Not all abuse is physical. Some is the result of psychological warfare. For 42 years, I seemed to be receiving coded messages that something was wrong. They came from seemingly likable billboard ads, pop songs and TV comedy skits. The queasiness, t...
The sardonic lyrics of "Pleasant Valley Sunday" (being sung on the above link) are recognized by any member of the Baby Boom generation who grew up in suburbia. Some see Mrs. Gray's pride in her roses and Mr. Green's TVs in every room as light satire, whereas others hear sharp social criticism.
Carole King and Gerry Goffin's song drew inspiration from their 1950s residency in West Orange, N.J. while they worked non-music jobs in New York City just before hitting it big with their 1960 iconic "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?"
"Pleasant Valley Sunday" came out in 1967, performed by the Monkees, a most unlikely group to sing a socially relevant protest song. Their television sitcom was rather goofy, and let's be real: TVs, if not in every room but every suburban home were why this concocted combo of a child actor, Broadway dancer, businessman and folk singer ever became heard of.
Regardless of who performed them, the lyrics of "Pleasant Valley Sunday" would have resonated positively with me, a lifelong critic of the car-dependent, unaware, property-obsessed, racially exclusive "status symbol land" of the U.S. suburbia of my origin. (Today, I don't own a car or a TV, and I prefer it that way.)
I say the song "would have" resonated positively with me, rather than "did," because, despite my views against materialism, something unknown was blocking me from feeling good when I would hear "Pleasant Valley Sunday."
I would get a downright queasy feeling from the song, most acutely during the chromatic flat riff as Mike Nesmith and Mickey Dolenz sing in unison, "Rows of houses that are all the same."
But why? I'm enthusiastically in agreement with the song's philosophical leanings; It can't be the lyrics. Nor the group. Like most kids, I loved the Monkees. Dolenz' "I'm a Believer" was probably my favorite pop release during my childhood. I loved the sound and the feel of it, and Mickey's voice.
Yet, for some inexplicable reason, "Pleasant Valley Sunday" has produced feelings of fear and suspicion in me whenever I hear it.
It seems that growing up and on into young adulthood, I kept getting multi-media hints that something or other wasn't right. On billboards, TV and in song, these images that ought to cause me unambiguous delight, also were disturbing or obsessing me. And they appear to have no common thread.
That is unless there could possibly be a link between an amused smile on the face of a smartly styled, pretty young woman who in the year 1967 dishes out treatment bizarrely age inappropriate to a person powerless to resist and whose mother seems strangely sidelined from taking the action she obviously would otherwise take, and Sunday being a creepy day (If the song had been called "Pleasant Valley Saturday," I would have been fine with it, I am certain).
Does that day suggest a problem with the family's religion? Nope, our household was non-churched and neither pro- nor anti-religion. Our extended family had a mix of non-believers, nominal churchgoers and strongly religious members and during my youth, we all peacefully co-existed on that issue. In our home, Sunday primarily suggested "back to school tomorrow."
That thought is always a glum notice to children that their enjoyment, and to some extent freedom is about to end, but with me, the effects of these combined media images over four decades would seem to indicate that going to school at age nine, the age I reached in 1967, was outright dreaded.
Yes, school -- but as I would feel these creepy impulses through the late 1970s and early '80s, I never defaulted to the any of the highly visible public service advertising messages opening the nation's eyes during those years to all the long hidden horrors that could happen to children in school. The categorical abuses -- sexual, physical, racial -- remained abstract issues of the outside world, not my issues. I certainly was concerned about abuse, but in an objective way, just like poverty, war or the Love Canal toxins a thousand miles away.
I never experienced battering or sexual abuse. And I was always thankful for this -- I mean I'll take not having suffered those over having suffered them. Still, an inability to trace my myriad personal fears and obsessions to any source for which a support group existed, or even a pamphlet was published made me feel a gnawing loneliness -- a perception that I was singularly messed up.
"All your problems is weirdo problems," Archie Bunker once whined to Mike on an All in the Family episode about Mike's impotence. Absolutely nothing the uneducated Archie ever opined had any sting with me -- except those words.
Archie's racist, sexist and anti-gay pronouncements? I easily and with pleasure demolished each one of them, seeing right through the preposterous co-option of a shamed economic have-not desperate to find somebody below him because he is starved for status.
And calling his son-in-law's problems "weirdo" should have led the parade of Bunker nonsense. Problems are problems -- yet, for a moment, ignore the pejorative suffix "o" and I could not deny that my example illustrated how some people's can be weirder than most.
Or at least more baffling. For 42 years, I never made a connection between these occasional recurring discomforts over disparate media images, nor did I see any pattern in an exploding neighbor, a cute office worker and "charcoal burning everywhere" on what happened to be Sunday.
Nor did I connect any of this with my tendency to be unsettled by contemplating the year 1967. There was always what would seem a rational explanation: It was when the Vietnam quagmire reached its worst point, stagnating Lyndon Johnson's once progressive image. The embarrassingly archaic term "Negro" was still used. It was when the space program ran aground after the horrible Apollo 1 fire. Colleges, despite the Summer of Love, were still mostly unenlightened places of crew cuts and corporate recruiters.
In the mid-1970s, I became passionately pro-architectural preservation. In the ensuing decade, I moved to Louisville, and shortly my realization of the city's great success at preserving its vast Victorian, Gothic and Greek Revival treasures made the place my sentimental as well as geographic home. I was retroactively relieved that Louisville had survived some tenuous decades before its stellar 1974 preservation ordinance ended the long danger to the city's unique charm.
And 1967 epitomized to me those days of peril from the unchallenged use of the wrecking ball so commonly called "progress." That year in particular would intrude on my joy as I'd behold the deep aesthetics of homes in so many sections of Louisville.
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Of course, any year in the '60s should have represented that bleak time. Nineteen Sixty-Six or 1969 didn't jolt me, however, like the dreaded 1967. Neither did any other year's crew cuts at West Lafayette or Evanston before campus political uprisings.
Seeing any movie dated 1967, ranging from the racial examination, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" to the Space geeky "Countdown," became a battle with slight but constant nausea. Those are two genres I love, but just knowing they were released in that year – yeech!
