08-15-2022, 07:37 PM
The Crisis Era comes to an end with a sharp change in the political culture. For example, extremist behavior is no longer tolerated or trivialized. Of late I have heard of incidents in which Trump supporters have done violence in response to the FBI snooping at Mar-a-Lago for classified information. Surely, someone must have ratted him out, whether out of conscience or of fear of legal consequences for failing to do so.
Although a dead body to which has been done obvious violence is itself troublesome, one might have exculpatory circumstances. If one did not do the deed one might have some explaining but without self-incrimination. So "Mr. Boddy" committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wounds for many possible reasons from impending arrest and long-term incarceration to a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Or "Mr. Boddy" fell down a flight of stairs while drunk or on drugs. Having classified documents in the wrong place has paradoxically fewer exculpations than a dead body and is itself prima facie evidence of guilt as is having a stash of heroin or cocaine.
Not so long ago Republicans owned almost all issues of national security. So Obama caused no problems with it? That shows perhaps how well Democrats knew to avoid trouble even if the rewards for handling it properly were politically slight but consequences for failure at that were catastrophic. Donald Trump threw that away by aligning himself with brutal autocrats overseas and (worst) attempting to blackmail the President of Ukraine.
My bad prediction: when Trump was impeached, I expected Republicans to go along because they had long been fussy about national security. Most let him get away with that. Ironically they would be far better off now had they impeached and removed him. Mike Pence could play his Goody Two-Shoes routine perhaps to an election in which he wins. He might be more effective in getting a flat tax or replacing the income tax with a national sales tax, achieving a nationwide Right to Work (for starvation pay) law, a complete nationwide ban on abortion, massive privatization to monopolistic profiteers, abolishing welfare, and perhaps making religious devotion mandatory even in public colleges. That would drastically transform America into a pure plutocracy in which the (fundamentalist Protestant) Lord reigneth... in a drastic shift from a secular society that still pretended to care about people who did not have the assets. Great wealth would itself become a tool of great oppression and a cause of great suffering.
That is not what happened, and it will not be what happens.
All Tunings are transitions from the ways of the previous Turning to the next Turning. and nobody can deny that the American world of 1948 was very different from that of 1928, and not only in technology. America abandoned the boom-and-bust economy of the quasi-Gilded Age. The celebrity circus of the 1920's was gone. The dangerous Second Klan of 1915 that was a nationwide force as a fascist movement had folded. The high-school diploma that was only for the middle class and above was now the norm for the working class. Suburbia had started to bloom (or infect, depending on your attitude) the rural areas on the outskirts of town where there had been hobo encampments and "Hoovervilles". Banking, a once wild-and-wooly casino of often shady activity, had taken the role of saying no to speculation. Non-WASP Americans who had been poor because they were not WASPs started to enter the Middle Class. Defense plants and the Armed Services had become integrated.
Obviously it helped that America had defeated the most demonic powers ever in existence; had America not done so America might be a land of peonage or slavery under Japanese or German overlords with large parts of the population vanishing into fake showers into which would be administered Zyklon-B gas. Much of the impetus of the Civil Rights struggle arises from the exposure of at least Nazi racism, with many Americans asking questions of whether Jim Crow practice was compatible with our claims to liberty and legal equality. It is telling that Nazi "philosopher" (and eventually, convicted major war criminal) Alfred Rosenberg translated the word subhuman from the writing of the Klan "philosopher" Lothrop Stoddard into the even more horrific Untermensch. I'm tempted to believe that the Axis lost the war due not to some superiority of the American way of life but instead because a fascist order cannot win the peace. Thus I see such a work as The Man in the High Castle, the best of a certain genre of science-fiction, as absurd if in some respects grimly amusing.
Two roads diverge at some point in a 4T. One leads to disgrace and ruin, personal or national. Another leads to a wholesome result. Maybe it isn't perfect; the generational theory suggests that even what people see as the optimum changes predictably in a cyclical way.
Although a dead body to which has been done obvious violence is itself troublesome, one might have exculpatory circumstances. If one did not do the deed one might have some explaining but without self-incrimination. So "Mr. Boddy" committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wounds for many possible reasons from impending arrest and long-term incarceration to a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Or "Mr. Boddy" fell down a flight of stairs while drunk or on drugs. Having classified documents in the wrong place has paradoxically fewer exculpations than a dead body and is itself prima facie evidence of guilt as is having a stash of heroin or cocaine.
Not so long ago Republicans owned almost all issues of national security. So Obama caused no problems with it? That shows perhaps how well Democrats knew to avoid trouble even if the rewards for handling it properly were politically slight but consequences for failure at that were catastrophic. Donald Trump threw that away by aligning himself with brutal autocrats overseas and (worst) attempting to blackmail the President of Ukraine.
My bad prediction: when Trump was impeached, I expected Republicans to go along because they had long been fussy about national security. Most let him get away with that. Ironically they would be far better off now had they impeached and removed him. Mike Pence could play his Goody Two-Shoes routine perhaps to an election in which he wins. He might be more effective in getting a flat tax or replacing the income tax with a national sales tax, achieving a nationwide Right to Work (for starvation pay) law, a complete nationwide ban on abortion, massive privatization to monopolistic profiteers, abolishing welfare, and perhaps making religious devotion mandatory even in public colleges. That would drastically transform America into a pure plutocracy in which the (fundamentalist Protestant) Lord reigneth... in a drastic shift from a secular society that still pretended to care about people who did not have the assets. Great wealth would itself become a tool of great oppression and a cause of great suffering.
That is not what happened, and it will not be what happens.
All Tunings are transitions from the ways of the previous Turning to the next Turning. and nobody can deny that the American world of 1948 was very different from that of 1928, and not only in technology. America abandoned the boom-and-bust economy of the quasi-Gilded Age. The celebrity circus of the 1920's was gone. The dangerous Second Klan of 1915 that was a nationwide force as a fascist movement had folded. The high-school diploma that was only for the middle class and above was now the norm for the working class. Suburbia had started to bloom (or infect, depending on your attitude) the rural areas on the outskirts of town where there had been hobo encampments and "Hoovervilles". Banking, a once wild-and-wooly casino of often shady activity, had taken the role of saying no to speculation. Non-WASP Americans who had been poor because they were not WASPs started to enter the Middle Class. Defense plants and the Armed Services had become integrated.
Obviously it helped that America had defeated the most demonic powers ever in existence; had America not done so America might be a land of peonage or slavery under Japanese or German overlords with large parts of the population vanishing into fake showers into which would be administered Zyklon-B gas. Much of the impetus of the Civil Rights struggle arises from the exposure of at least Nazi racism, with many Americans asking questions of whether Jim Crow practice was compatible with our claims to liberty and legal equality. It is telling that Nazi "philosopher" (and eventually, convicted major war criminal) Alfred Rosenberg translated the word subhuman from the writing of the Klan "philosopher" Lothrop Stoddard into the even more horrific Untermensch. I'm tempted to believe that the Axis lost the war due not to some superiority of the American way of life but instead because a fascist order cannot win the peace. Thus I see such a work as The Man in the High Castle, the best of a certain genre of science-fiction, as absurd if in some respects grimly amusing.
Two roads diverge at some point in a 4T. One leads to disgrace and ruin, personal or national. Another leads to a wholesome result. Maybe it isn't perfect; the generational theory suggests that even what people see as the optimum changes predictably in a cyclical way.
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.