08-30-2020, 01:56 PM
(07-19-2020, 07:24 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I am now thinking that we do not have to worry about bashing Trump 'while we can'. In highs, it is traditional to stomp on the old obsolete values from the prior unraveling. Trump is apt to be a central figure to be bashed upon. I expect even St. Reagan will be a target.
"Unraveling" values may be the newest values to meet the challenge of a Crisis, and the ones most likely to be destroyed. Such values are most likely to appear among people who believe nothing and do little thinking. Thought takes effort, and it can lead to some distressing revelations. It is easy to appeal to people on visceral and primitive desires, although real progress in life demands that people go beyond the visceral and primitive.
This
is still precious and has an appeal across time and culture. It has no cheap gimmicks, and it has substance or demands that the cellist turn the notes (I could make the case that this is the simplest music that Bach ever wrote). It is Bach, though...
What is most vulnerable to rejection is ideas and practices that have become shopworn and obsolete. Much stuff gets cast off because it is technologically obsolete, like mainframe computers, CRT televisions (and now not-so-smart flat-screen TV's) and VHS tapes even if they are still functional. Either they are inadequate or they imply costs of space and operation or have become unreliable. I predict that when self-driving cars become the norm (they will, because the insurance companies will make auto insurance prohibitively expensive by the standards of the time or because legislation will be passed to the effect that a human driver is just too dangerous), then huge numbers of cars will be scrapped because they can either not be retrofitted or because they are too valueless for retro-fitting. If we end up with a "cash for clunkers" program to get cars that use too much gasoline for the standards of the time, then people will be selling off such cars that give 20 mpg for cars that give 30 mpg due to better technology -- maybe some cars that were purchased in "cash for clunkers" deals. My current car, a 2009 model, is a candidate for such a deal.
In contrast, antiques can be valuable. Although some precious things have been destroyed in calamities, the badly-made stuff from any time has a tendency to be destroyed or abandoned. Bad design or shoddy materials are not good for long-term durability of an object. The Victorian houses that looks so charming are almost as a rule the ones best constructed and on which little cost was spared on details. The flimsy constructions devoid of charm built around 1870 have not lasted. Something else replaced them. The museum-quality antique cars were those that owners babied -- not the ones that people drove hard while never doing an oil change. I remember when huge numbers of cars manufactured in the 1950's, including some with attractive sheet metal, went to automobile graveyards. Collectors have the ones that still drove well in the late 1960's.
Unraveling eras promote the most superficial and unsustainable ideas and practices because unraveling eras allow people to indulge their worst impulses -- impulses that one cannot indulge in a Crisis and that, after a Crisis, one would find silly in a much-more rational time such as a High. I have known people who as adults in the 1910's and 1920's (one of the few good things about being my age is that I can relate things that many others can't relate because they weren't around to listen or notice) is that although I have seen a commercial market for nostalgia for times from the 1980's back, I have noticed that such goes back only as far as the 1930's. People born in the 1880's and 1890's who had the means of recovering the pop culture of the 1910's and 1920's didn't. That is not for a lack of means even if the Lost were the poorest elders. Not all were, and their kids would have been delighted to supply recreations of the mass culture of the 1910's and the 1920's to parents who asked. There was simply no market. As a rule, nothing is done commercially without a market for it except as an individual expression.
OK, most of what lasts through a Crisis Era as culture or ideas existed from the last Crisis -- or what is good from times in the preceding Saeculum. George Gershwin may have died in 1937, but his music lived through the Crisis Era even if it was from the Unraveling. It was too good. But the Celebration of Self of the 2T becomes irrelevant when survival is collective or impossible in a Crisis Era, as the Voyage to the Interior is impossible in a foxhole.
Donald Trump puts together the worst of the Boom Awakening (the extreme narcissism that few people could sustain because they had to concern themselves with economic survival at the cost of their egos), the depraved vulgarity of a degenerate 3T, and the fearful bigotry that arises among dimwits in a 4T. Which of this will survive this Crisis Era? We will all be best off if none of it does. The late-wave Boomers who had to sell out their dreams for an extended employment in retail or fast food despite such work being far beneath their spirit are still around in large numbers, and they may do more to shape the future than someone so blatantly narcissistic as Trump. Pragmatic X will be looking for what works, and many of them now reject the mindless mass culture that they knew all too well as kids as an unwelcome influence upon their kids -- and many of them established small businesses in the interstices that Corporate America avoided because the MBA's saw too little attraction (no Big Bucks and no potential to monopolize). Millennial adults need to hear a powerful restatement of FDR's "All we have to fear... is Fear Itself". The racists and religious bigots have nothing to offer except fear. Tyrants and cult leaders exploit fear to the fullest... and Trump tried that in the Republican National Convention in 2020. It was little different from the spoof of clip of Trump speech woven into the famous Apple ad of 1984 shown a few posts back.
Trump is the worst of 2T, 3T, and 4T. In the next High he will live as an example of how not to do things, whether he is dead, in prison, or in a nursing home. I compare him to Milosevich, and he deserves a similar fate.
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.