Things Are Looking Up

Things are looking up
I've been looking the landscape over
And it's covered with four leaf clover
Oh things are looking up
Since love looked up at me

--“Things Are Looking Up,” George and Ira Gershwin


Whether its an inevitable byproduct of growing old (like the apparent rule that people over 40 must start conversations with old friends by comparing each other’s medical conditions, or hair sprouting from new places every day), or whether its just a true reflection of the times, it seems like the older people get, the more they think things are going downhill. Either way, the further one gets away from their first day on this planet, the easier to see the human condition as inexorably worsening. Despite the fact that we, for the moment, still live in the world’s richest country, how can you continue to ignore the sky crashing in on you? Drugs in elementary schools, recession, taxes, the Jersey Shore, Martha Stewart, pollution, job loss, Rahm Emanuel, the hapless Astros, Tom Cruise…Dallas…the French. When’s it ever going to get better?

I can’t tell you. I can’t even tell you it definitely will get better at some point. I’m thinking more and more that I’m living in Atlantis. Or Pompeii. Only without the cool sandals or porcelain floors everywhere. Or lava oozing across my driveway. Frankly, lots of days after reading the latest news, I think about taking all my money and buying a bunch of gold coins, putting them in mason jars, and burying them out in my back yard along with ammo, rifles and canned goods (oh, and Quarter Pounders too…I read your article Carrie!). I just need to make sure not to dig up anything else in my back yard. Hypothetically.

But like our Fearless Leader, I too can give you some hope. Hope that comes not from ephemeral, focus-group tested campaign slogans, but hope that comes from facts. And from the perpetual, "you can’t kill it no matter how much take from the rich or nanny state legislation" you pass, American drive to make a buck.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Life still manages to crush and disappoint on an almost daily basis. On the whole, government is driving this country over the cliff, like Thelma and Louise hell bent to just “keep going.” Our “culture” mostly resembles that indeterminate sticky/slimy residue that builds up next to French Quarter sewer grates. Spend more than 10 minutes outside without wearing SPF 50 and you’ll glow like a pre-melanoma farmer. Steroids have nearly turned baseball players into a bunch of Godzillas playing rec league softball. And the most popular singer of the day, Justin Bieber, somehow makes Justin Timberlake seem like John Lennon.

Nevertheless, in many ways, things are looking up. Amidst all the catterwalling and yearning for better days gone by, we’ve been overlooking staggering improvements happening right under our noses. Right across the board, things have been getting better and better.

But since when? I picked 1969. That’s around the time everything really started to change. In 1970, Nixon went into Cambodia, and in 1969 the dreaded Flower Power plague finally died off at a raceway in Altamont, California. America landed men on the moon. Ted Kennedy, American Treasure and saviour of the working man, swam ashore and went home to his family compound while leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to drown. Large-scale busing began in earnest, and with it white flight and northeast urban center decline. The Beatles broke up. The Manson Family committed the Tate-LaBianca murders. The New York Times broke the My Lai story. The Stonewall “riots” occurred. That was the first year the Astros seriously contended for the playoffs. The Mary Tyler Moore Show started the next year.

I was five years old, and it’s the first year for which I have real memories. We lived in the Westbury subdivision in Houston, on a street right behind train tracks, which was next to busy South Main Street, which in turn was next to a drag racing strip and a high school football stadium (that’s why train noise never keeps me awake at night). Dad worked about 10 minutes from our house as a Southwestern Bell first line supervisor. I had one brother (who at the time was scared of his hair and who got in trouble on Father’s Day for doing a face plant into Dad’s cake), though the following year I would have two. We had a Volkswagen Beetle and an even-then old Nash Rambler station wagon that billowed blue smoke when you started it. Neither car had air conditioning. Everything began to change after 1969. But we sure had lots of fun. We were always going to fun places like the Battleship Texas, San Jacinto Monument, Hobby Airport, Houston Cougars and Astros and Galena Park Yellow Jacket games, Astro World, the zoo, Galveston, the Museum of Natural Science, and Hermann Park. The next year, we would move to Missouri City to avoid my having to go to Houston schools (in part, but also because the home building company Dad invested in went bankrupt and gave houses to stockholders as repayment—how does that taste, jilted Enron shareholders? We got a house out of the deal). My youngest brother (and corresponding increase in household and living expense) would arrive on the scene. Dad’s job got more stressful and we began to see less of him. Dad bought a yellow Ford Maverick, with no air conditioning (in which we had to ride around on Sunday afternoons looking at new homes, for some bizarre reason, piled into the back seat on top of each other and sweating like Kirstie Alley trying to make it to Pizza Hut before closing time. I always got car sick, which made me enormously popular). So, 1969 becomes the baseline for this post. It was the last “great year.” The “good old days.”

