A broken cycle?

[pbrower2a]

(07-19-2019, 03:40 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(07-19-2019, 03:32 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: I'm not aware of much nostalgia for the 90s now, at least not to compare for example with the level of nostalgia for the 50s during the 1970s, which featured shows like Happy Days, or for the 60s during the 1990s.

So you aren't familiar with millennial online culture.

To be fair, most millies are not nostalgic for the politics and economics of the 1990s though some are like fans of the gen X blogger Sargon of Accad.

I'm obviously not Eric, but we are both Boomers...

I outgrew the pop culture as I approached adulthood, perhaps because it was losing any pretense of intellectual appeal. Disco -- yuck! So I had to find something else, it is clear what I found. 

True greatness in cultural expression transcends time, place, and ideology. Music is easier to discuss... I can have the experience of real faith just by listening to some choral Masses; I love rich counterpoint. Some music expresses feelings taht I cannot put into words. Maybe I use music almost as if it were a drug; Sibelius' sixth symphony can calm me as little else can.

Back to the generational cycle: it could be that the difference between this Crisis and the previous Crisis is the severity of the financial panics that started them. The Great Depression began with a three-year economic meltdown that undid twenty years of economic progress. Although share prices may not be a perfect proxy for economic conditions, they reflect the level of optimism in economic institutions. Profits cratered, and it would take until the 1950s for the market to recover even the nominal stock prices of the 1929 peak.

The meltdown beginning in 2007 was similar in scale for a year and a half, but stock prices recovered. Political leadership sought to rescue Big Business to prevent another Great Depression  -- and it worked.


 
But the recovery was clearly for elites first this time. The common man got nothing out of it unless he invested his life savings in stocks in 2009 and was able to hold onto them. The elites got the funds with which to buy the political process, and by 2016 the United States of America had become about as pure a plutocracy as it could be. To be more plutocratic it would have to destroy the welfare system, and that would have people starving on the street, which is the sort of thing that induces Red revolutions. The ones associated with hammer-and-sickle emblems, that is.

In the 1930s, just about everything could be reformed. Many corporate behemoths disintegrated, and opportunity arose for small business emerged in the wreckage of those behemoths. In the 2020s, the focus of politics devolved into the enrichment, pampering, and authority of the Master Class. But before I go onto a post-Marxist (Marx is obsolete!) rant let me return to the difference in cultural expression:

people did not waste money in the 1930s. Nothing enforces thrift as does poverty. If people spent money it was on necessities -- or something really, really good. Habits that people learned in the more miserable part of the Great Depression persisted into the late 1930s. If people were going to spend money on entertainment it would have to be very good. It would have to be both accessible and appealing to the whole family. That meant the movie theater, where movie impresarios offered a nightly mix of newsreels to inform people of the events of the time (with you-know-who in Germany, and the largely-Jewish studio bosses in Hollywood, you can see how that went), some cartoons for the kiddies who would fall asleep during the feature film, maybe an informative travelogue, and then a feature film.

The movies had to be good, or people would not waste their time and money on them.