Old movies can save us

Ted Anthony of the Associated Press wrote a perfectly PC story, "Old favorites, outdated attitudes: Can entertainment expire?"

The answer to his question is no. In fact we need those old films now more than ever because they can instruct us on normal social interaction. It was lost in the degradation of family life and the rise of political correctness.

He gave as an example the 1940 classic, "The Philadelphia Story," which he said "opens with a case of domestic assault played for laughs."

Nothing of the sort happens. There is playful interaction between a man and a woman that has been going on for 10,000 years and will, despite the best efforts of academia, continue for another 10,000 years.

Anthony's ignorance of romance is startling. He is one of the biggest prudes on the planet. He fell for Molly Ringwald's hamfisted attempt to turn her film "Sixteen Candles" into a tale of pedophilia because two high school seniors were attracted by *gasp* a freshman!

So Ringwald would imprison 18-year-old boys for being attracted to 15-year-old girls.

Well, she's 50 now, so maybe she has forgotten being a teen.

Thankfully, the rest of us haven't forgotten.

Anthony however is a scold. He writes about the past as a "a less-enlightened age."

Oh?

People back in the day understood flirting was not a call for the #MeToo police. They also understood that asking a girl out for a date was not sexual harassment. They also understood that they should never be so full of themselves that they take jokes seriously.

I don't quite get what Anthony meant by this sentence, "So if we’re watching 'I Love Lucy,' do we consider how belittling Ricky (and most everyone else) is to her?"

Belittling?

On the show, she was a talentless woman who kept scheming to get into show business.

Ricky thwarted her, but on those few occasions when he schemed to stop her, he would get his comeuppance.

Of course she was the target of most of the jokes. It was her show. She played for the laughs, and she was good at it, and 65 years later people are still watching her show. Outside of "The Honeymooners," I cannot think of a show from that era that remains in the public conscience.

By the way, the only character on the show who could mock his accent was Lucy. It was as if she were the only one who heard the accent. What hump?

In the end, Anthony comes to Ringwald's conclusion, "Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art — change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go."

I would go a step further: learn from history. Learn how to flirt. Learn how to joke. Learn how to play.