(08-10-2019, 09:57 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:(08-01-2019, 04:34 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: 1. an omnibus culture that can unite people across lines of age, region, ethnicity, religion, and level of formal education. Cinema seems headed that way (we are in the 80th anniversary of the most admired year in American cinema), but there is no obvious equivalent of the Big Band Era.
2. more reliance upon thrift, instead of upon printing money, to facilitate investment and the formation of businesses -- and consumer spending. Thrift of course depends upon people making real money for their efforts, which implies...
3. a return to at the least the real wages that people knew in the 1970s. Technology and productivity support such, but monopolists and bureaucratic elites take even more than the economic growth since then.
4. more reliance upon the liberal arts in education as a means of improving the lives of adults who might get something out of them other than vocational opportunity. The tragedy is not the welder who has a liberal arts degree; the tragedy is an accountant or engineer who sees the world only as economic metrics even if those metrics are people.
On item 1, we still have not moved beyond excessive divisiveness, and in fact I feel it has increased. Following the Big Band Era (which was preceded by the Jazz Age), there was the rock 'n roll era headed by Elvis, Buddy Holly, etc. Then along came solo dance crazes led by the twist, followed by the psychedelic era led by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, et al. After that was the disco era which, although short-lived created its share of backlash, followed then by the even shorter-lived Urban Cowboy crazes which spawned such classics as Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. Not many cultural institutions of that nature have come along ever since, the closest probably being the country line dance crazed led by Brooks and Dunn.
The omnibus culture of the late 1930s could not have emerged except in the wake of the worst years of the Great Depression in a climate of economic fear that what improvements had happened could disintegrate quickly, whether with another economic meltdown or (later) an Axis victory. The post-WWII world created among middle-class Boomers a level of individual introspection that may have been without precedent in human history. Never mind that many first-wave Boomers weren't up to it...
The Great Depression forced cohesion of families and communities throughout the industrialized world, and a lone-wolf character like Jack Kerouac was an extreme anomaly. He did what people just did not do until it seemed economically safe to do so. But even communal cohesion can lead to social splintering if the communities make claim to equality of validity. One dirty little secret was that WASP elites still dominated the elite culture, and other ethnic and religious groups (aside from some spectacularly-successful Jews and some politically-powerful Irish Catholics in their urban milieux) knew their subordinate places and were to be shamed for not being WASPs as well as for being poor and under-educated.
...Some cultural trends are likely to crash. The tendency toward monopoly in communications will itself make entertainment even more expensive -- so much that 200 channels of cable TV will become unavailable. So it will be back to broadcast with multi-channel signals with five commercial networks producing new stuff, and one channel of public TV... maybe a Spanish-language channel or two
So ESPN prices itself out because of the economic realities of major-league sports. Rents have been skyrocketing, so it is easy to imagine a family of six crowded into a room that allows only one television... and whatever is on the idiot screen had better be at least tolerable to everyone.
Quote:On item 2, the PTB have been leading us away from thrift for many years now. Part of the reason I believe was that Boomers in their growing up years soundly rejected anything GI, and that includes thrift. The earlier generation lived through the Great Depression which helped them to practice that. But there is irony here too in that it was this generation that paved the way for the ever increasing fetish for ever increasing convenience and also the trend of eating more and more of their food away from home. Some here have forecasted that when this crisis reached the serious stage there will be immense sacrifices asked of many of us, far beyond, say, giving up chocolate for Lent.
The Powers That Be have good cause to oppose thrift. They are no morally better than the Southern agrarian elite that waxed fat upon the helplessness of sharecroppers always in debt. A century ago the capitalists like Henry Ford wanted workers to have a stake in the system and promoted such virtues as thrift and sobriety on the assumption that people who had a stake in the system had no cause to challenge it with the idea of dispossessing the capitalists. It is far easier to get the FED to supply money for investments than to depend upon banks and thrifts to induce people to save money that those entities can lend to manufacturers.
People who practice thrift and savings are less dependent upon corporate and commercial enterprises for what they have. They have the rainy-day fund that allows them to avoid making horrible, and even criminal, decisions on behalf of their superiors just to hold onto their position in life. The optimum in control is that exercised in Nazi Germany in management-labor relations: one could not quit one's job, but one could be sent to a nasty labor camp in which one toiled for starvation rations and learned quickly that the New Peonage was all that was ever going to be available. Suffer for the tycoon or the Junker, and always remember to smile! So the tycoon and Junker become more demanding and all the gain goes into sybaritic excess! The Fuehrer likes it that way!
If you think that American plutocrats will not impose the sort of peonage that existed in Nazi Germany (and this is before anyone thinks of the racism, militarism, and genocide) -- aristocrats, tycoons, and executives have never been morally superior to peasants and proles even if they have had lesser need to compromise their morals. They often have no morals. Profit-maximization is not morality.
People heavily in debt and still obscenely poor have no stake in their system, but owners of the assets and those who command the productive and necessary parts of the economy find it far easier to exploit people who have no valid choices except to risk slow death by starvation or a more agonizing death such as strangling slowly on a rope or being burned from the inside out with hydrogen cyanide fumes. (It surprises me that the Nazis, who went further than any people in the industrial world in degrading working people, did not revive burning at the stake, even in the camps... go figure).
