsors, a bit about regulation and self-appointed groups who saw the dangers of hyper-capitalized airwaves. Okay. So we got to sit the way back machine to 1968 again. The action for children's television, ACT, they are a self-started watchdog group and I genuinely frown on those, but this one seemed to actually be doing a good thing. They started as an effort to make sure that TV programming would encourage diversification in children's television offerings and would discourage over commercialization of children's

programming. And it would eliminate deceptive advertising aimed at young viewers. Okay. All right. So not that this was what they were aimed at or what sparked them, but I do remember soupy sales getting in trouble for tight kids. If you send me the portraits of presidents from your mom's purse, I'll send you a postcard from Costa Rica, which I love.

So I don't think that that's what they're talking about because that's too direct, but like you saw all kinds of advertising like that, right? And they're like, what the fuck? Um, their first main target actually was romper room, which makes a lot of sense when you think about romper room is all about kids playing, right? So brand product placement should like that. Yeah. Okay. And they're like, no, you have these toys rather overtly advertised here. And not everybody can afford those. So fucking stop it. Like get generic brands. If you're're gonna do that.

Okay, all right. It seems that once both reasonable and like a group of moms who were really fucking sick of their kids asking them for specific toys that they saw on TV shows. Yeah. Which also doesn't sound unreasonable to me. No, indeed.

You know, the first thing I think of hearing about that is nowadays we have YouTube. Yes we do. And there are, there are any number of, well, it's not just ads, it's there are whole YouTube channels put together by, you know, families with, with young children who have gone into basically every video they put up is some kind of, hey, let's show you how, you know, this is, here are these toys and you see the kids playing with the toys or you see, like, for a while, there was, there was a couple of them that Robert was watching where, you know, you hear clearly adults, you know,

doing stuff, you know, doing voices for the toys as they're playing with them. And, you know, you see them showing you how to flip the transformers from one mode to another and, you know, and all this kind of stuff. And it's just, it is, it is the same shit from the beginning of television has just morphed onto a new medium. Yep. It's like- And on-regulated, right? And on-regulated, right?

And on-regulated, right? Yeah. So, and it starts with local activism, right? It starts with people caring and making noise. So, that's what these women did. These moms. And they had an operating staff, they had an operating budget of $225,000 by the mid 1980s.

All right. About eight people paid on staff and they were aided by more than 20,000 volunteers, which you could see this as a civic duty. Yeah. The funding came up from about 70% of the funding was membership dues, 30% was from foundation grants like Oracle. In addition to promoting diversification and fighting capitalism,

they also began to focus on tamping down the violence in TV shows. Saturday morning cartoons were just getting going in the late 1960s and having the kids watching a steady diet of flaxed violence was better than having them watch a steady diet of turgid violence. So they pressured the FCC to get rid of the fantastic four cartoon, the lone ranger, space ghost, bird man, the galaxy trio, and others. Again, shit that we all liked, but if you look at it compared to other cartoons, you'd be like, okay, I see where they're going.

I don't necessarily agree, but then again, I, you know, I think differently, right? But this led the way for HR puffing stuff, dicked acidly and muttly and scooby-doo. Like, okay. And so you start to see how, you know, the, the Lathalympics cartoons, basically, yeah, actually are given space because we got rid of all the good shit. Um, but they were trying to get rid of the virus. Tell us, tell us what you think about dig drastardly there. Don't hold back. Give us your opinion. How did you really feel? I mean, don't get me wrong. You know, the USA network would show me the Lafilimpix. And I thought that was cool cool, but like it had like these random ass

Hannah Barbarra cartoons going against each other and I didn't know half of them. It's like there's a dune buggy that talks and three teenagers that I can't tell the difference between. Yeah. Like I liked the fact that great babe what had a deep voice, but I had never seen a cartoon of great babe, you know. Yeah, well, yeah, we were long past. Right.

Yeah. you know. Yeah, well, yeah, we were long past. Right. Yeah, you know, producer George remembers all of it, but anyway, in the 1970s, they, the, the, I feel like I had a throw in a fuck you on his behalf. So in the 1970s, the, the ACT moved to stop any and all advertising on children's programming via pressure on the FCC This is cool. You pressure the federal regulations. They do the thing right that effort ultimately failed So then they went after children's vitamins that looked like candy. They're like look fucking stop at least doing that And vitamin companies themselves actually removed advertising as a result and that kept the FCC from having to say anything as quite often happens to be honest. It's a cudgel that you wield and other people self-regulate, right? Now with this success, the ACT put forth more suggested guidelines, specifically a three-part thing.