Or was it? Since 1969, a big long list of things have markedly improved our daily lives. And more than just the remote controlled TV set. Let me offer just a handful of those ways. Maybe this will convince you that things weren't necessarily better back in the old days. Or I guess 1969 qualifies as the really old days. We didn't all wear animal hides though, so save your hilarious jokes for open mike night.

Obviously, the advent of modern computer represents the biggest advance since 1969. Computers have remade society, in every way, touching nearly every human activity. They’ve made possible quantum leaps in architecture, medicine, communications, law, engineering, basic research, politics…nearly every discipline you can imagine. The typewriter and the telex machine come to mind. Computers have rendered whole industries and products obsolete. Travel agents, draftsmen, recording engineers, box stores…all about as relevant as covered wagon manufacturers. Oh, and don’t forget all those computer games that have fattened up our children like a turkey just before Thanksgiving and given slackers everywhere something to do. Thanks Atari.

You can’t really talk about computers and their effect on society without throwing in the internet. Computers, and internet connectivity made possible through communication advances, have made it possible for riff raff like me to gain instant access to a wealth of information vastly exceeding the world’s largest libraries. Any information you could possibly want, available at your fingertips. Because I need to have up to the minute New Zealand rugby scores, and instructions on how to knit a scarf. At the same time. No need to pay for expensive doctor visits, not with Web MD available. Doctors. Meh! Them and their know-it-all God’s gift attitude. This’ll show them. Need to know how to ballroom dance, train your chimpanzee, or build a brick wall? Mr. Internet will teach you. Movie times, public announcements, status of the latest budget reconciliation bill? On line. Buying 15 pairs of shoes at one time? Check out the web site. Oh, and don’t forget expanded porn and gambling opportunities. Those hippies grew up and need to get their freak on. Basically, the internet has made it possible never to leave the house. Now if only those 500 pound, glassy-eyed, jaundiced computer geeks would do that, instead of taking up valuable coffee shop space.