"Convenience" remains essential to people struggling to maintain middle-class identity by working multiple jobs and spending more time commuting between nightmarish workplaces and increasingly-awful and overpriced housing. When the pretense is gone, which will be a choice of elites, we Americans will discover the relevance of the Plantation South to the American heritage. The non-Southern elites are learning its vices for themselves and its power in forcing a race to the bottom for everyone else.
Quote:On item 3, there are other issues here such as wages alone. And while you are seeing higher wages offered at fast food and other similar businesses, that all does have to go into the price of the product, and one must wonder whether in due time that could translate to less business and also increasing automation in much the same way that union wages in industry eventually pushed it out of the country.
In the wake of a real economic meltdown that crashes the monopolized, bureaucratic behemoths and exposes how little work is necessary for meeting basic human needs, people will discover much time that they never realized that they had. Getting a hamburger, shake, and fries from Chez Mac because one needs to wolf them down on the way from Job 1 to Job 2 or to pick up a child at daycare could become unnecessary and unsatisfying. I cannot say whether women or men are more likely to lose jobs, except that the combination of testosterone and anger makes unemployed men especially receptive to violent, extremist causes such as fascism, Nazism, Ku Kluxism, Bolshevism, and ISIS. I hate to say that Crisis Eras tend to send women back to the kitchen and force their daily attention to children with one outlet in the church, but it is safe to say that women got driven out of paid work around 1930s so that male breadwinners would get to keep some esteem as breadwinners instead of becoming receptive to a cheap uniform and 'action' through marching and abuse of minorities.
Maybe people will start making their own lasagna when the trade-off between convenience and culinary satisfaction becomes irrelevant. Besides, as the dinosaurs go extinct in the economic equivalent of the K-T catastrophe, there will be openings for small businesses. Farewell, bad fast food places and pretentious eateries like Red Lobster... and hello diners in which the owner's wife prepares the lasagna, chimichangas, stir-fry, pierogi, or whatever, the husband does food prep and cleaning, and the kids take the orders. Stores in which the staff has the responsibility to make one happy with what one purchases might supplant those like Wal*Mart, Target, and K-Mart where nobody pretends to such.
Quote:On item 4, the issue you describe is today affecting all levels of the society, not only those heavily involved in the STEM disciplines. Which in turn made liars out of a lot of futurists who were almost certain that all the advanced technology that almost all of us now kneel at the feet of would produce a society of ever increasing leisure. Not only do most people no longer take vacations, they don't participate that much in meaningful hobbies either. As an example many bowling alleys have closed and traditional service organizations such as the Rotary have been on the wane for years.
Did anyone predict that the world created after the Second World War would churn out narcissists incompetent at anything other than exploitation and abuse of people whom they could control through monopoly and brutal systems of management? Did it predict the rise of politicians as hollow first as Ronald Reagan and then (it could never go further in that direction!) than Donald Trump, the arch-example of Boom tendencies at their absolute worst? Most people hope for the best, and nobody would have thought that Germany would end up with a vicious leader who would exterminate the definitive Model Minority without there being adequate wisdom elsewhere to welcome in those Jews.
Humanity has some spiders in its souls. Every generation has its vices. Civic generations never learn until it is too late that there is more to life than creating prosperity and ease. Reactive generations learn only when they have lost all semblance of youth that caution and morality are worthy expressions of personal and public life, and that rage is ultimately futile. (Think of the large number of Lost-generation fascists, early Bolsheviks, and Stalinist puppets). Idealists ignore that they need work to achieve their grand, simple dreams until they are largely too old to do the raw labor that makes those dreams possible. Adaptive generations fail severely to do the enterprise that keeps a capitalist order from spiraling into monopoly as they take over the bureaucratic niches and leave nothing for their progeny.
The fault with those who have predicted the future is that they assume things that they fail to inculcate in others. The generational theory shows us that lofty goals do not always exist, that social realism vanishes when people no longer care about it, that social cohesion is nothing to take for granted, and that capitalism requires enterprise as much as it needs profit.
The opening for a Lincoln-style or FDR-style leader is passing. Clinton was not that, but that was not necessary then. Dubya certainly was not up to the task. Trump isn't.
OK, Obama was all in all good. He didn't leave any big gaping problems of his own doing. But he was more like the sort of leader that a healthy society gets after a Crisis era, a mature reactive who has no angry agenda and who insists upon going by the book... and preventing any calamities on his watch. We will have that sort of leader again... such a leader is usually in his 60s, and we all know what the worst sort of Reactive is. I see no Hitler or Mussolini in the immediate American future. It is just too late in the Crisis for anything like that to emerge now. We got a Reactive President, and we got the best one that we could get at the time...
Let me say this to conservative Republicans: your best chance at having a President for whom Americans have cause for respect will be a conservative mirror-image of Obama who might promote the family values that Obama lives quietly and more vocally expresses the patriotic loyalty that Obama practiced without talking about. That is someone with the same probity -- and after Trump we will need Obama-like integrity, wisdom, and clarity of expression even if such is the promotion of enterprise, thrift, self-discipline, and self-reliance.
You all know what I think of Donald Trump -- the vices of Idealist generations at their worst (arrogance, selfishness, and ruthlessness) with none of the virtues (culture, principle, and erudition). Look to the two greatest Idealist Presidents that we ever had in Lincoln and FDR, and you see nimble minds of people making humane choices in times that make those unlikely for most. Trump makes cruel choices in the complete absence of the appropriateness of such choices. So extreme a vulgarian as Trump makes America a sick joke until they remember better.
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.