During the early 1970’s, America was standing on the verge
of the end of the world as we had known it.
The 1960’s had been a decade of great turmoil, a mix of social progress
and social upheaval, a mix of war and prosperity. The U.S. tried to simultaneously fight the
War on Poverty, and the War in Vietnam, and the rush to get to the moon. All the while, the stage was being set for
the tremendous changes that have followed.
The coming of the end.
In 1973, TV was saturated with commercials for Mr. Coffee,
commercials that featured Joe Dimaggio in the role of product pitchman. Most people seemed to take this new
development in stride, but I knew instinctively that if Joltin’ Joe could do
such a thing it meant that every single fucking thing in the world had been
altered completely. The world as we had
known it was gone.
I was too young to see Joe Dimaggio’s baseball career first hand, but
you could not escape his importance to the culture of the 50’s and 60’s. There was the marriage to Marilyn Monroe, for
one thing. My family regularly ate at
his up-scale Italian restaurant in Flushing, Queens. He was a tremendously dignified man, tall,
handsome and highly intelligent. I
actually had him in my taxi one time, around the time of the Mr. Coffee
ads. I never mentioned Mr. Coffee, of
course. I drove him from JFK to the
Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue. He was
quiet, he just stared out the window for most of the ride. He did ask me about the weather, but no
conversation developed. I liked Joe,
and I respected his dignified solitude, which you could cut with a knife.
In the years since the early 70’s we have seen the
destruction of much of what was good and holy in American life. The exponential rise in productivity has
benefited only the tenth-of-one-percent; the unions have been destroyed and
with them most of the working class; we have increasing debt-slavery; the
middle class has been demoralized and largely impoverished; probable cause and
due process rights have been destroyed; and forget the old fashioned covenant
of good faith and fair dealing in business and politics. The death of everything.
It didn’t start with Joe and the Mr. Coffee gig. Joe was just the wakeup call that something
had happened while we weren’t looking. The
“wake up and smell the coffee” moment.
Maybe it was not obvious, but I think it was impossible not to become
suspicious. Joe D., the very
personification of old school grace and charm, hawking a cheap coffee
maker. What’s wrong with this
picture?
I’d never suggest that the old world was a perfect place,
but it did have a lot going for it.
There were progressive tax policies, policies that favored the middle
class over moneyed interests. Civil
rights were on the upswing, although still under great stress. Personal freedoms in the due process area
were expanding. And, as weird as it may
sound now, the two major political parties could still work together and
compromise when the needs of the country called for it.
Something had happened at about the time that JFK was
murdered, and within ten years it had been cut in stone. After that the dominoes really started to
fall. Joe Dimaggio and the Mr. Coffee
thing were the headlights on the highway.
That was a turning point. Since
then the truck has run all of our sorry asses over.
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