Our society may have run out of things to say, but it’s a lot easier to communicate. Think of how it was in 1969. You could either write someone a letter or call them on the phone. The Post Office would more than likely deliver the letter, a few days or weeks later, and generally even to the correct address. Then you waited to get a response. One back and forth exchange could take weeks, depending on how distant the person with whom you were communicating was located. Or, you could use the phone (or telex machine for the high falutin’ among us). You couldn’t actually own your phone; you leased it from the phone company. Nor could you move it around your house; it was permanently plugged into the wall. It had one color-black. Though by the 1960s, Bell was offering other colors and styles (three cheers for the Princess phone!) for a premium. Though Bell had the technology for advanced services like call back, caller ID, call forwarding, network switching, data transmission, and so forth, it refused to offer those services because it would require replacement of non-depreciated cables. And Bell also refused to deploy advanced phones and cables until it could fully depreciate its rate based equipment (which had extremely long service lives). Long distance? Forget it. There’s a scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in which George Peppard (in New York) calls OJ Berman (in Los Angeles), and the operator is heard to say “please deposit $3 for three minutes.” This was 1962. Even with 45 years’ inflation, that’s still obscene. Bell basically subsidized local phone rates by charging a premium on long distance, just as it charged (and still charges) higher rates on local phone service to keep rural and urban service at roughly the same rate. Cozy relationships with state regulators kept this antiquated fiefdom from progressing much beyond Alexander Graham Bell-style technology. Enter one Harold Greene, federal district judge. By rejecting Bell’s various antitrust defenses, he essentially forced Bell to realize the gig was up and enter into a consent decree separating its long distance and local service divisions, breaking up the historic AT&T monopoly. This immediately touched off a flurry of competition in long distance markets, sending prices plummeting. You could finally talk to your brother on the west coast for longer than two minutes without having to mortgage your house or sell your children for scientific experiments to pay the bill. The consent decree also required Bell to allow customers to use their own telephones, ushering in a revolution of phone technology innovation. And Mickey Mouse phones (free with every subscription to the Disney Channel); Later, the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 required the local companies to “host” competitive companies who competed for local service. Though local phone service competition never really took hold, it did allow internet providers to compete against the Bell companies for providing internet service by using the monopoly telephone lines, driving down internet access rates. All this was a huge leap, but the development of cellular and later digital phone technology has truly revolutionized the world. Combined with cost-effective technologies for launching and maintaining communications satellites, unregulated mobile telephony has grown and innovated to the point where cell phones are available for a fraction of the cost that Bell charged for its land network. Twelve year old kids can afford cell phones just from their lemonade stand sales or paper route. You can even get a Hello Kitty cell phone. Something Bell would never have tolerated. Cell phones are safety devices, on top of allowing all kinds of emergency or remote communications the Bell network could never have facilitated. And you can’t tap cell phones, so that makes all kinds of crime possible that the Man would have stopped years ago. And don’t forget all the texts and e-mails you can get, even when its not possible to talk on the phone. Its getting to be nearly impossible to have an actual meeting anymore where people pay attention, with all the checking blackberries and iphones for messages. That, however is a good thing. There’s too damn many meetings (“let’s get the team together to visit about the next filing…” Uh, let’s not).

Remember when you got sick? Basically, the doctor was good at telling you the problem, but not so good at actually curing it. Cancer? If they couldn’t cut it all out, you were toast. Heart disease? In the late 1960s, some doctors were still prescribing steaks to those with heart problems. If they couldn’t perform a triple bypass, you were in a bad way. Strokes—the same. Stroke care consisted of finding a dark corner for you to sit in so you wouldn’t bother the rest of us. Orthopedic care was primeval. Psychiatric care made that facility in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look like a health resort. Pre-natal care? There was no pre-natal care. Cross your fingers. Fast forward to 2010. The American health care industry has developed cures and treatments that in 1969 would have seemed miraculous. Cancer is no longer a death sentence. There’s such a thing as stroke care. Heart deaths, heart attacks, and heart disease have all dropped precipitously. Doctors, insurers, and society at large now recognize preventative care as a crucial way of life, and not just a luxury. Hey, they can perform surgery on babies in the womb. How Star Trek is that?

On to slightly less profound changes. Radical topic shift. Ever watch tape of an old football or baseball game from the 1960s? ESPN Classic shows those games all the time. Back in the late 1960s, the pros never made enough money to live the entire year off their paychecks, so most of them had to have other jobs in the off-season, like selling insurance. They couldn’t train during the off-season, and had to get back into shape during training camp. Even then, weight lifting was still regarded as a novelty, nutrition was prehistoric (lots of steaks and potatoes), staying hydrated just meant you were a big puss, and if you suffered almost any kind of injury you were pretty much through. Speed ahead 40 years later. Athletes train year round. Training techniques have become revolutionized, as has the understanding of the roles that nutrition plays. Sports medicine was not a term in 1969, but now is a recognized medical specialty. The athletes we watch at the pro and college level can all run circles around their 1969 counterparts. They’re bigger, faster, stronger and quicker. They have greater stamina. At 7’ 1”, Wilt Chamberlain was a freak. Today he’d be one of many seven footers. Jim Brown ran over and around 6’, 230 lb. linebackers. It’s not terribly clear he could do the same against 6’, 1” 250 lb. Ray Lewis. The advent of summer skills camps, better coaching at the high school and even lower levels, organized recreational leagues, and even private coaching has given today’s average athletes skills that only the elite level players possessed in 1969. Routine procedures cure injuries that in 1969 would have ended careers, and rehabilitation techniques get players back on the field or on the court in a fraction of the time of their 1969 counterparts. None of this is to say that the actual games are any better. HBO recently showed the 1958 NFL Championship Game between the Colts and Giants, widely regarded as the greatest NFL game of all time. I wrote about this at the time. Most of those players were clearly inferior to today’s athletes, just going on size, strength, quickness, and conditioning. Say what you will, its more exciting watching, yet the actual game was every bit as exciting as some of the best games played in the last 10 years. So the players and the level of play have improved markedly, though maybe it hasn’t resulted in more exciting games.

