(09-09-2022, 01:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(09-08-2022, 06:09 PM)sbarrera Wrote: I think that Biden's generational archetype clearly shows - he is an Artist, Silent gen, he's a basically nice guy who just wants a fair world for everyone, and yeah, too old to be the Grey Champion. I believe that he is sincere in his statements and don't understand how he gets portrayed in such a negative light by his opponents. It's laughable that the right tries to portray him as a tyrant (same as they did for Obama, who was a reserved, cautious technocrat suited for the 1T.) But I also think it's amusing that the Internet has basically tried to transform Biden's archetype with the "Dark Brandon" meme. It's like the demand was there so the Internet just digitally mastered a Grey Champion out of available materials.
How can a gray guy be too old to be a gray champion?
Ben Franklin did it; Joe Biden can do it.
"We are at an inflection point" he says. He knows it.
I like the cusp idea better than supposing the calendar can provide exact cut-off dates. Biden is a Silent-Boomer cusper and has traits of both. He was elected to the Senate in 1972 as a spokesman for what was then (and in my mind and heart will forever remain) "the younger generation," the Boomers. It was the McGovern movement that enabled him to prevail in his senate race.
People are living longer and staying intellectually and physically active. Joe Biden shows all sixty of nearly eighty years.
Let's think of the late Queen Elizabeth II. She had appointments on her calendar and was 96. That kept her going.
Elizabeth II was one of the most secretive persons to have ever lived -- more secretive than the tyrant who announces his choices by murdering a dissident, rival, or opponent. She didn't rule that way, and that is one way to keep secrets. Any notes that she has kept in a diary or journals will make grist for what will be quite possibly the most interesting biography that anyone will have ever written. (Much else will be garbage, I regret). If I were a historian I could hardly imagine a more interesting person for study. Ken Burns, maybe? Her likes and dislikes will be telling.
I'm going to make a wild guess. She dedicated time to as rigorous exercise as was possible. What time one dedicates to such gives one more life than one dedicates. She showed all seventy of her 96 years before her death. I figure that she had some exercise machines wherever she was, including Balmoral Palace.
The cusp explains Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was unusually cunning and pragmatic for an Idealist without compromising his vision, principle, decisiveness, and erudition. FDR had some Reactive traits, but those were "mature Reactive" traits. Facing not-so-mature Reactive types he could beat them (Mussolini, Tojo, Hitler) at their own game. Goebbels gave his infamous "Total War" speech as German troops stranded in Stalingrad were being ground down by the Soviet Army, and FDR gave a retort suggesting that after defeat, Germany could rejoin the community of respectable nations -- although the idea of the Master Race would have to go. FDR could make that prediction even when Nazi Germany was butchering nations. Howe and Strauss may have used "1882" as the cut-off for the Missionary Generation to accommodate FDR; they would not tried to use "1882" to include such cuspers as Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (1882-1946, who transformed the Wehrmacht into for all practical purposes the Nazi Armed Forces complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich, and hanged as the result of judgment at the Nuremberg Trials) or Romanian generalissimo Ion Antonescu (1882-1946, clearly culpable of atrocities including the Holocaust in places under Romanian rule, executed by firing squad under King Michael's transitional rule that led in a way that deposed the young King). FDR is a much bigger figure in history than Keitel or Antonescu. Most of the nasty fascists from Pierre Laval to Heinrich Himmler and Stalinist stooges including Andrei Vyshinsky are clearly immature Reactives, the sorts whose decisions have much of their source in salving old resentments that they never quite shed.
Elizabeth I of England, George Washington, Ulysses S Grant, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barack Obama are "mature Reactive" types who do not create trouble so much as that they resolve it -- at times with force, and at times with subtlety. I think we get the overall idea. They may not pretend to being great thinkers who overpower "weaklings", but they over-perform their images. Obama is Reactive enough that his whacking of Osama bin Laden resembled a gangland hit. Obama could learn something from Al Capone even if he was as far from being a criminal as he could be.
Joe Biden is on the Adaptive-Idealist cusp and shows the better traits of both. He may take time to make a decision, but it sticks and so far it is right.
...Hey, folks! I just noticed that I am approaching 10,000 posts! I doubt that that means anything... few pay attention except at round numbers (1024, as 2^10 deserves about as much attention as 1000)
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.