good old days

1 Article
Francis Illington

Below are headlines and subheads of several nineteenth-century wire stories that appeared in the local press of a small Midwestern city.

Oh, for the days when educated people referred to the mentally ill as “lunatics!” Or, better yet, when unfettered Gilded Age capitalism dismissed the need for beefed-up building codes to protect society’s most vulnerable! The latter point is enough to make the most antediluvian Tea Partier or misguided Paulian libertarian pine for the return of an imagined sepia-toned past of American greatness when our nation was unshackled by the burdens of intrusive government regulations.

Of course, all of this clown ass-ery nonsense brings to mind a quotation from American journalist Franklin Pierce Adams (1881-1960): “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

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