You know, though kids face of lot of perils and in many ways aren’t as happy or healthy, they’re better in some respects now than before. The average 10 year old knew very little about the world in which he lived. That kid had very little information, and didn’t care too much about the world beyond the end of the street. That second grader was still trying to learn how to read and write, and do basic math. Childhood nutrition largely consisted of whatever government cheese provided by someone’s cousin that his school got stuck with. At home it was beanie weenies and Hamburger Helper (which, as Cousin Eddie reminded us, is good enough to eat without the hamburger). Staying out side all day in the sun, soaking up the rays til you turned red was common. Outside of the basic immunizations, kids didn’t have to endure too much in the way of preventive medicine. Parents used to turn kids loose on the streets in the mornings, feed them at lunch, and have them come home when it got dark. Now they are reading even before they make it to school, and with computers and calculators can perform all sorts of advanced math much earlier. They get all kinds of instructions and lessons and develop skills at earlier ages. Though they probably face more and more frequent dangers and threats, they’re also much more aware of those dangers and of the world around them. Yes it’s a loss of childhood innocence, but perhaps that’s just another way of saying that they’re developing faster and better. Or at least catching up to all those Japanese spelling bee winners, with their holier than thou attitudes. Learning English in five days, and then winning the spelling bee the next weekend. And while so many of them are big enough to make Augustus Gloop worry about their health, kids are generally bigger, stronger, faster, and mature more quickly than in 1969. They basically make kids better than they used to, and when they don’t, we can care for them better than we used to.

We adults are better too. Life spans are increasing, and attaining the age of 65 no longer seems remarkable. Not only that, old age no longer represents a long, slow death march consigned to a life of Guy Lombardo records, broken hips, pungent smelling nursing homes, and scaring your grandkids with stories about some kid from back in elementary school who didn’t learn his math tables and went on to get killed robbing a bank. If only he had learned math….Something strange happened. The “Mad Men” three-martini lunch lifestyle gave way to healthy living, and people now are reaping the rewards. In 1969, the dad still came home from work, having already smoked a couple of packs of cigarettes and having wine and fat for lunch, to down a couple of martinis, smoke more cigarettes, eat a dinner containing more fat at one sitting than the modern average weekly diet, sit inert for a couple of hours, then go to bed (after the day’s last cigarette). Exercise? That’s something you did in P.E. back in school. Hell, even professional athletes didn’t work out except when they were in season. Sunscreen? That consisted of mineral oil smeared all over one’s body to get an even better tan. Fresh food was difficult to find; asking for organic food might net some raised eyebrows. “Low fat” was just a variety of milk (which, by the way, was hard to find). People poured salt over everything like the more they used the bigger their chance of winning the lottery. All these changes, along with medical advances, are paying off. Things that would have killed you in 1969 won’t necessarily do so today, and you’re less likely to get those things by practicing some relatively innocuous preventative measures like walking daily, drinking moderately, stopping smoking and avoiding sun exposure, cutting fat intake and eating fresh foods. People today are much more active than their 1969 counterparts, taking active vacations where, for example, they’ll hike the Grand Canyon rather than just get out of their car, stand on the rim, and look out for 15 minutes. Though people still have problems with weight, at least there’s a general recognition that excess weight is a problem, and that drugs or crash diets isn’t the way to resolve the problem. Better public sanitation, water treatment policies, disease prevention, pest eradication, and food quality oversight has had a noticeable positive impact as well. Older people are more active too, taking trips, joining clubs, going on outings, and staying active well after their retirement. Companies catering to these active seniors have cashed in by developing living communities catering to active retirees. Oldsters previously content to shuffle off to Florida or South Texas to die (in the heat, because for some reason 72 degree weather is like being consigned to the Yukon Ice Sheet) now flock to places like Sun City, for example, or Round Rock. Due to redistributive social programs disproportionately slanted in favor of older people (who in turn have the highest voter turnout rates), oldsters generally have better medical and social care than any other age group. In short, people themselves are in most cases better physically than their 1969 counterparts, at all ages, and can expect to live longer lives than in 1969.

