Is joy and celebration going away in the USA today?

[pbrower2a]

(08-09-2022, 09:49 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(08-04-2022, 09:25 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(08-03-2022, 11:36 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Agree with all, except for letting Reagan off the hook. He did the same thing to AIDS as Trump did with covid. He instituted neoliberalism which has led to our current plight: climate breakdown, severe inequality, police assaults, rampant gun violence, you name it, it can all be put at the doorstep of the corrupt Ronald Reagan. He was an extremist, not a moderate. Trump is just Reagan with a bit of economic nationalism added, and racism TRUMPeted instead of just alluded to. Trump has taken Reagan's neoliberal assault on the environment to an extreme.

Flawed as Reagan was, he was much more rational than Donald Trump. He was a standing joke for environmentalists of the time for seeing trees solely as lumber and paper. Unpleasant as it may be to admit, he was in the mainstream at the time on homosexuality, still believing that most gays fit the pattern of child-molesting "chicken-hawks", people definitely to be avoided if one is a boy. guess what? Forty years later the child-molesting pervs are even more marginalized, as the homosexuals in fully-adult relationships have become the mainstream. Reagan was also a more adept politician. 

Yes, he was a nightmare for the poor; he had come to the believe that Corporate America was the engine of economic progress without which social progress (which he defined as consumerism) was impossible. He was the bête noir of environmentalists who saw trees as more than lumber and paper. America is not what it was in the 1980's. The shopping-mall "culture" that peaked when Reagan was President no longer excites us. Let's not forget his attitude toward organized labor. By current standards, Reagan was the front-man for the trend of increasing disparities of economic results with the intensification of poverty as a norm. Reagan believed as did Corporate America in jobs -- just in not paying people adequately to live on those. The corporate solutions to inadequate pay on the jobs was for people to work two such jobs, which makes one as much a consumer but more a toiler.

Trump is Reagan's faults on steroids with none of the rationality, including the ability to back off when one sees dissent. Trump loves to hear people express grief and pain when hurt, and he turns up the pain-creating stimulus when he hears or sees such. Trump is a sadistic sociopath. He is far less astute than Reagan. He can never back down hen facts contradict him. He is responsive to only the anti-scientific, superstitious part of the American populace that got him elected. 

The big problem with AIDS was that gays were still pariahs in much of America. The popular view was that they were "chicken-hawks" who exploited boys. The loudest ones of the 1970's were the NAMbLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association. The majority of homosexuals were men who could love men but not women... well, I can accept that. There but for the Grace of God go I, but if I were gay I would certainly never mess with boys. Gays had to change their behavior if they were to not be ravaged, and many caught on. Use a condom and develop monogamy... and stay away from street drugs. Medical transmission was easier to stop after people found that people were contracting AIDS from recklessly-discarded needles, skin grafts, and blood transfusions. Medical personnel changed their ways fast. The slowest to get the message were users of injectable drugs such as heroin. Many such people are prostitutes, obvious vectors of AIDS. 

People had to change their ways to avoid getting a deadly disease. COVID-19 isn't AIDS, but much that medical science and public health have learned  from AIDS has been applied to COVID-19, even if the methods of transmission are quite different. The hardest part was to compel people to do things that reduce the spread. None of it was easy, but that had to be done before the more definitive prevention was available (the vaccine). Trump failed to debunk the COVID-19 "truthers" who offered everything other than a rational response. Trump somehow felt their pain about wearing masks, frequent hand-washing, sanitary wiping, amd avoiding mass activities. Who says that reality is easy to deal with? That is all that we have.

I used Reagan in full knowledge of his faults -- and his ability to get a coherent message across.  That difference is enough to suggest how horrid Trump was as President.

I shall now attempt a paragraph by paragraph response:

P1:  I don't know if any of you follow Thom Hartmann's program which can be heard on a handful of progressive-minded radio stations and also on YouTube, but he has often laid so many of our current problems, including the rise of Trump, squarely at Reagan's feet.  You can find many clips on YT that pertain to this. His busting of the unions in 1981 proved to be in many minds including my own, the requiem for middle class prosperity as it had come to be known. By 1987 we had a greater homeless problem than at any time since the Great Depression. In addition to the lumber and paper comment, he was also credited with declaring ketchup to be a vegetable.

I have seen his program sporadically. Donald Trump is the logical consequence of Ronald Reagan as the cultural constraints on political meanness from the Right disappeared. When that meanness became a cornerstone of American politics, with the likes of Newt Gingrich, Jack Abramoff, Lee Atwater, Karl Rogue, and Ralph Reed, we entered the mental state of a Crisis Era. If we were not on the bandwagon of cruelty then we were trying to defend ourselves, which means that even if we hated the ideology we had become as entrenched in the Crisis Era.  

Quote:P2: Regarding RWR's attitude on jobs, there was a story I read in which the so-called Paycheck to Paycheck crowd often has to work two jobs for the same pay that one job once provided. They are for the most part a luckless lot, stuck in place, with very little room for escape save for some stroke of luck such as a lottery win. They were labeled Generation LIMBO. All caps because, from the information given I was able to create the perfect acronym. Lower Income Mostly Beyond Overhaul.

