Betty Jean O’Hara (1913-1973) was a famed lady of the night and madam in Honolulu, Hawaii’s Hotel Street red-light district during World War II. O’Hara came up with a novel solution to cope with the demand of randy US sailors during the conflict.
O’Hara set up a Hotel Street brothel that combined sexual services with the assembly-line efficiency of a Ford plant. Each of O’Hara’s employees rotated between a series of three rooms. In one room a man would be undressing, in another a fellow would be engaging in an act of carnal knowledge. In a third room, a satiated sailor would be getting dressed. The Hotel Street red-light district of Honolulu lasted throughout most of World War II.
I never served in the military, but I have met many men who have. In the 1980s I met a man a few years older than me who was stationed in South Korea with the US Army in the late 1970s. He told me stories of “Miss Oh”, a local courtesan in Daegu, South Korea. Based on the gleam in his eye when he reminisced, Miss Oh must have been a proverbial firecracker.
One of my high school acquaintances was in the US Marine Corps during the 1980s. (I’ll call him Mitch.) Mitch also served in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91.
Many years later, I ran into Mitch at a reunion and he told me some war stories.
While relating his experiences abroad, Mitch also mentioned a handful of experiences with professional women—mostly in the Philippines, where large numbers of US service personnel were stationed through about 1992.
I was somewhat surprised. Mitch had been the archetypical ladies’ man in high school: a handsome, charming, multi-sport athlete. Not the kind of guy one associates with sex workers.
Perhaps sensing my surprise at his revelation, Mitch explained: “You’re a young guy in a foreign country, working in a mostly male organization (the Marine Corps). There aren’t many opportunities for conventional dating and relationships.”
Things are different, though, in this enlightened 21st century. The USS Abraham Lincoln has just docked in Thailand. The aircraft carrier and its crew participated in US military operations against Iran, and stayed at sea for more than 260 days—almost nine months.
Adams acknowledged Dolly Parton’s universal appeal and good works in a social media post, while also challenging the appropriateness of lowering the flag in her honor.
According to Adams, “It should be reserved for our military heroes, fallen first responders, presidents and other major national leaders, or events that have had a tremendous impact on our country. If we lower the flag every time a well-known or beloved person passes away, I believe we eventually lessen the meaning of the gesture.”
Most recently, President Trump ordered the flag to be flown at half-staff for Senator Lindsey Graham, who died of natural causes in July. (Well, there are some conspiracy chasers who think the Russian FSB was involved, but we’ll table that discussion for the moment.)
And then there was the lowering of the flag for the assassinated Charlie Kirk last year. Kirk was a noteworthy but controversial celebrity/activist who divided public opinion.
Lindsay Clancy is the Massachusetts woman who killed her three children. In any normal society, this would make her an instant pariah.
But this is Massachusetts we’re talking about. Child killing is all the rage in Massachusetts, where abortion was recently made legal until birth. Even as Lindsay Clancy is on trial, her exoneration has become a “cause” among progressive feminist factions of the Bay State. Hundreds of supporters, overwhelmingly women, recently rallied outside the courthouse in support of Clancy—who strangled her young children to death with exercise bands.
The other day my Facebook feed informed me that a nightclub in Brixton, London held a party earlier this year to which men under the height of 6 feet were barred from entry. The event was called “Land of the Giants.”
And they were serious about the height requirement. Men—and only men—were measured at the door.
The event sold out, but social media opinions were divided. Supporters argued that this was really no different from height filters on popular dating apps. Opponents assailed the height requirement as exclusionary.
I am 5’10” tall. I therefore would have been turned away at the door. Perhaps I should be upset about this. (That’s obviously what Facebook’s algorithm was hoping for.) But I don’t do much clubbing in Brixton, London. (I live in Ohio, after all.) And at my current age of 58, well… I guess I don’t regard this as a personally pressing matter.
The height requirement is tacky. But if a woman really must have a man capable of playing guard on a professional basketball team… “Who am I to judge?” as the late Pope Francis once said.
As sexual beings, we are entitled to like what we like, so long as we confine our liking to consenting adults. Women are entitled to fetishize height. Men are equally entitled to fetishize youth, thinness, and thigh gaps.