Let’s make another radical topic shift to the arts. Remember how stilted the acting was in most movies back in 1969? Other than Brando, Newman, and the other relatively limited number of method actors, most came from the Tony Curtis “look good and say the lines perfectly” acting school. Movies were shot on Technicolor or other type of film stock, dependent upon enormously complicated lighting and sound apparatus to get shots. Movies cost a lot of money to make, so the major studios, with their financial resources, controlled movie making and therefore wanted traditional “stars” to ensure they recovered their investment. So-called independent movies existed, but largely in the guise of the studios having some money to throw around and using it as seed money for various projects. Likewise, the music industry was a monolith. Getting a “record deal” was everything, because the medium of music listening was object-based (excellent microphones and magnetic tape to record the music, an acoustically superior studio to focus the sounds, a record and a record player) and it took an industry with financial wherewithal to finance the recordings themselves, and produce and distribute the records. Unless you’re talking about the Beatles or Frank Sinatra, the musicians themselves could never afford to make their own recordings, and even the Beatles lost their shirt on Apple Records in the end. So the “recording industry” held a stranglehold on musical development by deciding which acts to record. None of this is true now. On the movie side, the good-looking but glassy eyed, laconic star can’t work in Hollywood today. Unless his name is Tom Cruise. Now, nearly everyone in movies can act. The performances are a quantum improvement over the average 1969 counterparts. Every college has a school of acting, and every town has an acting coach. Good performances beget more good performances, and with the abundance of quality acting, the movie-going (or renting) public will no longer accept a bunch of stiffs on screen (again, except for Tom Cruise). On the production side, someone with a good idea for a movie need no longer beg the studios to develop it and in the process be relegated to the sidelines while committees of cost-sensitive, Spago-going guys in suits who’ve never actually made a movie ram through focus-group tested changes. Can you imagine something like Sony Pictures making The Godfather today? They’d turn it either into the feel-good gangster movie of the summer (more scenes with Vito playing with little Michael in his orchard, maybe with Marisa Tomei playing Connie), or into an explosion movie featuring Vin Diesel single-handedly mowing down the Tattaligia family with a machine gun. Movie making technology has advanced to the point where nearly anyone with the know-how and initiative, who can scrape together less financing than some people’s down payments on their houses, can make a movie. The key now is getting a distribution deal, and that involves going on the film festival scene. The break on the studio stranglehold means that all kinds of movies on all kinds of subjects can get made. On the music side, computers have basically rendered all the objects (even the musical instruments themselves, sadly) obsolete. No need for expensive recording studios, magnetic tape, record plants, cassette decks, record players, or any of that. Computers can do it all. Music is no longer tied to some physical object (such as the record or the tape); people can share it through e-mails and internet downloads. All that costs a mere fraction of 1969’s production costs. Bands can bypass those blood-sucking record executives and put out their own music. And do their own publicity. So we no longer have to settle for whatever music that Capital or Columbia or RCA or Decca or any of those record labels thought we’d like. On the other hand, there’s really no such thing as bands that write, play and record music any more. They need to be on American Idol to have any chance of success. This newfound freedom has given us…Britney Spears. Ok, I take it back. We need more guys in suits bribing DJs.