That was the Reagan solution for inflation -- cut the pay and take away opportunity (except to work longer and harder for less -- and always remember in your menial task to show that happy-to-serve-you smile and always show gratitude to investors and executives who get everything). I experienced it and I hated it. I saw the conspicuous consumption of  economic elites as in-your-face oppression. I toyed with Marxism for a while until I recognized how futile that was not only in forcing fundamental change of leadership but also in failing to prevent oppression. Many found their way toward nostalgia not so much for a more humane world but instead for one in which people not white, straight, male, and Christian -- this was when the Born-Again phenomenon came into existence, when the austerity of Presbyterianism in the heavily Scots-Irish Mountain South gave way to an angry and superstitious version of the Southern Baptist Church.  The most reactionary region of America is now the Mountain South, which used to be solidly Democratic because it recognized the New Deal creating a modicum of prosperity. It elected culturally-conservative, but economically progressive Democrats like Wendell Ford, Terry Sanford, and William Fulbright. It now elects Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn instead of Blanche Lincoln and Al Gore.  

Quote:P3: I thought about the steroids remark a few time, but you are the first I have actually heard use it.  Perhaps fitting because it was during the Reagan years when Trump first hit the cultural landscape as a celebrity real estate developer. One time I did actually talk with a woman who had met him along with his recently deceased first wife. She was of the opinion that he was easier to talk with than she was.

Donald Trump may have been less rigid in his thought and more optimistic back then. he was still a piece of work. Of course, you must remember that Trump's first wife is not a native speaker of English. People not native speakers of English are very cautious about speaking, and are more likely to listen than speak. She was also educated (and indoctrinated) in a Communist-dominated country, She likely was not fully comfortable with American ways. Even showing a love for Czech culture (the Czechs have great musical and literary traditions) could have seemed suspect during the Cold War.   

Quote:P4: The AIDS scare definitely slammed the brakes on the sexual revolution, and not long after what was labeled the cocooning movement set in where one-time partiers were spending weekend night at home watching movies on their VCRs (now obsolete) and eating, say, takeout teriyaki. Demand for takeout food exploded some three decades before the convenience obsession went even further with home delivery now being nearly everywhere. Seems to me though that Americans tend to be homebodies during three out of the four turnings, that only during an Awakening is the sanctity of home and hearth seriously challenged.

The AIDS disaster was the nadir for the status of homosexuals. As for takeout food... also came the great surge of "casual dining" restaurants that reflects in part the cheapness of labor that makes such possible. Wait staff often relied upon tips that were much bigger than the nominal pay for wait staff. Illegal immigrants were often working in the kitchen or doing the cleaning -- they hardly got paid. 

Take-out food may reflect that people were picking something up, whether a pizza or teriyaki chicken, on the way from work to home because fully cooking a meal such as a pot roast or meatloaf took far too much time for a woman who had an office job. Not coincidentally, the end of the workday was typically dinnertime, especially if one had to stay a bit late. If the wife prepared a pot roast or meatloaf it was on a weekend when someone could attend the oven or slow-cooker. If she cooked meatloaf or pot-roast during the week, then it might not be ready until 9 o'clock. That was too late. By then the White Sox, Blackhawks, or Bulls game was well underway and hubby wanted nothing in the way. Look also at the plethora of prepared dishes that came in boxes at the grocery store. Out of the freezer and into the microwave, and done in five minutes. Or with the 'deli' section of most grocery stores. Do you want some rotisserie chicken, baked beans, and potato salad? Got it!    

Quote:P5: There is still much debate as to whether the mass lockdowns which decimated many if not most businesses for a period of several months was the way to go. Much of the residue remains despite a somewhat return to normalcy. People going out to eat again, etc. Thought not quite a return to previous congestion levels.

Many of the restaurants went take-out only. That hurt the waiters who had relied on tips unless they got paid a real wage to keep them from looking for something else. But let's remember that 

(1) there was already a shake-out in the casual-dining business. Places that had a waitress serving a hamburger, shake, and fries where this icon was 




what one saw... they are mostly gone. You can get much the same hamburger at "Chez Mac" without tipping the counterperson. If you have never eaten at a Big Boy, then you really haven't missed anything/

We also had a shake-out in the department store business and many specialty stores (typically in books, video, and music). Many venerable department stores are gone. So are Tower Records, Radio Shack, Brentano's, Waldenbooks, Musicland, Sam Goody, Blockbuster Video,  and Borders.   This was also mostly before COVID-19.  The explanation is simple enough: if you are making $4000 a month and paying $3200 in rent to what is basically a slumlord, then you are poor despite an impressive income. When the disposable income shrinks, then so does the consumer economy. 

Maybe we will make post-secondary education cheap again; maybe labor unions will recover their effectiveness and economic influence. Maybe we will quit seeing the most rapacious of plutocrats as successes that we must exempt from heavy taxation if we are to not kill the goose that lays the golden egg. (In fact, small business has typically been the engine of economic progress and high-quality customer service in America; Big Business is great for creating bureaucratic monoliths and buying politicians. We may need to sacrifice that and some high salaries if we are to get a just and equitable society in which far more people have a chance. We may have to scale back Big Government to reduce it to legitimate needs such as education, law enforcement, justice, road-building, welfare, and old-age security so that we can become a prosperous society based on small, community-based  business again. I remember when even banking, broadcasting, and certain small-scale manufacturing were nearly cottage industries. Those were the best aspects of the Good Old Days! (I'll pass on Jim Crow, homophobia, the Red Scare, male chauvinism, polio, and blood-alley highways, though).