We all know the history surrounding Nazi Germany and its authoritarian controls on popular culture. The Third Reich aggressively banned art that the Nazi Party deemed substandard, degenerate, or subversive.
But that was 90 years ago, right? Today Germany is a modern, democratic nation that isn’t afraid of free expression. Right?
Not exactly. The old authoritarian impulses still hold sway in Berlin. Last month German movie regulators refused to assign a rating to director Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante. Since it is illegal to distribute films in Germany that have not been rated, this effectively banned Citizen Vigilante from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
Citizen Vigilante stars Armie Hammer as Michael Sanders, a vigilante who hunts down rapists and violent criminals, many of whom are migrants from Islamic countries.
The movie is an unsubtle statement on government policies that have tolerated—and perhaps even encouraged—mass migration from the Middle East to destinations in the European Union and (to a lesser extent) North America. (Uwe Boll is a German filmmaker.)
By all accounts, Citizen Vigilante is not a pleasant film, and perhaps you could argue that it is not even a particularly good one. But if present headlines are any indication, this is a debate that is not going away anytime soon. The backlash against mass migration is not limited to the Trump-voting sectors of America. The same backlash has been building in Europe for quite some time now. The immigration issue is the primary reason for the recent successes of Germany’s right-leaning Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
In the internet age, you simply cannot stamp out ideas. After the movie was suppressed in Germany, Elon Musk made it available for 48 hours, free of charge, on his X platform.
I didn’t hear about the movie because of Elon Musk, however. I learned of Citizen Vigilante when I read a finger-wagging article decrying the film’s very existence. It probably would have escaped my notice otherwise. That’s the irony of cancel culture: the very act of denouncing something has the unintended consequence of amplifying it.
I haven’t seen Citizen Vigilante, though I’ve seen clips of some of its most controversial scenes. By all indications, the movie is boilerplate vigilante spectacle. That’s an old genre in entertainment. It goes all the way back to the Race Williams detective stories published in Black Mask in the 1920s, when large numbers of Americans were anxious about rising crime rates. In the 1970s, it was manifest in the Death Wish vigilante films starring the already fifty-something Charles Bronson.
The notion of citizens taking the law into their own hands is an uncomfortable topic for a film. But when such movies become popular, it is usually because of some genuine grassroots frustration with the status quo. Perhaps this is the issue that the German government should really be paying attention to, rather than trying to ban what is, by all accounts, a rather mediocre movie.
Although the Third Reich ended more than eighty years ago, German authorities are still uncomfortable with the concept of unregulated speech. They are also, apparently, unfamiliar with the concept of reverse psychology.
Never before have so many movies, videos, and whatnot competed for our attention. The best way to convince people to seek out an otherwise obscure movie is for a government to declare its director a pariah and his movie verboten. Citizen Vigilante received over 10.5 million views, from all over the world, during its 48-hour free run on X.
Soccer was regarded as a somewhat newfangled sport when I was an adolescent and teenager in the first half of the 1980s. If you were a soccer fan, people might have suspected that you were going out of your way to be different or “special”.
I once asked my uncle if he ever watched soccer. “Well,” he said wryly, “soccer might be all right if you were a European.”
I fully grasped my uncle’s sentiment, even if I didn’t entirely agree with it. In that time and place, there were only three sports that counted: football, basketball, and baseball.
I ran track and cross country in high school. While no one regarded the running sports as aberrant, no one cared much about them, either. I don’t remember many spectators at our track meets—even when our team was doing well.
My high school got its first boys’ soccer team while I was a student there. The team did quite well, as I recall, winning a state championship in 1984. This was appreciated, of course; but the soccer team still played second fiddle to the football team in the fall athletic season. No one saw this as a great injustice or irony. It was just the way things were.
Soccer has become far more popular in the four decades since then. But it has become popular primarily as a sport that Americans play—not watch. And most of the Americans who play soccer are of student age.
Consider the numbers. The Super Bowl routinely pulls in 123 million to 128 million domestic viewers in the US. Even a World Cup final match struggles to pull in half that… in the US, that is. Globally, about 1.5 to 1.8 billion people follow the World Cup. American football, by contrast, has almost no bounce beyond US borders.
