death rates of white middle class American males

[pbrower2a]

(02-24-2017, 05:20 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The 3T in America was not "devoid" of culture, but often a tone of despair was evident. I think rap, punk, grunge and heavy metal are both ugly and negative in their message. It seems like it contributes to the mood of despair. I contrast them with an uplifting, melodious song from 1967 that came to my mind the other day. "Hey, 98.6 it's good to have you back again.... lovin' is the medicine that saved me...." The poor state of our TV contributes even more, perhaps. Violent and shallow. But disagree as we might about all that, I think it goes well beyond this. There is a low attitude toward education and the media in many segments of our culture, white and black and in between, young and old. Many people prefer to be uninformed. And most do not read books anymore. They may cruise and surf social media, but does that provide a suitable substitute? Philosophy and history, two of my favorite studies, are not so popular these days. There's the loneliness and social isolation I mentioned from the PBS report too. Our politics itself contributes too, of course. Negative, polarized, stalemated; it does not give much cause for hope from that quarter either. You don't see ads for heroin on TV, but lots of other drugs with lots of side effects are advertised to the hilt. And then there's the gun culture, of course. Makes suicide very handy.

We Americans are in part victims of our own success. We are productive enough that we could live at least as well as most Northern white people did in the 1950s (most blacks and Southern whites were not living the Good Life by 1950s standards, and that could be rectified with appropriate reforms and investments) with much less time on the job. If we are working more it is to ensure that rapacious plutocrats get even more, then maybe we need to question the foundations of the political choices that we have made. Maybe Donald Trump is everything wrong with America except for the drug scene.

America solved the problem of chronic underemployment in the 1930s by shortening the workweek. America was not out of the Crisis and would not be until Emperor Hirohito called for surrender in all but name, but by the late 1930s things were materially better for most Americans than they had been ten years earlier.

We have a sick culture, a culture so sick that it could elect Donald Trump and give him Congressional majorities willing to do his bidding and give some public officials the empowerment to call for fascistic repression of dissent. People who say that it would be almost acceptable to run over political protesters who challenge the moral credibility of rapacious plutocrats and the supposed rectitude of the Great and Infallible Leader of America who has decided for all time what the truth is? They have imbibed of the same mass culture as the rest of us. If they are Boomers they may be just as reflective as Blue Boomers; those cruel people reflect upon the wrong bases of political, cultural, and economic leadership.

...Soon after the abject defeat of the Third Reich Americans got to judge Nazis for their worst crimes.  The harshest interrogators and judges were, not surprisingly, Jews who had scores to settle. After all, many of those bodies stacked like cordwood  at the end of the war, the corpses in mass graves, and the ashes that had gone up chimneys at extermination camps had had Jewish souls attached. Second-worst as interrogators and judges to Nazis on trial for their lives were those Americans who had extensive study of German history and culture. They admired the Germany of Goethe, Schiller, Bach, and Beethoven and had no use for someone who could say as Sergeant Otto Moll (executed as a war criminal) said when casting pellets of cyanide into the gas chamber, Na gib ihnen etwas zu fressen. (now give them something to gobble)*. It was not Goethe, Schiller, Bach, or Beethoven who induced Nazis to abuse, dispossess, beat, and murder the Jews; those Germanophiles by culture could hate Nazis who abandoned the benign part of the German cultural heritage.

...After World War II, both parts of Germany repudiated Nazism as a cultural influence. The capitalist West and the Communist East found different pretexts for rejecting Nazism -- liberalism in the West, Marxism-Leninism in the East. Neither cast off the true glories of German culture before Hitler. Both even accepted Marx as part of the heritage, if with vastly-different interpretations and emphasis.

When Donald Trump is off the political scene we Americans will need to reject the patterns of thought that made possible the rise of a demagogue who, like Hitler, achieved great power with less-than-majority (in Trump's case, less even than plurality support) by appealing to the worst in human nature. We will have to go beyond the technical basics of reading, writing, arithmetic, and technical training to include at the least philosophy so that people can make decisions on the viability of political promises based upon formal logic, philosophy so that we can be savvy enough to recognize and reject psychological manipulation when we encounter it, and economics so that we know that the only really good deal is something good for both. Most significantly, less time spend in formal employment implies that we will have more leisure time. Many Americans have no idea of how they can use it to enrich their lives. How about art, music, literature, and outdoor activity?

Most of us have all the stuff that we need. Newly-poor people may have large collections of books, music, and video that they really can't sell for much.

Quote:Weimar culture was the outgrowth of turn of the 20th century culture, which was an epochal change of age in civilization. It guess it's no wonder that it took up where things left off since the 1890s-1910s era, which historians often agree was a turning point on a once in 500-year scale. And Europe had such a fertile foundation for vibrant culture to begin with going back thousands of years.

Oh, Art Deco! Oh, Impressionism! Oh, Cubism! Oh, great authors of the time like Thomas Mann and the ones like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky coming into the mainstream of literature! Just think of the great composers born from about 1866 on -- Janacek, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Sibelius, Scriabin, Glazunov, Vaughan-Williams, Respighi, Ives, Ravel, Albeniz, Respighi, Schoenberg, Bartok, Stravinsky, Honegger, Prokofiev, Gershwin, Orff, Copland... and what glorious silent movies in Hollywood and (for a short time) Berlin!

But the Germans would throw most of that away, human as it was, as "Degeneracy". They would accept this:



It looks stupid now, but it didn't seem so ludicrous in 1935.

Quote:The article mentioned something of a resurgence of culture in Europe in the sixties. I guess the sixties in the United States did not have such an impact. 30 years later, the outgrowth of the sixties was limited to the new age and neo-pagan movements and other similar counter-cultural expressions like raves and multi-media computer arts. By the 3T, our culture had been already dumbed down to a remarkable degree. Concentration of media ownership was a major factor in this. Arguably, the anti-rational approach of the sixties itself contributed to a less vital intellectual life, along with the generally anti-intellectual, pragmatic, materialist mindset of America to begin with. So, there couldn't have been a 3T Weimar culture in the USA such as Germany had. The foundations just weren't there.

As Henry Louis Mencken cynically observed, nobody can go broke by underestimating the taste of the American people. By the late 1970s the younger teenagers (Generation X) tired of being preached to in the popular culture and wanted some fun at best and angry cynicism at the worst. "Sid Vicious", anyone?

Of course the concentration in media allowed shareholders to define profit as the only measure of merit. To be sure, the Vietnam War made its participants distrustful of government, but those affected were Boomers and not X. Maybe what will stop America from going full-bore fascist is that Generation X 'missed out' on the meat-grinder war and vindictive settlement that the German contemporaries of the American Lost Generation endured, and the hyperinflation that caused people to distrust even money.

Quote:But the negative racist, nationalist currents of those times in Germany were hard to avoid, too.  They had been building up for decades. Add the great depression, and they pushed the positive culture aside. Something like that has happened now in the USA, and perhaps in Europe too.

I have no info though about a mood of despair and shorter lifespans among Germans of middle age in the 1930s, such as we have in America today.

"Germany" as a concept was an awkward, novel idea even during the First World War. Germany was less than a half-century old throughout the war. Wilhelmine Germany was an oddity as a federal monarchy as a federation of kingdoms nominally independent with (until Wilhelm II took nearly-autocratic power) a multi-party democracy. But... Donald Trump has remarkable parallels to Wilhelm II in behavior.He has debased American democracy badly, not that he didn't have accomplices.

*Germans give a distinction between essen, which refers to eating in an orderly way as people do, and fressen, which means to eat as an animal does. To use the verb fressen to describe a person eating is an extreme insult.