07-07-2021, 11:10 AM
Civic generations have typically had a taste for the bland and banal. They have typically experienced an excess of adventure during the Crisis Era, and gravitate toward the familiar and even hokey. Daring creativity is not their taste (although I might not say that of some creative people such as Goya and Pollock in art, or Mozart, Messiaen, or Shostakovich in music. Shakespeare is anything but insipid!
(As for the Gilded, I consider them clearly Reactive/Nomad in childhood and early adulthood up to the Civil War but largely Civic afterward).
Just look in the all-but-trash bin in thrift stores for recorded music, and you will find plenty of GI-created pop music for GI audiences. Lawrence Welk. Guy Lombardo. Henry Mancini. It might have been cute for gimmicks at some time, but the audience for that is no more, for obvious reasons.
The Crisis of 2020 is very different from those of 1940, 1860. and 1780 for not having a shooting war as the focus even if imposing mass death. Blame Trump if you wish, but we were likely to end up with a Trump-like President who would have mangled the response to COVID-19 due to ideology if not incompetence.
(As for the Gilded, I consider them clearly Reactive/Nomad in childhood and early adulthood up to the Civil War but largely Civic afterward).
Just look in the all-but-trash bin in thrift stores for recorded music, and you will find plenty of GI-created pop music for GI audiences. Lawrence Welk. Guy Lombardo. Henry Mancini. It might have been cute for gimmicks at some time, but the audience for that is no more, for obvious reasons.
The Crisis of 2020 is very different from those of 1940, 1860. and 1780 for not having a shooting war as the focus even if imposing mass death. Blame Trump if you wish, but we were likely to end up with a Trump-like President who would have mangled the response to COVID-19 due to ideology if not incompetence.
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.