While reading this and other articles on the Medicare fights I suddenly realized that the conservatives' hankering over some mythical past when All Was Well in the world is most selective. Medicare was created almost fifty years ago, but they don't like it.
Though it's not just the conservatives who yearn for an imaginary past. Here's New York City mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, on the new wave of bad parents:
“Unfortunately there are some parents who just come from — they never had a formal education, and they don’t understand the value of education,” Mr. Bloomberg said on the program, which is broadcast on WOR-AM (710).That is not only rude but also inaccurate. First, the Norman Rockwell family never existed. Rockwell was a painter who idolized certain aspects of the American experience, the way greeting cards do.
He went on to observe: “The old Norman Rockwell family is gone.”
Second, the world in which Rockwell painted was full of people who had less formal education than the parents of today and many of them did not value education, at least based on the stories I have heard from older people.