A 30 Step Guide for Restoring American Class

That's actually a really awesome list. I'm off to the hat, vinyl player, & manners store.

All of these things are attainable (and still being employed in certain corners), but some don't make practical sense in this day and age, like a manual camera.

I have a turntable too, and play it rather often. Still, it's not the same audio quality (or selection) that I can get from other sources. It's mostly nostalgia speaking. And sometimes that is okay, but it feels like this author, in many of her suggestions, wants more of a time machine than anything else.

1. Hats on men.

Goddammit, Jake.

Serving fresh veggie platters with dip is eccentric now? Well la de da!

This list is a lot of fun, I agree with most of it. I sure don't want to go out dancing though, I only dance in the privacy of my own home where no one but my boyfriend can see how I resemble an epileptic turkey

That is such a great list, and I agree with every single thing on it!

I'm not American, but I'd love to see the return of pocket watches. I tend to alternate between a wristwatch and fob-watch depending on the occasion and I love how tactile the fob watch is. Then again it's getting rare to see anyone with ANY kind of watch nowadays.

The reason for that is that we have the time displayed everywhere...from our cellphones, to our stereo decks in our cars...to our computer desktops..to all the electronic displays on our appliances. Personal watches, outside of the hiking/survivalist mode, seem sort of redundant in these modern times.

But a lot of other redundancies survive as affectations. I still cuff links and tie pins/clips to the office, and know a lot of people who do. Practicality isn't really a chief concern.

It does seem to me that that list is completely inspired by Mad Men. That show seems to have made people want to go all retrograde 1960s.

Games' Nights are a great thing to do with Friends. We have a monthly one which is always fun.

Also Sunday Roasts should never go out of fashion.

QFT. People tend to look at the past in an idealized way and forget all the bullshit. Ain't no way I'm rooting for a return to the sixties no matter how much I love Mad Men. Though it would be fun to see people flip out at not having personal computers and cell phones. But then, as a black man, I'd probably get my ass water-hosed or lynched for laughing at a white guy lamenting the loss of his iPhone. Oh sixties!

While I was only half serious, I am, in fact, convinced that an idealized portrayal of the sixties seen in fictional shows like Mad Men (and other eras also: see, That 70s Show and Boardwalk Empire) fool naive people into thinking those were "better" times - fancier, posh days where the average Dick and Jane looked and acted just like Don Draper and Joan Holloway. But for every Iraq/Afghanistan, there is a Vietnam and Cuban Missile Crisis, for every Sarah Palin there is a Nixon and Goldwater, for every Katrina there is a Hurricane Camille. We can't be fooled into thinking that because they didn't have iPhones at the dinner table nor e-mailed Thank Yous that somehow that made it a better time. Even Mad Men delves into the darker issues that lurked beneath the perfect veneer of the so-callednwell-to-do.

Aside: There is no doubt that Mad Men played an influential role in that list. The first image is of Don Draper himself and most of the entries recall the mid-1900s. I don't think that can be denied. [In fact, on that very page there is a link to a Let's Bring Back the Mad Men list which starts off with the very same item, Hats for Men.]

My issue with lists like this (or moreso the reaction to these lists) is that they devalue the things we have today because they're not seen as being as "glamorous" as train restaurants and discussion societies. And these fantasy lists encourage us to separate the heavy, important issues and struggles of those times (such as civil rights, women's rights, the draft, class struggle, etc) from the more idealistic images like hot-air balloons and fountain pens that we love to wax nostalgic about.

Now, I like Game Nights, Libraries, and Manners as much as the next guy, and I'm certainly not saying there's no entertainment value in compiling these lists. I was an Art History major so I spent the majority of my academic days waxing nostalgic about fancy hotel lobbies and photographic journals of road trips, manual cameras and pocketwatches, but when you make statements like...

...you're forgetting that for most people living in those eras, times were just as hard and just as fucked up as we think of our current day, and you're advocating not for things that would improve our quality of life but for things that would supposedly add glitz to our everyday lives. Agent Z nailed it when he said...

Not to get too off-topic, but Mad Men doesn't idealize that era at all. It pretty much calls out all of the underlying tensions/hypocrisies you're talking about.

Now, it certainly does fetishize some of (all right, most of) the base, tactile aesthetics of the era, but, as this list kind of makes the case for, not without good reason.

I see what you're saying. No doubt much of Mad Men is specifically about the flaws beneath the surface, but like any fictional show there's going to be a certain amount of idealization/fetishism. Whether it be the makeup, hair, dialogue, the impossibly attractive faces everywhere we look, etc., there's always going to be the element of sterilization; and indeed it's even necessary for a narrative to work (even so-called "reality" shows are nothing more than false/heightened reality because do audiences really want to watch the average Joe and Jane go about their mundane lives?). A less "substantial" show would certainly completely gloss over the darker issues in favor of a more fetishistic slant so I wouldn't knock Mad Men's look at all.

And again, there's nothing wrong with digging records and lockets and picnics, I certainly do. You're absolutely right that there is good reason these things are iconic. But, when people start to judge the social value of an era by the aura of those "things" from that era, we are doing ourselves and our history an injustice.

Kate's titles "30 Steps to a Better America" and "A 30 Step Guide to Restoring American Class" are unfortunately a perfect example of this fetishism warping our idea of societal "value" and "quality." The statements rub me the wrong way because they imply both that "things equal value" and that admirable societal values are absent/more lacking in the present day as compared to the past. So, my main issue isn't with the list, but in how people misinterpret their reactions to it. You nailed the fetishistic aspect of what these lists represent, but many others mistake their fetishism for items as admiration for values.

Edit: To Kate - You're absolutely right that the items should be taken at face value and for what they are. However, as I mentioned in this post your comments about "American Class" and "Better Days" indicate that you're not taking these things at face value and in fact are making a larger societal judgment based on these specific tiems. You can't make those judgments without taking into account the whole era, the good and the bad. So the comments about American Class and a Better America are just wrong in the context of what the author of the list herself was aiming for. Her comments focused more specifically on the value of those specific items and not on the larger value of our society today versus decades ago. She's focusing on her/our fetishism of these items, as Z. Vasquez brought up, not their societal value.

And more than half the Mad Men list corresponds to the general list so I would argue that the general list is a strong reflection of the Mad Men list.

But see, these things aren't about improving society, they're about making your particular daily experience more enjoyable. America would be better off with closer family bonds, consideration for others, and proper etiquette but that doesn't require the resurgence of social clubs and dinner parties and the abolition of technology. It's not what you have, it's how you use it, so to speak. For every pocket watch, there was someone trying to flaunt it or trying to steal it. For every dinner party there was someone trying to out-class everyone else or belittle everyone else. There's a good and bad to everything, and it's not inherent to that thing, it's inherent to our nature as human beings. Don't let the list become something that it's not.

Whenever a family member or a friend goes on about how they wished certain things were a certain way as they were in a different time period, my mind immediately goes where dajuice7's goes.

When I speak on the matter, I'm usually given a frown. BUZZKILL!

My mom loves fancy period pieces and comments on how she longs to live in that period. I immediately comment on the fact that as a Korean woman, she would be enjoying none of those trappings. Hahahahaha.