New Ideas for the revved up society

[Eric the Green]

(02-09-2019, 11:06 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(02-08-2019, 11:18 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: Freedom is typically not in vogue during a 4T or 1T. On the contrary, both great tyrannies (Nazism and Bolshevism) reached their heyday during such a turning. Africa and some parts of the Middle East had their 4T in the 1960s, and tyrannies appeared there too.

Also, culture never flourishes during a 4T or 1T.

Big band music was quite possibly the greatest popular music ever (unless you are going to count Haydn and Mozart as 'popular' because their music was similarly popular when it was new for much the same reasons -- omnibus appeal, catchy tunes, powerful rhythm, and tight structure... Benny Goodman's Let's Dance! is arguably better than the Invitation to the Dance by Carl Maria von Weber upon which it is taken).  Note also that the Golden Year of American Cinema (1939) is definitely in a Crisis Era, as are many movies of great quality from surrounding years.

This said, the culture of a Crisis Era can be very good -- but it is almost never made for personal expression or narrow audiences. In view of what has come out of Pixar Studios and Marvel Studios in recent years, we are back to omnibus entertainment to which one can take the whole family. It is not over the heads of children, offensive to the elderly or devout, or too shallow or stupid for people with high IQs. Movies like Easy Rider, A Clockwork Orange, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, or Bonnie and Clyde just would not be made today. But even such a masterpiece as Casablanca can have propaganda value. (I wrote a review of my favorite movie and recognized a Shakespeare-quality script and a subtle illusion to The Divine Comedy in that Nazi Germany was the Inferno, a place full of ambiguities like Morocco was Purgatory, and America was Paradise... and that a self-pitying American like "Rick Blaine" could achieve redemption only in giving up his self-pity and going unambiguously and whole-heartedly to the Allied cause). Even Gone With the Wind suggests how not to deal with a Crisis mode (defending something rotten like slavery is one sure way to fail and get horrible consequences).

Creative people have yet to get behind Donald Trump... and likely never will. Lincoln and Their Finest Hour (Churchill) allude to leaders to whom Donald Trump can never compare. Trump went low in his appeal and has missed much of America.

I think your points also add to my point that "culture never flourishes during a 4T or 1T" is not so either/or. In the 4T, at least, there are bright spots. The big band era was good, although it was limited in scope, and sixties/seventies classic and folk rock surpassed it and was very much wider in scope and quantity. I would add though that a lot of romantic ballads from the 1930s/early 40s 4T were also marvellous (I reviewed these on the best songs ever thread). And the golden age of cinema certainly deserves mention. 

I think, and this may not concern people here, that the 4T and 1T are "not flourishing" very much with regard to spiritual vision, and featured an excess of humanism and scientism, especially in the USA. Modern art was not as inspired as it was earlier in the century. And in the 1T, all the arts were obscured by the rise of commercial TV, while pop music was innocuous, and then in early rock'n'roll became too harsh or primitive-sounding and male-dominated, and remained shallow. So there's grounds for the S&H description of a 1T as spirit dead, generally-speaking, although some deeper creativity was going on underground or out of sight of the pop mainstream. Our streets became, in Bob Dylan's words at the start of the 2T, too dead for dreaming. 

In today's 4T, the millennial generation are leading us back to a spiritually-dead culture and a shallow pop music, generally-speaking, and Gen X and some Boomers certainly prepared the way for this trend; again, generally-speaking.