11-07-2019, 01:06 AM
(11-06-2019, 09:27 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(11-06-2019, 08:30 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: What word would you prefer that I use? Personally I consider the "high" to be the most repressive era even in the US after WWII, but at least everyone on this forum knows what time period it means.I tend to believe that it was called a high because it actually was a loosening of the restrictive mood of the GDWWII years. Emotions may have been strained for those not in the Organization Man/Suzy Homemaker camp, but for the most part not as much as the turnings before and after. Many blue and white collar families alike, so long as they were not communist sympathizers didn’t have to worry about daddy coming home jobless. Mom and pop stores and diners were still abundant in an era of stability where the biggest disruption may have been Elvis Presley’s wiggle which some considered obscene. Households of the “Leave it to Beaver” era were swept away in a sea of prosperity and, for the most part outside of Hollywood, family stability as divorce was still highly stigmatized within the mainstream. And while the earth began to shake a bit when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus, the major upheaval was still a decade away.
Xenakis prefers "recovery". The post-Crisis might be a hard era of extreme hardship due to the destruction of institutions and infrastructure -- think of Poland after WWII. I have showed imagers of Warsaw immediately after the war. The middle class, including the intelligentsia, the szlachta (a semi-aristocratic class), and of course the Jews (who were many of the country's entrepreneurs) were decimated. Such children as there are are often orphans. Public institutions must be re-established. People are almost all uprooted. Add to this, the country went from a proud independence to a complete subjection under horrible masters only to go quickly under the rule of masters that the People would have never voted in.
Physical reality will shape what is possible, as will the character of the ruling elite that either returns, emerges, or is imposed from elsewhere. People will do what is necessary, which might be back-breaking toil for near-starvation wages.... or two meals of porridge or soup with perhaps a little bread and a hot beverage on the side -- and a makeshift bed in a makeshift dwelling.
Most people will have little desire to shake things up. Things were shaken enough in recent years of the most dangerous years of the Crisis Era, thank you. Normal starts to civilian careers and family life have been put off perhaps into the mid-20's, and any taste for experiment is gone. People are making up for lost time and opportunities. So get wed, get a civilian job (just about anything is better than combat), and be thankful that you can do that. Soldiers may have gotten to see the world -- but they saw it at its worst. What might have been a charming village before the war in France was likely a steaming wreck with the stench of death, espcially in the summer of 1944. Exotic ideas? Forget them!
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.
