11-11-2021, 06:12 PM
(11-11-2021, 09:22 AM)Anthony Wrote: Too many white Americans see themselves as being in the same sort of perils that Batman and/or Robin (usually both) faced in essentially every episode of the 1960s TV series - and they will perceive this danger becoming steadily more intense as their share of our population approaches the 50% mark, after which this will be a "majority-minority" nation.
This is why the odds of a Second Civil War are getting likelier and likelier.
The Batman series of the 1960's was camp, with evil masterminds such as the Joker, the Riddler, Catwoman, the Penguin, Egghead, and Dr. Freeze hamming it up with absurd crimes. I can assure you that the usual criminal is a person who thinks himself imaginative, brilliant, wise, and resourceful despite being the opposite. The usual criminal is a materialistic, selfish, power-hungry fiend. Even rape is an expression of power over someone helpless at the moment.
The white people who have it worst may have done well (or their parents did well) when there were plenty of jobs in mines and factories that paid well. Many of those have no job opportunities but are hooked on meth, opiates, and booze. I don't see the factory jobs coming back, let alone the coal seams. Donald Trump, who acts in many ways like one of the hyper-villains of the campy Batman series of the 1960's, offered the slogan "Make America Great Again" that many interpreted it however they wanted. Hey, the steel mills will be hiring again in Youngstown! Maybe people will again hear a modified version of Packard's slogan "Ask the man who owns one!" with (OK, Lauren Bacall is no longer available) a sultry female voice saying "Ask the woman who owns one!"
Truth be told, the Millennial generation is not as divided as Boomers politically between the Left and Right. You may think that there will be enough Millennial adults to staff a Confederacy-like MAGA army, navy, and air force in "Red" states. but even there the Millennial generation is split almost evenly. The power struggle is among comparatively (and simply) old people who are now relics of the Culture Wars.
It was easy about twenty years ago to imagine "Red" interests besieging "Blue" populations concentrated in giant cities by cutting off food, water, and electrical power and giving people in those communities the privilege of survival in return for signing over property, becoming hereditary serfs, or betraying "Blue" interests when the bulk of soldier-aged people were X and Millennial kids were still mostly children. At one time I saw the polarization of American politics much like Spain in the 1930's, between a very modern Left and a Right whose intellectual lives were still in medieval times except for industrial productivity, weapons, and means of repression. That possibility is over. The Right now relies exclusively upon chicanery and entrenched power.
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.