Quote, one, that there be a minimum of 14 hours programming for children of different ages each week as a public service. This sounds great. Okay. All right. Two, that there be no commercials on children's programs. I like, I like, I'm down for this shit. Like, Hey, in addition to providing us one half hour of out of the 24 for news, do this for kids program it, right? And three, that hosts on children's shows do not sell anything. Okay. So that honestly, well, I'll get to that in a second. Fred Rogers was a keynote speaker at one of their symposia. Now, the National Association of Broadcasters reacted to all of this in 1973 by exceeding to some of their guidelines.

Hosts of children's shows couldn't appear in commercials aimed at selling things to kids anymore because you know, you're a trusted face, you know, blah, blah. So when you have to get a cell, you can't be trying to sell legos. Now, what this means is you should give them raises to make up for the, you know, we see this in wrestling. There's the connection. We see this in wrestling. Faces had merch. Heels did not. So you paid heels more to make up for the gap. Okay, it's almost like a night shift differential for nurses. Yeah. Okay. All right. So that's what they should have done I don't think the networks did that because it honestly

So that's what they should have done. I don't think the networks did that because it, honestly, commercial airtime during children's programming was limited to 12 minutes per hour. Okay. That's cool. Which if you think about it, a half hour show of old cartoons was 23, 24 minutes. The other six minutes was ads, right?

Yeah. And so in an hour, 47 minutes for was ads, right? Yeah. And so in an hour, 47 minutes, for an hour, right? Like you see that kind of bleeding over. Yeah. Now it's 18 minutes per half hour of actual content. Well, we'll get to one. But commercial airtime gets limited. This combination absolutely kills local programming hours.

The MC of whatever the fuck hour was no longer viable commodity to the advertisers in the area. So the hosted television hour just completely went away and networks ran national commercials instead. So they're pocketing the money local guys are getting fucked, right? Okay, yeah. In 1970, but the effect is that people aren't selling as much shit to kids. This is not a bad thing. Now in 1977, ACT pushed again, okay?

And it was successful again in getting the FTC, or yeah, the FTC, the Fair Trade Commission, to ban ads targeted at children who were too young to understand advertising, as well as to ban sugary, uh, almost at surgery, sugary, serial advertisements. And they'd become quite a powerhouse, and they kept winning their fights. The AC okay. Okay. Cool. And then 1981 came around. There's a fellow named Mark S. Fowler. He was the new chairman of the FCC on Adrenal Reagan.

And as a conservative Republican, he spear the new chairman of the FCC on Adrenal Reagan. And as a conservative Republican, he spearheaded the end of the fairness doctrine and did all that he could to dysregulate and deregulate the airwaves. I mean, after all, parent groups shouldn't decide what's right for kids and then pressure the government to keep that trust. We need to get government off our backs and let the parents decide based on what corporations make available to them. Yeah, that's you. You said the quiet part out loud there, but so did he.

TV airwaves and radio airwaves for that matter were now dictated by the market and its needs, regardless of what impact it had on children's health or welfare, that's for the parents to deal with. I mean, decide. I mean, deal with. I mean, purchase. After all, parents could regulate as necessary. You don't like it, change the channel. And there is intuitive understanding of that. And I agree with it on so many levels. However, also, yeah, like I don't buy metal shaving cereal, but also I shouldn't have to choose not to buy metal. So Captain King Roo, children's variety show with with a very loose format that encourage safety, kindness, and public service and that would spend a bit of time at the end of every episode Encouraging parents to spend some quality time with their children and encouraged their creativity was canceled in 1984

Schoolhouse rock died off in 1985 a show that essentially supplemented what kids were taught in school math grammar civics kids were taught in school, math, grammar, civics. Fowler was quoted as saying, quote, it's too bad Captain Kangaroo is gone, but the government should not be issuing directives about what should be on the air. Ed shoulders just dropped in defeat. Yeah, well, I mean, when you're dealing with people whose entire ideology is negative, you know, because it's not, it's not, they don't stand for anything positive. It's not, it's not a positive identity. It is a negative identity. Right. It's, it's, you know, we're, we're not socialists. We're not, exactly. We're not going to tell business what they need to do. Okay, well, what do you stand for? Well, we stand for the free market, which is a really good way of masking a negative identity

as a positive one. It's also offloading responsibility, which if you are the government, your job is to take care of the Commonwealth. Yeah. That's why we hired you. Because I don't want to think about how high a speed bump should be. You're the expert. You hire experts and you get that shit done and I give you money so that I don't have

to show up with a shovel at 3 a.m. to help fix the speed bump. Yeah. Like, and no shade on speed bump makers. Thank you. Yeah. But I need one of my streets as a matter of fact. Yeah. Yeah. Like I also like I'm a history teacher. I don't expect other people to teach our kids history. That's what I'm therefore, you know. Yeah. So yeah, he's fully offloading such a responsibility to the market, like any good Reaganite would. Captain Kangaroo himself, Bob Keaton, he went off. He said that such decisions, letting such decisions be made by those with the money who wanted to make the money were inherently exploitative. And that quote, despite the guarantee of free speech, our children are so precious that the free speech of the child pornographer has to give away, has to give way to allow us to protect children from exploitation. So he's like, there's fucking limits here to your, your, your, you know, let the market decide. Yeah.

