When I hear ‘Make America Great Again’

I think of that Geico commercial that promises to save me 15% or more on car insurance.

I figure the gist of the commercial is ‘we’ll save you money.’  Whether they do or not is up to others to decide.  As for Trump’s motto? I suppose it means something different for different people.   Probably it means things aren’t the best now, and they weren’t altogether bad then.

I thought of that as I saw this again:

I posted about this some years ago.  This is MTV.  Five years after its debut.  Not that the 80s were some puritanical age of Ozzie and Harriet.  But you have to admit, this is almost Disney like.  Already we had Madonna’s stage sex,  Michael Jackson gyrating with a little selective crotch grabbing.  David Lee Roth’s seatless pants.  And Prince singing about whatever it was he not so subtly sang about.

And yet this, in 1986, my second year of college, on MTV.  It felt like Romper Room.  And I can’t help but think people, when they say ‘great again’, mean something that this speaks to.  Something has gone wrong in our society.  We might not agree about what, but there were quite a few who felt something’s wrong.

If not a lack of Monkees MTV Christmas medleys, then something else.  Something different that we feel we’ve lost or changes we feel are for the worse.  Don’t know, just kicking things around.  I do know that it’s weird when I happily let my youngest watch an old MTV video from my college days before I let him watch shows aimed at kids today.  Perhaps that’s what people are thinking, however vaguely.  It’s not that change isn’t inevitable.  But it doesn’t always have to last.  Unless, of course, we want it to last.