11-05-2019, 03:07 PM
(11-05-2019, 12:06 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Yes, I think that the 80 year span is a good theory because it is both simple and inevitable. That elder generation had been fading from public life/public influence due to its aging, and now that generation has begun to rapidly disappear. I recall a description of age 80 as the "fragility barrier"-an individual's body has become quite fragile, and he is living on borrowed time, in effect.
Prime example of a Xenakis scare: 9/11 happened 59 years, eight months, and about twenty days after the Pearl Harbor attack. Many people who did not remember Pearl Harbor saw that, at least for the time, saw 9/11 as an analogue to Pearl Harbor. So expect gasoline rationing! Seek a job in a defense plant! If you are of the right age, see a military recruiter! Instead of planning for a vacation or going on an expedition for a new wardrobe, buy war bonds!
Americans may have thought of such, but they acted very differently. They went to the shopping mall and went on vacation. War plants did not hire everyone who wanted a job. Entertainers and pro athletes (blatant, tragic, and extreme exception Pat Tillman) did not give up precious time in lucrative careers to serve in the Armed Forces. There were no bond drives. Instead we had a corrupt speculative boom that one saw playing out in Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, a novel that made more sense in the Double-Zero decade than in any other decade since the Roaring Twenties.
OK, this Crisis will not be like the others. We are not under the thumb of a monarch tightening the screws on a people seeking more freedom as in 1775. We will have no interstate crisis between people who consider slavery an abomination and those who think it the most wonderful institution ever devised as a solution to economic need. Democratic institutions are paradoxically more secure in Germany, Italy, Japan... and possibly Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania as well... as in the United States. (Thank you TEA Party and its ultimate exponent Donald Trump!), so any replay of "the day that will live in infamy" will be a cinematic reconstruction.
I see the impeachment of Donald Trump as a pivotal event in this Crisis Era, whether Trump is removed or not.
So perhaps this Crisis begins with an economic meltdown (see also the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Panic of 1857) and ends with (the best hope that I can imagine) a flurry of reforms of economic, educational, and political life. Bang or whimper? We have yet to know. In the meantime we dispatched Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
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.