Careening to the next topic, remember that 1969 car of yours? It was really cheap, a great bargain. And it ran on regular gas. You could easily work on it and do most of your own maintenance and repairs. On the other hand, the air conditioner never worked, it had a lap belt only, no airbags, and pretty much was toast in most collisions. It guzzled gas, which while cheap in 1969, isn’t so much today. Most models spewed pollution. Had relatively uncomfortable bench seats. The glass would shatter into a million pieces in a collision. Today’s cars are a far cry from 1969. They may not look as cool, but they’re far more advanced in terms of safety and performance. They emit only a fraction of pollutants of 1969 models. Non-American models are far more efficient, reliable, and durable. Even some American models are better than their 1969 counterparts on that score. Most cars today feature standard equipment that would have seemed like something on the Jetsons—On Star or other GPS navigation, airbags, solid body chassis, computerized equipment settings, vastly improved fuel efficiency, and fire resistance. Tires have improved, windows have improved, the seats are more comfortable. They may not be as artistic looking as some 1969 models, but today’s car is leaps and bounds better in nearly every other way.

One could say much the same thing about a wide range of consumer products. Nearly everything is safer and more reliable. Remember buying canned food back in 1969? After you used the hand-operated can opener to saw off the top, it left an extremely sharp metal ring on the inside that half the time would nearly cut off one or more fingers. Most of the cans had some type of lead lining, slowly poisoning the contents. Not any more. Think of a whole range of products—chances are they’re better and safer than in 1969. Ladders, lawn mowers, toasters, refrigerators, freezers, televisions, stereos, ovens, cameras, hair dryers, washing machines, dishwashers, lawn darts…ok, maybe that one was a miss. Virtually anything you can get in a Best Buy (or a WalMart) will be safer, more efficient, have more uses, and on an inflation-adjusted basis be the same or a similar cost as its 1969 version. Why? Government regulation to some extent, the expansion of products liability lawsuits and consumer protection statutes, each have played a role. But in the end, market forces played the biggest part. Quality sells. Performance sells. As incomes have risen and people have recognized that a bargain doesn’t inevitably constitute the cheapest available alternative, people have sought out the safer, better performing, more reliable alternative. Companies make money by promoting quality.

While we’re at it, shopping has improved too. WalMart, Amazon, and Best Buy may be the devil, and they may have put Main Street out of business, but they wouldn’t have made money hand over fist if they weren’t satisfying consumer demand. If WalMart wasn’t doing a better job of giving people what they want than the mom and pop stores, then they’d still be in business. No one has to go to WalMart or Best Buy. But those companies have utilized economies of scale and wholesale buying discipline to provide merchandise at significant price savings than the smaller stores. These companies have helped people save money at a time in this country’s history when times are lean, and people need all the help they can get. To the argument that they’ve put the small businesses of America out of work, I say who cares? Our economy is founded on competition. If bankruptcy is never a possibility, one loses the drive to innovate, to control costs, to provide consumers with what they want. All those moms and pops that used to own their businesses can go to work at WalMart. So you say, WalMart doesn’t pay as much or provide health care or other benefits. Your best pal and Man of the People (former Law Professor Barack) is solving that last problem. As to the former, again, that’s just too bad. WalMart’s salary structure helps it to provide goods at low cost. No one has to work for WalMart either. They can learn a new trade, open another business not competing with WalMart, or they can compete with WalMart offering something WalMart doesn’t, like higher quality merchandise or better service. That’s been a successful formula for hundreds of companies selling higher priced but better quality merchandise than WalMart carries. The capitalist economy, left largely unfettered, solves these kinds of problems.