I have never been much into watching other people play sports. (Another thing about the US: our passion for spectator sports has risen in proportion to our obesity rates. But that’s another essay.) My personal disinterest, coupled with my indifference to soccer as an American, prejudiced me against watching the 2026 World Cup. I wasn’t against it; I just didn’t care.
And then I started watching—just to see what all the fuss was about, at first. Somewhat against my will, I got hooked. By the final match between Spain and Argentina, I was a moderately enthusiastic World Cup fan.
I discovered that there are some things about soccer that I particularly like. For one thing, it is one of the few remaining sports that a normal-sized person can play at a professional level. Pro basketball is now a game for people who are almost seven feet tall. I’m only 5’10”. I simply can’t relate to pro basketball. But the average World Cup soccer player is very close to my height.
Soccer is a fast-moving game. This is a quality that it shares with hockey. One cannot watch a soccer game with half one’s attention. One must either focus on the game, or focus on something else. The action is simply that engrossing.
I know that some Europeans can become rabid partisans of one team or another. Riots at European soccer venues have been a well-documented phenomenon for years.
I’ll probably never attend a match in person and I’d certainly never riot over the outcome of such a contest. But by the end of the 2026 World Cup, I was enthusiastically rooting for Spain. There were too many instances of poor sportsmanship on the Argentinian side, while the Spanish team struck me as a class act.
Soccer will probably never be as popular in the USA as pro football. The NFL is simply too entrenched in the American psyche. But pro soccer now has at least one new American fan. I’ll almost certainly watch the World Cup in 2030, and probably some additional tournaments in the interim.
Which Latin American strongman was most on the mind of the American president in 1986? Daniel Ortega, the dictator of Nicaragua.
Ortega, a Marxist protégé of the USSR, ruled Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. The Reagan administration provided aid to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, often through clandestine means. This led to the infamous Iran-Contra scandal of Reagan’s second term in office.
Time Magazine, March 1986
There was talk in some quarters about direct U.S. intervention in the Latin American nation in the 1980s, though I don’t think this was ever seriously on the table.
Ortega was eventually ousted from within and found himself out of power for seventeen years, from 1990 to 2007. Then he came back into power. Ortega’s second dictatorship has lasted for almost 20 years now.
No, I’m not about to suggest that the US should attempt to force a regime change in Nicaragua. That was a bad idea in 1986, and it’s a bad idea now. From the U.S. perspective, the situation in Nicaragua is a nuisance, not an existential threat.
But we may consider the irony. So much has changed since the mid-1980s. (To consider the matter from a personal perspective, I turned 18 in 1986, the year I graduated from high school. I will soon turn 58.)
There are, however, some constants in this ever-changing world. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I will never be accused of age discrimination. I find that people of various ages get on my nerves more or less equally, albeit in different ways.
The twenty-somethings with their neurotic cell phone obsessions… the aging Baby Boomers who dawdle and shuffle about… the now-forty-something Millennials who are still trying to be hipsters, as if the calendar had been pushed back to 2005.
And we haven’t even gotten to children and teenagers yet.
The point here is that people of all ages can be annoying, so there is no reason to discriminate against any of them, in a knee-jerk, automated manner.
Bethany Michel, who is now 28, moved to a retirement community in Florida in 2020 to take care of her terminally ill father. This was obviously during the COVID pandemic. Her father subsequently passed away and she inherited the house from him in 2023.
The HOA in Michel’s neighborhood is now trying to force her out, apparently, because she is under the age of 55. The campaign to oust her began three months after her father’s death, when she received a letter informing her that she did not meet the requirements for residency. (Although she was an adult, she was too young for the 55+ community.) The HOA is now trying to evict her with formal legal measures.
Age discrimination is one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination. Often it is directed at those of us who are older.
I will soon turn 58. Every now and then I’ll see the term “creepy old man” tossed about on the internet, on social media or elsewhere. What’s the deal with that? Does anyone seriously believe that a 30-year-old man can’t be creepy? I can show you a lot of evidence to the contrary.