Because the market's a shitty place. Now he might be overflowing it. Yeah, he might be overblowing it, but, you know, understandably. Yeah. There's other regulations. Yes. But his point is still pretty salient there. And when he's seeing the regulations being stripped off like the zip ties

peeing on the top of the hell in the cell under the weight of Mick Follin, the undertaker, say, there you go. There you go. I could see him thinking what was coming, right? Yeah. Other shows died out too, but you see what's happening and what filled that vacuum. I found our cartoons that were advertisements for toys. Yeah. Man, the American release of Voltron, mask, my little pony, transformers, and actual subject of this whole episode, the GI Joe. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, Act didn't let up, but they didn't win anymore either. In fact, the only victory that act had, okay. And again, act by the way, just as a reminder is the action for children's television. Okay. Yeah. So the only victory that they had was actually, and here's the thing, I'm, I'm sympathizing with these people who banned garbage-pale kids, the cartoon. Do you see what you've done, Ronald Reagan? You've made me back the people who banned what could have been the greatest cartoon of all time. Yeah, you know, yeah. They in all honesty though, they they quite rightly saw the rest as programming that blurred

the quote blurred the distinction between the program content and commercial speech. Yeah. That's what they were against. And it's G.I. Joe that I really want to discuss G.I. Joe. Okay. Or how Reaganism caused Reaganism to fight against Reaganism in the most Reaganistic way possible. Wait, what? How Reaganism caused Reaganism to fight against Reagan. I know, I heard it. Okay. Okay. Here's another way to put it on the destabilization of home culture, which led to white

kids being alone with the TV led to a cartoon that pitted militarism against megalomaniac hypercapitalists, all in an effort to sell toys to kids whose parents were both at work. Okay. And that's where we're parents were both at work. Okay. And that's where we're going to end this episode. Okay. I just got us there. Made it. Yeah.

That is skin of your teeth. Oh boy. I didn't even teeth had skin. Yeah. I found it. I found it. That's not. Okay.

Um, so what have you gleaned now that I finally finally got to it? Well, the the revelation, well not really, yeah, the revelation to me that the overwhelming majority of quote unquote latch key kids were middle and upper middle class suburban white kids. Kind of like hearing it laid bare. Yeah blew my mind for a moment and then I thought about it and it was one of those oh, I never realized moments. Because I don't know if I would have qualified as a Latchkey kid fully. Sure.

I know I was at least in a gray area leaning toward it. But I also know that several of my friends who would definitely qualify, who like at the time I was like, oh yeah, no, he is, he is a latchkey kid. Right, right. I realized that every one of them I could think of was from a family that was actually better off than mine. You know, had all the toys, you know, to make up for the fact that they had to shuttle between mom and dad's houses. Right.

And to make up for the fact that, you know, mom and dad weren't home in the afternoon. They had all the cool snacks too. Oh yeah. They had the food by the foot. Why? Because, fucking mom and dad weren't home to cook. They had all the cool snacks too. Oh, yeah. Oh, they had the food by the foot. Why? I know they had. Fucking mom and dad weren't home to cook.

Yeah, they had the bitch-n-est food. Right. And I know I've talked about, you know, one of my friends that his place was the one we always wanted to go to on Friday nights to play D&D. Right. Because mom wasn't going to be home. Right. You know, and like, and his mom wasn't home the other four days a week while

he was getting home from school, because then she was working, right? Friday night, you know, she was out. It's got to get away. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, there, there is, it's interesting because I remember the episodes, the very special episodes, or they weren't even very special episodes, but, you know, the youngest kid in the three, three child family because they always had that in the sitcoms would bring home a kid who invariably wore just a plain gray t-shirt. And he would come home and he'd have or he'd come over to hang out and he'd have terrible eating habits or he'd break toys or you know, he would he would he'd scarf down extra food and ask for more and of course mom would give it to him and stuff like that. And then it would come out that you know or and then his mom would come pick extra food and ask for more. And of course, mom would give it to him and stuff like that. And then it would come out that,

or and then his mom would come pick him up and she just had to stay late at work. And then it happened a third and a fourth time. And, you know, it just, this is his reality. And he's a latchkey kid. And it's like, oh, I'm sad. And we never see that kid again. But like those episodes always cast it in that same way.

Yeah. You know, and it's not, it was not that. I mean, all those behaviors might have been there because, you know, but also two hours or more. So you're talking like you get home, say it's about three, maybe two thirty depending on if you're, when your elementary school gets out right. Yeah. Yeah.

