Great post dimdown.

the Baby-Boomer generation, perhaps brought about by Post-Nuclear anxiety, that western society through off it's hats and gloves, along with other, less tangible, restrictions of the past.

I'm inclined to disagree with this perception. I don't think that the Baby Boomers liberated anything. I think that they were a very manipulative generation who decided to judge everything, create several false dilemmas, and then knock down those strawmen. For instance in I Love Lucy they didn't speak about Lucy's pregnancy; why? The Boomers say it's because they hate women, are intolerant, or whatever. Ask the generation who "censored" that and they'll tell you that they respected her privacy, essentially, and were being proper. Meanwhile the Boomers give us the PC police, you can't say "shut up" with a Y7 rating, and they even gave us these TV ratings (where was that in the Lucy era?).

Politics have gotten incredibly manipulative and cruel, generally citing moral superiority and guilt tripping and/or fear to make a point rather than the point itself. I wouldn't be a politician just because I know that if they find out that I wipe my butt it'll be on the 10 o'clock news.

I know this is a diversion and I don't want to be a jerk, but I think that the Boomers were just rebelling and creating strawmen to knock down, and that they were judging everything and everybody as intrinsically bad. I don't think that hats were a restriction but just another cultural thing so that the everyman could be on the "in", or perhaps even express himself. Look at the different kinds of hats they were wearing. I don't really believe that they'd begrudge a hatless man. I think that the Boomers dramatized everything in almost a Freudian way and broke the chain of culture, basically have manipulated us for the last half century, and shattered norms replacing them with politics, finance, and excessive greed, classism, and vague judgments rather than clearly defined ones.