“Rock music and tight-fitting sweaters, nothing is more terrifying to me than these two evils.”
~Old white people in the 1950’s
Hindsight is the greatest. If you fire enough people and admit something like, “oh I guess natural gas is highly flammable” or “in retrospect, maybe Gays should be allowed to serve in the military,” you can pretty much come off smelling like roses, while appearing “progressive” and “innovative.” And we at AFFotD are no different. We’re the first one’s telling you about the glory that is beef jerky potato chips, and as soon as the ghost of Charlton Heston shows up to tell us that the secret ingredient is people, we’ll be the first to tell you that people are fucking delicious.
What we’re trying to say is that we’re not always right about things, and the best way to make everyone totally forget about the terrible, terrible mistakes you’ve made in the past is to make very efficient cars acknowledge your flaws and put them behind you.
What brings this up, as you no doubt suspected, has to do with our 1950s bi-weekly pamphlets we used to distribute, called “The Informative American.” We like to go through them from time to time, laughing at the antiquated way most social situations were handled at the time, while cringing at some of the more blatant racism. It was while going through these that we found a little gem from early 1959 about Buddy Holly.
Now don’t get us wrong, Buddy Holly is clearly American, and is the most responsible person for modern Rock and Roll that wasn’t a black group obfuscated by a racist culture. But back then, he was clashing a bit with our office’s more conservative ideals. They didn’t like him.
So now, without further adieu, AFFotD presents an…unfortunately timed release (it came out less than a month before Holly’s untimely death)…
The Informative American Presents: Buddy Holly, Destroyer of Morals (Originally published January, 1959)
America Fun Fact of the Day 