I want to say a word about judging. That is, American state and federal judges. 1969 was around the time that judges began to think they could solve all society’s woes themselves. Who needs a Congress or a legislature when with the stroke of a pen, they can order whole industries to change, institutions to adopt new policies, change the very fabric of society. Judges ran amok in the 1970s, taking over prisons, elections, schools, hospitals, government budgets, employment agreements…the list goes on and on. All by finding that the Constitution created privacy rights, and numerous other bogus rights never intended by the Constitution’s authors. They also opened the doors to what essentially constituted a run on corporations by plaintiff’s personal injury lawyers, by recognizing as “authoritative” all kinds of junk scientific theories designed to bamboozle 12 jurors in backwaters like Talloquah, Oklahoma into rendering multi-million dollar verdicts for the most ridiculous of claims. What’s wrong with that? Nine lawyers in robes should not make the country’s most fundamental decisions. Congress should (God help us). Today, there’s still judges who think they know how to govern better than the legislature. But like the number of games Shaquille O’Neal plays each season, their numbers have dwindled considerably. Even liberal judges inclined to find “rights” under every rock now tend to shy from invalidating legislation and taking over portions of the government. They also seem to manage their cases more aggressively, throwing out obviously meritless lawsuits. 1980s and 90s tort reform acted a sharp rebuke to this type of judge. Having failed to implement civil laws according to the popular consensus supporting them, legislatures acted to strip judges of power to redistribute wealth under the guise of compensating victims. Public revulsion over naked “government by judicial fiat,” coupled with nearly bipartisan insistence on fidelity to legislation, also acted to reel in the judges. We seldom find judges running school districts or prisons or hospitals now. That’s a vast improvement; there’s not many judges I would trust to run a local Kiwanis Club Pancake Breakfast and Raffle, much less a major public institution like the prison system.

Ping-ponging around once again, think about improvements in food quality and food choice. In 1969, your grocery store may have had courteous and friendly sackers, but it was basically a death zone; a cesspool of preservatives, bacteria, and artificial additives. Cancer causing cyclamates, Red dye no. 2 (remember the Red M&M scare?), produce covered in a fine pesticide and insecticide film. Everything natural about that food had been denuded by the time it reached the grocery store. There was one and only brand of whole wheat bread available, Roman Meal, and if you bought it people gave you weird looks. But maybe not as weird as if you bought Grape Nuts, advertised by that nature freak Ewell Gibbons. You know, the guy that could make about 92 uses out of tree bark? Or Wheaties, which in reality doesn’t have very much fiber per serving. Personally I was a Captain Crunch connoisseur, or on special occasions, Pop Tarts. Basically I ate like some computer game/Dungeons and Dragons weirdo (or pothead) until I was about 20. Organic food? That was something hippies ate. After all, food was already organic, right? Things are vastly different today. Though most grocery stores still offer about the same amount of crap, there’s a much wider variety of crap from which to choose, and its generally safer and less adulterated. Most stores offer a number of fresh food options, and a growing amount of organic (or quasi-organic) selections. Specialty grocery stores are sprouting everywhere, focusing on selling high quality, fresh, local food without preservatives (or with minimal preservatives), and made organically. And yet we’re still fat. At least we live longer. And get to watch more TV channels in the process.

This could go on forever, so I’ll just arbitrarily stop after observing how architecture, and buildings generally, have improved. Something happened after World War II in architecture circles. The minimalists won. Somewhere along the way it became uncool to want buildings to show something other than their bare structure. I guess this school would have us walk around as just skeletons, devoid of skin, because that’s just unneeded flourish. Hence, the 1960s and 70s gave us the dreaded glass box skyscraper, the multi-purpose sport stadium, the big huge box convention center, the Borg-ship cube looking malls, all concrete buildings, the University of Houston, and other architectural blights. The horror! These people could get excited looking at a Soviet housing block. But despite having something of a 1970s heyday (can we get rid of the Pennzoil Towers yet, since, you know, there’s no such thing as Pennzoil any more-yeah, Shell owns them?), that design aesthetic has bit the dust. You can now enjoy looking at modern buildings. At the same time, the engineers improved too. Today’s buildings are far more energy efficient, safe, secure, and adaptable to different uses. They can be built for less cost, and due to building code improvements, they’re generally safer than their 1960s counterpart.

So that’s it. More Songs about Buildings and Food, I guess.