01-14-2018, 11:34 AM
But -- in 2008 the President that we elect is clearly not of the Generation of '68. Bill Clinton may be, and he has terrible flaws despite getting something out of the Boom Awakening. But he was elected President in 1992, long before the Crisis began. The younger Bush seems to be little influenced by the culture of the 1960s, and Donald Trump seems to represent the worst of all worlds -- no culture, overwhelming narcissism, no religiosity, and no moral compass. If Bill Clinton is an intellectual, Donald Trump is about as anti-intellectual as the typical televangelist. No, I do not mean Fulton Sheen.
Barack Obama has his virtues, but he is no Boomer. He is as good as one can be as a pure pragmatist -- which means that he is ineffective in pushing any moral values upon people. He can do right, but he can't preach any high moral agenda. He's the sort of leader that one sees after a Crisis is over, and who has the least to gain from any Awakening Era even if he can expect to see two of them in his lifetime if he has a normal lifespan. I wanted to believe that he might pick and choose between a Millennial-like Civic personality (but he would have gotten that from GIs that he knew well) and a Boom-like Idealist personality as an echo of the Silent without the neurotic traits of the Silent or the exaggerated machismo of a Clint Eastwood, and that this might work.
Was he a failure as a President? Hardly. He could patch things up and keep the lid on some of the worst trends. But economic reality went one way, and the plutocrats that he rescued so that he could prevent a recurrence of another Great Depression saved their assets and used some of those assets to establish a reactionary politics that has come close to establishing a totalitarian order, a fascistic society with American traits. OK, Gershwin is safer than Wagner, if less profound... and I will take Samuel Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Martin Luther King over any sun-god, Roman emperor, or Prussian monarch. I will also pass on Nebuchadnezzar, a hero of Satan Hussein and a reviled person in the Bible.
I saw a paper by Mike Alexander that suggests that PSI is really high now. The dominant people in American economic life seem to believe that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as that suffering allows unbridled indulgence, power, and privilege among the economic and bureaucratic elites... It is hard to see why such a dominant ethos can win hearts and minds. It can at its most effective break hearts and minds, but it can only do so by turning most people into victims.
The Right has shown its fix in the slogan Make America Great Again. As is my wont from such philosophical training as I have, I try to understand what any all-encompassing, vague slogan means. Was America ever better, without qualification, than it is now? OK -- it really was better for economic elites in the Gilded Age, when the few rich people could buy anything that they wanted. Who needed a fine stereo system and recorded music when one could hire musicians cheaply and organize a good band or even a symphony orchestra? I am astonished that some American plutocrat didn't imitate the House of Esterhazy in hiring a house orchestra to play for his convenience... OK, there will never be another Franz-Josef Haydn (whom I consider the most important composer of all time, without whom Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Puccini, Bartok, and even the Beatles are impossible) who could compose so many musical masterpieces as he did. American plutocrats and their heirs could live like European nobility. What the heck? We have such families today -- the Koch and the Walton families instead of the Vanderbilt family (Anderson Cooper says that there is no remaining Vanderbilt fortune).
But as I am reminded in a book from the 1970s, the "Good old days" (then meaning the 19th century) were horrible unless one was part of the elite. This is almost 2020, and the 1920s (the last hurrah for the Gilded ethos) are even farther away than the 1890s were in the 1970s. The 1920s look awful to me now. They may have been better than the 1890s, and the technology is more familiar to us. So they had early automobiles, refrigerators, phonographs, and radios, and the horrid patent medicines effectively driven off the market around 1910 were no longer present. Sure -- but the roads were horrible -- slow, but even worse... dangerous even at the slow speeds. Race relations were merely subordination of anyone not WASP by WASPs (the Klan was powerful, which says much about the time) except in a few cities in which the crooked Irish-American pols bled everyone else. Educational standards were such that an eighth-grade education could be 'solid'. Workplace safety was a low concern. If industrial conditions had improved from the norm of the seventy-hour workweek and the forty-year lifespan for an industrial worker, they were still awful. Add to this, a glorious time does not end in a the protracted economic meltdown (a consequence of severe economic inequality) that culminates in the rise of the most demonic political leader in one of the most technologically-advanced, culturally-sophisticated, economically-developed nations of the time.
OK, technology is over-rated. I don't have an i-Phone, and I don't need one. If I had to choose between the technologies of the 1920s (except in medicine and transportation; penicillin may have saved my life, and I would not want to drive cars from before about 1970 except in a parade, and I use freeways if possible to travel long distances and have no nostalgia for Blood Alley) and modern institutions I would take the 1920s technologies and keep the modern institutions. I might not have been a victim of Jim Crow, homophobia, or male chauvinism at any time, but we can all relegate those to the trash-heap of history, can we not? I may have not gotten direct benefit from the GI Bill, but I certainly got indirect benefits through the better world. I have rarely worked in a business that gets unionized... but I am glad that we have had strong unions. We will need them again, especially if arrogant pricks like Donald Trump become the economic and political norm. (Donald Trump is the best recruiter for the Communist Party that the Communist Party ever had!)
After nearly four years of Donald Trump most of us we will be satisfied with a slogan like Let's make America GOOD again", or "Let's again do what we used to do WELL again for all of us". If we are to undo the welfare state, then we are going to need high-enough wages to ensure that people can save for old age and buy adequate life insurance. If we really want to develop ourselves as a people, we will need more formal education just so that people know better how to make reduced hours at work (an inevitable consequence of technological advances, including robotics) meaningful and so that (it will take K-14 education to do this) we have a populace sophisticated enough to reject the next demagogue, that most likely someone resembling Hugo Chavez, a left-wing demagogue. Formal learning does not itself create wisdom, but in modern times we need wisdom. So let's have most of our young adults take college-level survey courses in economics, philosophy, and psychology... and sides of Freshman Composition, calculus, comparative religion, literature, and music/art/cinema appreciation. Maybe a bit of foreign languages so that we can become more competent in English.
