Armagideon Time

Here’s a cheerful in-house ad from the January 18, 1982 issue of Time Magazine:

MUGGINGS! RAPES! MURDERS! Does that scare you, Ms. Whiteperson? It should. The egghead intellectual elites might try to confuse you with their nonsense about historic patterns and trends and how the media overstates the threat of violent crime, but you know better.

It’s a dangerous world, full of vicious predators lurking in the darker places. They wouldn’t think twice about taking your property, virtue, or life in order to satisfy their primitive urges….LIKE THE SERIAL RAPIST HIDING IN YOUR BROOM CLOSET AT THIS VERY MOMENT!  LOOK OUT!

Ha, ha. Just kidding. For now. You did pee your pants a little, though, which is why you need to get a five-year paid subscription to our fine publication…because who else (besides the Republican Party) is going to pander to your irrational fears of The Other?

Recommended listening:  Bauhaus – In Fear of Fear (from Mask, 1981)

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Fear of gothiness. Fear of dub-influenced postpunk with a hint of funk. Fear of a singer who wanted to be David Bowie and a guitarist who wanted to be that wannabe David Bowie. Fear being remembered only for “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”

In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. But now, God knows, anything goes…

…and no one was more aware of this decadent turn of events than John S. Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Fortunately, Sumner didn’t have to man the Comstockian barricades all by his lonesome. The July 16, 1927 issue of The Literary Digest more than willing to offer a few column inches in support of Sumner’s crusade against the vile social disease known as modernity in a piece titled “Why We Are Thrill Addicts.”

Sumner goes on to lump labor unions in with dumbwaiters and the lightbulb as another obstacle to the path of righteousness, as humanity is fundamentally incapable of virtue when liberated from the Eden of ceaseless, backbreaking agrarian toil and set loose in the den of sin known as “the city.”

I blame automated amusements such as Grand Theft Horseless Carriage: 23 Skidoo Stories for this unfortunate decline in morals. That, and the invention of the wheel (a.k.a. “Satan’s terrible circle”).

Recommended Listening: Gang of Four – Natural’s Not in It (from Entertainment!, 1979)

Even thrill addiction eventually succumbs to commodification and alienation, mechanical routines used to fill the empty spaces between shifts…and Gang of Four explored that anomie with jagged, pulsing, abrasive postpunk that still sounds fresh three decades later.