Cultural imperatives can transform slowly and subtly without
anyone being aware of the change. But sometimes we see something in an old
movie or TV show that depicts attitudes or conditions that have changed so much
that it makes us realize how different things are from “the good old days,” “our
salad days” and “back in the day.”
The other day I had one such epiphany of change while channel
surfing for something to watch while exercising. I chanced upon the 1982 Taylor
Hackford melodrama, “An Officer and a Gentleman,” which dissects the lives and
loves of Naval pilots in training. At the beginning, Lou Gossett Jr. chews up
the scenery for what seems like an eternity as a sergeant who is abusing the
new recruits, who are all lined up in front of him. In his diatribe, he throws
every invective and emotion at them, each a reason why he will make sure they
fail. The anger rises in his throat when
he tells them how pissed off he is that they’ll get out of military in six
years and make big bucks flying for the airlines.
That reference stopped me in my tracks.
Just a few weeks earlier I had seen an episode of HBO’s very
funny “The Brink,” in which two fighter pilots in trouble
for a variety of reasons bemoan that they may have to leave the Navy and get a
job making some puny amount, $30,000 I think, working terrible hours. FYI,
these guys will later save the world from nuclear holocaust by dive-bombing
their jet into a rogue Pakistani refueling jet loaded with nuclear devices
headed to downtown Tel Aviv. It being fiction, they are able to eject from the
plane seconds before impact.
Think about it. In 30 years, the cultural reference to commercial
pilots went from they have a great-paying
glamorous job to they mill a
grindstone for peanuts.
Back in 1982, commercial pilots—primarily unionized—were
considered to be at the top of the middle class. Today, the question is, what
middle class?
The change in pilot status implicit in these two references
in works of art 30 years apart indeed symbolizes what has happened to the
American middle class over the past three decades. The Reagan program of
suppressing unions, cutting taxes on the wealthy, cutting government spending
on education and social programs and privatizing government services to
for-profit, mostly non-unionized companies has laid waste to the incomes and
wealth of the middle class and poor. The
wealthy now take a far greater share of the wealth and income pie than they
have since the Gilded Age of the 19th century. That piggish slice of the pie
came at the expense of all others.
The difference between the America with a strong middle
class and shrinking poverty that existed before Ronald Reagan took office and
the nation of rich and poor we have today is so obvious that it comes across in
minor details of the extended dramatic exhortations of popular culture. The
reality then and now was and is baked into the popular art of the times.
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