The term “country” has a lot of meanings and can be applied to music, art, lifestyle, animals… But there’s one form of country I hate: the feather-bed, spinning-wheel, cracker-barrel, maple-syrup, pot-belly-stove, ye-olde-shoppe variety.
It’s not that I dislike old-fashioned values, and anyone who reads this column knows I find interest in almost everything nostalgic. But there’s something about ceramic geese dressed in gingham, playing checkers in the old hardware store, sittin’ a spell, and attending services in a picture-perfect steepled church that gives me the heebee jeebees. I don’t think such a time ever existed.
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All of this week’s images are from an early 1960s magazine called Ideals, which seems to have existed purely to show people how much simpler (and thus better) times once were. The magazine had a circulation of just over 300,000.
I admit it: I don’t value fresh-baked apple pies, a good ol’ hunting dog, big-wheeled coffee grinders, and sugar and spice and everything nice.
In Indiana’s Amish country, I discovered a store that sells nothing more than hundreds of outfits for geese statues people display on their porches and lawns. Thirty years earlier, these people might have have read Ideals, cut out poems from Reader’s Digest, and hung Norman Rockwell prints in their living rooms.
I know I’m being a judgmental curmudgeon, but to me that world is a little too sweet. Perhaps it’s because I was raised a city boy. I sincerely love what I consider true country quaint old-fashioned times that accurately reflect an era. But did boys really dip girl’s pigtails in the inkwell while Mom made fresh griddle cakes and Dad chewed the fat with the other men down at the country store next to the pickle barrel?
And as far as color schemes and artistic sensibility go, what could be worse than a hodge-podge of Pennsylvania Dutch, ornate Victorian, red and white checks, and calico?
Only in Ideals would you find poetry of the sort that rhymes mittens and kittens. Does it get any cuter than that? Well, yes, it does actually. There are Tin Lizzies, patchwork quilts, paisley shawls and “violets drenched with morning dew.”
Perhaps if I had ever been on a hayride or driven a horse and buggy, I might feel differently. And I’ve never had sassafras and I didn’t have freckles, either. In Los Angeles where I grew up people were nostalgic for a time when the air didn’t make your eyes red and your lungs hurt.
I don’t have any issue with these things individually, and I respect the right of anyone to cherish such images and values. But when you put them all together, especially in the way Ideals magazine did, they come off as condescending towards the not-so-simple lives most of us lead. Or worse, like a bad theme restaurant where the food is “hearty” but not so good.
[Editor’s note: To each his own! Next week Gene embraces Mexican flea market art, an entirely different kind of kitsch.]
This article was last modified on May 17, 2023
This article was first published on July 3, 2009
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