A more systematic, though carefully hidden, form of age discrimination is used in job interview situations. There are some hiring managers in corporate America who don’t believe that people over 50 are capable of learning newfangled things. (Once again, I could provide plenty of evidence to the contrary.)
But there is also an ilk of people over 55 who seek to discriminate against younger adults—especially those younger adults with children.
Many of them live in age-restricted 55+ communities. Such communities are legal under the Housing for Older Persons Act (HOPA) of 1995.
Many of these communities provide exemptions for live-in caregivers. For example, The Villages, a huge retirement community in Central Florida, will allow the under-55 to reside within their hoary confines so long as:
“at least one member of your household is 55 and you are not younger than 19 years old.”
And they’re serious about those under-19-year-olds. The Villages “absolutely” does “welcome children and grandchildren”… to a point. “Please note,” the community’s website informs us, “visitors under the age of 18 are limited to 30 days in the calendar year.”
Unless, that is, the under-18-year-old is a pit bull or a Rottweiler. The Villages is aggressively pet-friendly. The community has many dog-walking paths and parks.
Certain forms of “age discrimination” are both commonsense and unavoidable. We have all been exasperated by the twenty-something who purports to have all the answers to all the world’s problems. Romantic relationships with vast age gaps—even among consenting adults—will always raise eyebrows.
But where ordinary social interaction is concerned, we are becoming a bit too precious as a society if we now demand the right to only associate with those who were born in the same decade as us. On the contrary, this is an area where we could all benefit from a little more diversity.
One of my friends at my local gym is a guy named Bob. Bob, who is exactly 30 years my senior, will turn 88 this year. Bob was a well-known college basketball player in the early 1960s. I love listening to his sports stories. I also enjoy talking with him about the way America was during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years.
This doesn’t mean that I now want to restrict my company to people on the verge of 90. I also enjoy interactions with twenty-somethings, much as they sometimes frustrate me. I occasionally get ideas from my twenty-something acquaintances that I simply wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.
At the same time, I enjoy interacting with my fellow Gen Xers, now mostly fifty-something adults who fondly remember what it was like to come of age in the 1980s and early 1990s.
If you spend too much time talking to only Gen Xers, though, you’ll develop a worldview that is a little too cynical and sarcastic. I find that I benefit from deliberately pulling myself out of the Gen X bubble at regular intervals.
This was true even when I was a teen and twenty-something myself. At that time, everyone who was significantly younger than me was literally a child. Most of my age-disparate interactions, therefore, took place with older adults. I enjoyed listening to the Baby Boomers’ stories about Vietnam and the 1960s. I enjoyed listening to my World War II generation grandparents tell me about the 1930s and 1940s. I never wanted to live in an age-restricted bubble.
Back to Bethany Michel and her housing fight. There are photos of the 28-year-old online. She’s blonde and very easy on the eyes. And while I’m perfectly happy with my current next-door neighbors, I would not shriek in horror if Ms. Michel were to purchase their home.
So who, exactly, is so offended by her presence? And why? And why would The Villages want to severely restrict the presence of younger people, as if anyone under the age of 19 will turn into a flesh-eating zombie after 30 days?
As for me, I’d be a lot more annoyed by all the dogs.
I was just turning 15 when Risky Business—the movie that launched Tom Cruise’s acting career—hit the theaters in August 1983. I was too young to get into an R-rated movie without an adult; and this wasn’t a film that either of my parents would have been interested in seeing with me.
I neglected to see Risky Business for more than 40 years, partly because I was put off by the much-played clip of Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear. Call me homophobic if you’d like; but that isn’t the way to get me to see a movie. And there were just so many other movies to see.
I finally got around to watching Risky Business a few days ago. (Better late than never!) The movie was quite well done for a film that was originally conceived as a throwaway flick for Reagan-era young adults. (Moreover, despite the ubiquity of that clip with Tom Cruise in his underwear, that scene is a minuscule portion of the 95-minute movie.) Continue reading “‘Risky Business’: an entertaining film that would never get made today”
The early 1980s gave us a famous song named after a phone number: “867-5309”. Even if you do not remember the early 1980s, you are probably familiar with the song.