Barack Obama has his virtues, but he is no Boomer. He is as good as one can be as a pure pragmatist -- which means that he is ineffective in pushing any moral values upon people. He can do right, but he can't preach any high moral agenda. He's the sort of leader that one sees after a Crisis is over, and who has the least to gain from any Awakening Era even if he can expect to see two of them in his lifetime if he has a normal lifespan. I wanted to believe that he might pick and choose between a Millennial-like Civic personality (but he would have gotten that from GIs that he knew well) and a Boom-like Idealist personality as an echo of the Silent without the neurotic traits of the Silent or the exaggerated machismo of a Clint Eastwood, and that this might work.
Was he a failure as a President? Hardly. He could patch things up and keep the lid on some of the worst trends. But economic reality went one way, and the plutocrats that he rescued so that he could prevent a recurrence of another Great Depression saved their assets and used some of those assets to establish a reactionary politics that has come close to establishing a totalitarian order, a fascistic society with American traits. OK, Gershwin is safer than Wagner, if less profound... and I will take Samuel Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and Martin Luther King over any sun-god, Roman emperor, or Prussian monarch. I will also pass on Nebuchadnezzar, a hero of Satan Hussein and a reviled person in the Bible.
I saw a paper by Mike Alexander that suggests that PSI is really high now. The dominant people in American economic life seem to believe that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as that suffering allows unbridled indulgence, power, and privilege among the economic and bureaucratic elites... It is hard to see why such a dominant ethos can win hearts and minds. It can at its most effective break hearts and minds, but it can only do so by turning most people into victims.
The Right has shown its fix in the slogan Make America Great Again. As is my wont from such philosophical training as I have, I try to understand what any all-encompassing, vague slogan means. Was America ever better, without qualification, than it is now? OK -- it really was better for economic elites in the Gilded Age, when the few rich people could buy anything that they wanted. Who needed a fine stereo system and recorded music when one could hire musicians cheaply and organize a good band or even a symphony orchestra? I am astonished that some American plutocrat didn't imitate the House of Esterhazy in hiring a house orchestra to play for his convenience... OK, there will never be another Franz-Josef Haydn (whom I consider the most important composer of all time, without whom Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Puccini, Bartok, and even the Beatles are impossible) who could compose so many musical masterpieces as he did. American plutocrats and their heirs could live like European nobility. What the heck? We have such families today -- the Koch and the Walton families instead of the Vanderbilt family (Anderson Cooper says that there is no remaining Vanderbilt fortune).
But as I am reminded in a book from the 1970s, the "Good old days" (then meaning the 19th century) were horrible unless one was part of the elite. This is almost 2020, and the 1920s (the last hurrah for the Gilded ethos) are even farther away than the 1890s were in the 1970s. The 1920s look awful to me now. They may have been better than the 1890s, and the technology is more familiar to us. So they had early automobiles, refrigerators, phonographs, and radios, and the horrid patent medicines effectively driven off the market around 1910 were no longer present. Sure -- but the roads were horrible -- slow, but even worse... dangerous even at the slow speeds. Race relations were merely subordination of anyone not WASP by WASPs (the Klan was powerful, which says much about the time) except in a few cities in which the crooked Irish-American pols bled everyone else. Educational standards were such that an eighth-grade education could be 'solid'. Workplace safety was a low concern. If industrial conditions had improved from the norm of the seventy-hour workweek and the forty-year lifespan for an industrial worker, they were still awful. Add to this, a glorious time does not end in a the protracted economic meltdown (a consequence of severe economic inequality) that culminates in the rise of the most demonic political leader in one of the most technologically-advanced, culturally-sophisticated, economically-developed nations of the time.
OK, technology is over-rated. I don't have an i-Phone, and I don't need one. If I had to choose between the technologies of the 1920s (except in medicine and transportation; penicillin may have saved my life, and I would not want to drive cars from before about 1970 except in a parade, and I use freeways if possible to travel long distances and have no nostalgia for Blood Alley) and modern institutions I would take the 1920s technologies and keep the modern institutions. I might not have been a victim of Jim Crow, homophobia, or male chauvinism at any time, but we can all relegate those to the trash-heap of history, can we not? I may have not gotten direct benefit from the GI Bill, but I certainly got indirect benefits through the better world. I have rarely worked in a business that gets unionized... but I am glad that we have had strong unions. We will need them again, especially if arrogant pricks like Donald Trump become the economic and political norm. (Donald Trump is the best recruiter for the Communist Party that the Communist Party ever had!)
After nearly four years of Donald Trump most of us we will be satisfied with a slogan like Let's make America GOOD again", or "Let's again do what we used to do WELL again for all of us". If we are to undo the welfare state, then we are going to need high-enough wages to ensure that people can save for old age and buy adequate life insurance. If we really want to develop ourselves as a people, we will need more formal education just so that people know better how to make reduced hours at work (an inevitable consequence of technological advances, including robotics) meaningful and so that (it will take K-14 education to do this) we have a populace sophisticated enough to reject the next demagogue, that most likely someone resembling Hugo Chavez, a left-wing demagogue. Formal learning does not itself create wisdom, but in modern times we need wisdom. So let's have most of our young adults take college-level survey courses in economics, philosophy, and psychology... and sides of Freshman Composition, calculus, comparative religion, literature, and music/art/cinema appreciation. Maybe a bit of foreign languages so that we can become more competent in English.
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.