(C) Daily Montanan This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Some Montanans cheer for the bad old days to make a comeback – Daily Montanan [1] ['More From Author', 'April', 'Darrell Ehrlick'] Date: 2023-04-13 The most dangerous rock-and-roll video I have ever seen wasn’t Madonna, who was a one-woman scandal machine when I was growing up. I remember obtaining a bootlegged copy of her video, “Justify My Love,” which looks awfully tame by today’s standards. Instead, the most sexually explosive performance I have ever seen happened in 1958 on Dick Clark’s “Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show,” when Jerry Lee Lewis gave a hissing, sexually supercharged performance of his last big hit, “Breathless,” to a packed house of mostly white, suburban kids, many of whom simply were dumbfounded by Lewis’ pure sexuality. So, I appreciate Rep. Bob Phalen’s ham-handed attempt at trying to smear the current generation with the gripe of every aging adult: That back in his day, which he pegged somewhere near the Eisenhower era, that they didn’t sexualize children. Phalen is the author of a bill aimed at all the smut he believes is lurking on the shelves of classrooms and libraries. He recently passed out content to fellow Montana lawmakers that he’d gotten from the much maligned, “Gender Queer” book, juxtaposed against an idyllic picture of happy, harmonious kids from the 1950s. Except that Phalen’s memory is as faulty as his history. I also remember reading a book, back around 1990, that changed my view of what you can find in books. Holden Caulfield as a character was irresistible to a teenage boy, and “Catcher In The Rye,” with its unflinching coming-of-age story, had just enough cursing to keep me interested. That led to exploring Ernest Hemingway, whose tales of booze, war and carousing was equally intriguing to a teenager. But it wasn’t just the lascivious scenes or the gratuitous cussing that kept me engaged. Through those books, I began to understand the full impact war could have on a man, something that still has profoundly shaped me today. J.D. Salinger’s legendary book came out in (checks notes), ah, 1951. And rock-and-roll’s foundation, which helped establish America as the cultural leader of the world, started in 1955, and was equally reviled when Elvis Presley’s hip gyrations were nothing more than raw sexualization, with some pretty catchy melodies. I’ll do Phalen the favor of not going lyric by lyric through a catalog of 1950s pop tunes, but I’d suggest that Jerry Lee Lewis’, “Open up a-honey, it’s your lover boy me that’s knockin’” ain’t exactly gospel. The problem with Phalen’s argument isn’t in his selective memory of the 1950s, because every generation has believed that the contemporary generation is the most vulgar or sexualized and nothing more than a group of philistines and libertines. Instead, Phalen is harkening back to something very different on purpose. By referencing the 1950s, he’s referencing not just a time when women didn’t wear pants, and men wore ties, it was also that last generation in which women weren’t found in the workforce, except for a few carefully controlled careers, and then, only until a woman married. Phalen’s shout-out to Eisenhower era was also was propaganda — content, happy children without a care in the world — while ignoring how the dominant white culture treated any person of color. It was a time when sundown policies were enforced around Montana against Native Americans. It was a time when domestic problems were often ignored, left to boil and fester at home. The 1950s also introduced us to folks like Bull Connor, who turned fire hoses and police dogs on people who were fighting to be treated as equals. If what Phalen wants is harmony enforced by dogs, water and tear gas, count me out. The 1950s were also the last decade that birth control was not available in pill form, another example of women being treated as second-class citizens, subject to the approval of their husbands. And when it comes to the LGBTQ community in the 1950s? If they weren’t being sent to a mental institution, they were jailed or harassed. When Phalen distributed a picture to fellow lawmakers from the 1950s, whatever photo he included wasn’t how it was, as much as how he wishes to remember it. And the only group of people who yearn to bring that era back seem to be exactly the people who are so threatened by these other groups rising to claim what the Constitution gives them by birthright. If anyone needs to spend more time in robust libraries, learning about the past, it would be Phalen and his followers who seem to romanticize an era that didn’t really happen quite like they’d like the rest of us to remember. Ironic that the people who need books the most would want to set fire to them. Speaking of history – if we want to leave the 1950s out of the conversation completely, but still want to engage in history, here’s the question reframed in a slightly different way: Show me one example where a group of lawmakers argued for book burning or even book banning that turned out well. The danger isn’t wishing that history repeats itself, the true threat is that it will. 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