03-28-2019, 08:29 AM
Politics: we wasted a good President and got a horrid one.
Culture: we might not quite have the equivalent of 1939, the greatest year of American cinema, this year -- but the cinematic output is very good. I see no equivalent of Big Band music, the greatest popular music ever unless one considers Haydn and Mozart 'popular' in their time.
Eighty years ago, the world was much more dangerous -- and obviously so. Japan was in a bloody war with China; Mussolini had incorporated Ethiopia and Albania into the Italian Empire; Hitler had annexed Austria and dismembered Czechoslovakia to add much of it into the Demonic Reich, and his regime already showed its enmity toward Jews in the Kristallnacht. The Nationalists were destroying such traces of liberal modernity in Spain as had survived the Spanish Civil War until then. Fascistic movements had blamed the Jews for the economic hardships of many nations, and anyone not a fool recognized the Soviet Union as a dehumanizing nightmare.
Maybe this Crisis Era is not so dangerous as the last one. Maybe the last one was the most dangerous Crisis possible.
Culture: we might not quite have the equivalent of 1939, the greatest year of American cinema, this year -- but the cinematic output is very good. I see no equivalent of Big Band music, the greatest popular music ever unless one considers Haydn and Mozart 'popular' in their time.
Eighty years ago, the world was much more dangerous -- and obviously so. Japan was in a bloody war with China; Mussolini had incorporated Ethiopia and Albania into the Italian Empire; Hitler had annexed Austria and dismembered Czechoslovakia to add much of it into the Demonic Reich, and his regime already showed its enmity toward Jews in the Kristallnacht. The Nationalists were destroying such traces of liberal modernity in Spain as had survived the Spanish Civil War until then. Fascistic movements had blamed the Jews for the economic hardships of many nations, and anyone not a fool recognized the Soviet Union as a dehumanizing nightmare.
Maybe this Crisis Era is not so dangerous as the last one. Maybe the last one was the most dangerous Crisis possible.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.