Here's the thing.
I noticed awhile back that lots of people who devote time to lampooning the "garish, burnt-orange, shag-carpeted tastelessness" of the 1970s are often linked to right wingers.
Hmm.
Well, here's a defense of that supposedly hideous decade, and a diss of the current Tyranny of "Tastefulness".
The 1970s were the last decade where tastes were dictated by the middle of the income scale - because that was also the last decade when the middle class was big, rich, and healthy enough to have the lion's share of the buying power.
It was the last great heyday of what I think of as Bowling-Alley (remember those?) America.
Bowling alleys.
Remember the scenery? Garish polyester shirts, bright orange plastic chairs, swoopy Jetsons architecture, carpet the color of bubblegum, glittery bowling balls, loud shoes, elaborate victory dances, Pepsi in plastic cups - all of it.
It was glorious.
The people pitching balls down the lanes were a big, wide swath of the American economic spectrum - maybe not the yacht-and-polo-pony set, but everyone else was represented there on a Saturday night. Car mechanics, dentists, realtors, production line workers, landscape maintenance people, linemen for the power company, even the occasional university professor - all mixed together and laughing. Letting their hair down. At home with one another.
I also remember that anyone who gave the slightest indication that he might be putting on airs was swiftly informed in a million little ways that he just needed to get over himself.
The parking lot was full of American cars - big, garish, exuberant American cars in every metal-flaked color it was possible to make. Made by well-paid American labor.
The interiors of people's houses could be, I admit, a touch...exuberant, let's say.
But are today's interiors really any better?
In certain respects, I would argue they are a good deal worse.
Go to any "high-end" housing development built in the last 20 years or so, and I bet you a million dollars that the kitchen will have a stainless-steel refrigerator, granite counters and a stove that, if it is not an actual Viking Range, is doing its very best to look "professional grade."
The conceit being expressed there is that all that hardware is "necessary" because of all the Grand Entertaining that the owners are Important enough to need to put on.
Lighting throughout the house will be in the form of recessed cans and will look very "designed" and kind of theatrical - as if the house is a stage set. Sort of Potemkin Affluence.
The furniture will be in muted colors and completely and utterly non-challenging to any convention of "taste."
All that cold granite, clinical stainless, and "artful" muted lighting makes these places remind me, frankly, of tombs - places where the homeowners buried their individuality out of fear of stepping even one degree away from what people in the Hamptons might approve of.
Bowling-alley America had its flaws, for sure - plenty of them - everybody smoked, bar brawls were a regular feature at the local dive bar (and as I recall, more bars were dive-ish back in those days), those American cars were too often poorly made and gulped gas at an appalling rate, and much else.
But given a choice between exuberant, colorful self-expression and frigid, icy stainless "taste"? Give me orange shag, avocado green fridges and macrame any day.