Saturday, September 6, 2014

Rant About "A Good Man is Hard to Find,"

Although there are a lot of things to say about "A Good Man is Hard to Find," I really just wanted to rant about a specific part that stuck out to me. When the grandmother talks about how much better times used to be, it really got me thinking about the modern context of the statement. This was written in the fifties, the "Happy Days" time frame, the time in American History that people talk about in retrospect as if it were this pure and clean decade where everyone was honest, hard working and innocent. But that wasn't the case and I loved that even though the author obviously didn't intend to bring that up since it was written in what at the time was modern context, it brought up the issue that things have always more or less been the same in terms of the quality of people and society. Economically and politically things were great for white suburban families but segregation was still a thing at that point, homosexuality was considered illegal many states, and a lot of people had it unfairly difficult. It wasn't a perfect decade. Things have gotten worse for certain demographics but at the same time evened out for others. I just really wanted to bring this up because I feel like it adds a certain historical context to the piece that probably wasn't intended to be there, but works with everything else in it's own way.

3 comments:

  1. I agree that older people do tend to glorify the past> I think that is called revisionist history. I know because my mother-in-law remembers things that to my knowledge never happened but when questioned she get belligerent and it is just better to agree with her.

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  2. It seems like so many people who are a bit older say the same thing about "their day". I have said it to my girlfriends little sister before about when I was in grade school how much different it was. Things probably weren't that far off in any generation when put into context, but it seems like they were because of how society changes.

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  3. Zac,
    This is a great point, and we are going to see a lot of writers we will be reading coming up challenging ideas about history like this.

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