And how close you live. But I mean, shit, we had crossing guards, like who were kids, right? Yeah. And so, yeah, you'd get home. And two hours is just from three to five. Yeah. And I mean, I had parents who both worked, although my mom's hours were not necessarily like where I was alone. And my dad would sometimes be home like they,

they, you know, working class in San Francisco. And so their hours weren't nine to fives, necessarily every day of the week. But there were days where I would be left to my own devices. And it was understood that you've got this to do and this to do and this to do. And then you snuck TV and where you could, yeah, you know, you'd short shrift this and you'd watch more TV or whatever. Yeah. And you could get you could get bored, you could get snacks, you could go out and play, you could do all kinds of shit. And it was just it was not deprivation, I guess. No. But fuck if I didn't watch a lot of after school cartoons. Oh yeah. So, which is why I really wanted to take this on because I was fascinating that I was being advertised to

by these cartoons and by the ideology that was expressed in these cartoons as a young boy because it was way, way skewed toward the boys. And we're gonna get into this boy. But yeah, the fact that that it was not the poor kid with the gray sweatshirt. Yeah. And you know, again, I wasn't I wasn't poor at that point, but you know, neither will you rich. Yeah. But you know, it was typically your middle and upper middle class. Yeah. But yeah, just yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah, just the, the, you know, not having made that connections,

like you say, about, you know, intuition being, being tricky. Yeah. Hey, no, wait. Yeah. Oh, shit. Yeah, having that, having that moment of realization. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it was that was a fun little wrinkle To to to smooth out in this research actually. It's kind of cool. I can believe it though. What what reading you recommending for people?

What I'm going to recommend Or what media I guess yeah, well, I'm it's it's reading I'm going to very strongly recommend Voice of the worldwind by Walter John Williams. Okay. It is a cyberpunk novel, which I'm again recommending because that's gonna be my next topic.

And it is, first off, it's just really good. It's a well-written kind of a mystery novel. And as an example of the genre, I think it's a very strong one. And I'm intentionally steering people away from a particular author or reasons. Okay. But Walter John Williams is one of the big names in Cyberpunk. Um, and, uh,

voices of the whirlwind is the second novel in a series. Um, I would like to recommend the first one, but I haven't actually been able to find it anywhere. Okay. To read it, but voice the whirlwind. I have read. It's awesome. Pick it up. Check it out. Nice. What do you have to recommend? Brett Harvey is an historian who wrote the 50s, a women's oral history. Oh, it is fantastic. It is interviewing all kinds of women who lived through the 1950s. Either as children or as mothers or as dating people and stuff like that. And it's excellent. It gets pretty heavy because it's the brutality of a woman's experience. But it's a really good read. And it gets kind of at some of the stuff I was talking about early on, like the dominant culture

and what the values that were placed on women. And that women also bought into, because the culture is dynamic. It is not merely oppressive. But yeah, the 50s by Brett Harvey, it is at least 20 years old. I forget exactly when it came out, but I want to say it was free 2000. So it's more than 20 years old,

but it's, oh, I was wrong. I actually just looked at the back of it. It was 2002. So it's more than 20 years old, but it's, oh, I was wrong. I actually just looked at the back of it. It was 2002. So it's really good though. So, yeah, cool. You got anything you want to plug or anything you want people to find you at? Well, I know I really, for just me individually, I don't, right now. We of course collectively can be found on Twitter

at Geek History Time. We can be found online at woobahwoobahgeekhistoryoftime.com and I'm stealing that from KC O Davis. Because woobahwoobah is easier to say than WWW. And of course, you're listening to us. So you found us somewhere already, whether it's on the Apple podcast app or on a Stitcher, whatever it is that you have found us, please subscribe. Please give us the five-star review that you know we deserve. And please talk us up to your friends and relations. We'd very much appreciate it. And how about you? See, by the time this drops, I think people will have missed the April 7th show. But hey, go to the April 7th show at Luna's at 8 p.m. for capital punishment. If this, this, this comes after that, then I say go to the May 5th show at capital punishment and also the June 2nd show at, at, at Luna's.

Both of those capital punishment, the pun tournament that I'm a part of. We're, and we are heading toward our seventh year. Holy crap. It's amazing. It's, it's fantastic. My show has lasted longer than the Confederacy. I want my fucking statue.

I wanted the bronze wheeled at spins. There you go. But, but yeah, come check it out. $10 proof of vaccination. God, I don't know what it's going to be like. We're recording this. I don't want to give too much away, but in late February. So I have no idea how what variant will be at,

but we'll be giving out masks. I always ask people to wear masks, but at least bring proof of vaccination $10. Just bring some money for some merch and buy some nachos because art makes good nachos. Makes good other food too. Check it out. But yeah, those and that's that's about it.

I have hermitted up beyond that. So cool. Well, for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm head Blaelach. And until next time, keep rolling 20s.