The song was alternatively known as “Jenny”. Often the song was identified with both names: 867-5309/Jenny.
In the song, a male narrator describes his obsession with a woman named “Jenny”, whose phone number (867-5309) was written on a wall, presumably in a men’s room. (That was a common prank back in the 1970s and early 1980s—writing random women’s names and phone numbers on the walls of men’s rooms. Don’t ask me why.)
Tommy Tutone is the name of the musical act that performed 867-5309.
Tommy Tutone is not a single artist, but a California-based group. The original lineup of Tommy Tutone was formed in 1978. The band still exists today. Tommy Tutone released six studio albums between 1980 and 2019. But the band owes most of its name recognition to 867-5309.
867-5309/Jenny was released on November 16, 1981. By the end of the following year, everyone with an FM radio had heard it.
867-5309 was, and remains, a cultural phenomenon. Not everyone was pleased about the song’s fame, however. After the song became popular, homeowners who happened to have been assigned the number began receiving prank phone calls. Many changed their numbers. Some even unplugged their phones in desperation.
Still others went out of their way to acquire the suddenly famous seven digits. Now that the initial fervor over the song has long since died down, this is the more common trend. It would probably be difficult—if not impossible—for you to obtain 867-5309 as your personal phone number. But your odds will increase in less populated areas, and as the time between the heyday of the song and the present year continues to grow.
In late 1981, I was in the eighth grade in Cincinnati, Ohio. One morning—it must have been a few weeks before the Christmas holidays—I heard a girl in my homeroom say my name. When I turned around, she had a smile on her face. I sensed good things ahead. Continue reading “867-5309, and a lesson in the value of skepticism “
I don’t evangelize many 21st-century television shows. But I am unabashed in my enthusiasm for The Americans, the period spy drama that originally aired on FX from 2013 to 2018.
The Americans is about big events of the final decade of the Cold War. But it is also a family drama: about Philip and Elizabeth Jennings and their two children. The Jenningses are deep-cover Soviet KGB operatives. Philip and Elizabeth do all the bad things you would expect KGB agents to do. But they also cope with the pressures of maintaining their cover, and keeping their secret from their two children, who were born in the USA.
The series finale was set at the end of 1987/early 1988, just as Cold War tensions were easing. No spoilers here, except to say the series ended in a way that was satisfying, while simultaneously leaving the door open for sequels.
And it’s easy to imagine any number of sequels, based on a myriad of post-1988 plot lines. So much was yet to happen: the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (1989), the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), and the collapse of the USSR (1991).
And what about the post-Soviet, Yeltsin and Putin eras? The possibilities are endless.
In a March 11, 2023 interview on The Rich Eisen Show, series star Matthew Rhys hinted at the possibility of The Americans continuing in some form.
That was almost two years ago. I remain cautiously hopeful. But I am also realistic about these things. Despite the high quality of the show’s concept and execution, a revived version of The Americans would face certain obstacles.
To begin with, young audiences may have difficulty relating to the subject matter. I am in my 50s and I remember the 1980s as if that decade ended last year. Viewers under 40, who lack such a perspective (and who have suffered the intellectual depredations of American public education) may struggle to get a foothold as they begin a show that involves Cold War-era history.
The Americans premiered in a crowded 2010s TV arena, filled with more accessible shows involving dragons, superheroes, and teenagers performing magic. The Americans was always a critical success, but it never got the viewership it deserved.
That may also have been an issue of timing. Between 2013 and 2018, the US public was focused on economic recovery, ISIS, Islamic terrorism, and the 2016 presidential election. The Cold War and Russia seemed far, far away.
That faraway perception of Russia may have changed, however, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and talk of a Cold War II from all quarters.
Now may be the perfect time to revive The Americans, in fact. A post-Soviet storyline would make the most sense. But there is plenty of material surrounding the fall of the USSR, too.
Even if The Americans zoomed forward to the present era, it could be made to work. All of the main characters, though much older, could plausibly still be alive.
I’m crossing my fingers for a sequel to my all-time favorite television show. As the above interview with Matthew Rhys suggests, I’m not alone in hoping for more seasons of The Americans.
