(09-15-2017, 07:06 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(09-15-2017, 03:43 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The slogan "Make America Great Again" exemplifies a folly. Imagine a time machine. So I am 61 in 1927 and I get to see the world of 2017. Of course there would be much that would upset me, like technologies that would seem magical. It might upset me more that the automobiles that are in use in 2017 are impossible for me to do minor service work upon. But I would see a world safer, more just, and with more potential of personal choice. Would I have the arrogance to bring someone back to some alleged Good Old Days? I doubt it. I might see good and bad in social change.
Just because you personally wouldn't prefer 1927 doesn't mean others wouldn't. For my part, magical technologies are a plus, but there's far less personal choice in 2017 than in 1927.
That said, I think what Trump is looking for is close to America in the decade after the Cold War.
Real estate in real terms was certainly cheaper in those days, so in that respect life was easier. Commutes were shorter. Of course, your commute could be on foot. A mile on foot might be better for you from the standpoint of physical fitness than a fifteen-minute drive to and from work, but we can take the dog out for a fifteen-minute walk after we get home from work, can't we? Of course, people were starting to experience the dubious pleasures of smoking, for which they wouold pay great personal costs (lung cancer) a few decades later).
We have far more information at our fingertips (maybe with the aid of a computer screen) in 2017 -- and we need not go to the library.
I certainly wouldn't want to be black in 1927, especially in "Kukluxistan". Having to work unpaid overtime in honest-to-God hard labor because the Boss got an emergency order sounds like a truly-raw deal. Work the added hours or be fired? That's not much of a choice.
Bland and dull as the Interstates are, I prefer them to the Blood Alleys. There are trips that I would not take were it not for the Interstates and similar highways.
...but this said, I have never known of anyone who sees America as a finished project, and I have rarely heard anyone speak longingly of some Golden Age. Maybe people would go back in time to get their youth back, but that is about it.
Of course we have lost some things that we might want to get back. Cheap real estate isn't one of those things that we can get back unless we are to see a population crash. Submissive women (children, kitchen, church)? Tough luck, male chauvinists. Ethnic minorities only in subordinate places. like domestic service or sharecropping? Forget it!
Maybe life was better in some critical aspects when business executives became such near the end of their careers when they were in their mid-50s and lacked the time or means for conspicuous consumption, and made perhaps 3 or 4 times as much as a laborer. Maybe we would be better off if the liberal arts were again the focus of undergraduate education -- in the assumption that education was to improve the person and not to serve as a union card to some Good Life.
I look at our current elites -- tycoons, financiers, executives, political operatives, and experts at fleecing people -- and I see people no better than the aristocrats of a feudal order or of planters in the Old South. That is the problem.
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.