Posts: 10,465
Threads: 197
Joined: May 2016
I added people, heavily composers (I am a classical music lover), artists, writers, and entrepreneurs. I see entrepreneurs as key figures in reshaping the material environment in which the bulk of people live day-to-day lives. Do you doubt that John Wanamaker's one-price retailing changed the milieu of capitalist production? Do you doubt that the Skaggs brothers, by creating the supermarket, changed our expectations of what we get as food? Do you question that, how much you may disparage the fare, that mediocre fast food (Ray Kroc) has greatly changed how much of the world does things?
I put among Gilded achievements in America Antonin Dvorak's "New World Symphony" and would have added his "American" quartet for strings as arguably the greatest works in classical form ever composed in America... these works were commissioned by Americans and first performed in America. Great music was possible in America, and I assign the spark of Dvorak to much of it. Would composers as disparate as Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Elmer Bernstein (the latter two are unrelated -- I checked it) John Williams (cough, cough!) and even Jimi Hendrix have been as effective without him?
I thought that such painters as Durer, Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Hokusai, Seurat, and Dali merited attention. I also considered Milton, Goethe, Dickens, Hugo, Verne, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, and Remarque in need of praise. I could not ignore JS Bach, Haydn, Schubert*, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Puccini, Mahler, Bartok, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. I considered Vidkun Quisling the perfect illustration of a hyper-villainous traitor so dangerous among Reactive generations. See also a cadre of Stalinist stooges and functionaries (and victims). How did Howe and Strauss miss Sam Houston, President of TEXAS?
We also have some time passed since Howe and Strauss wrote Generations (1989), as we have completed a full 3T since then, complete with some cultural and economic changes. A well-written and well-performed, attractive comedy such as Wings (set in a small airport near Cape Cod before 9/11) is unwatchable now because the loosey-goosey environment in a regional airport is impossible as airport security now resembles that of a prison. (I have not been on a jetliner since 2009, and I have no desire to be on one. The trip would have to come with really-high expectations. European honeymoon with some rich recent widow? Maybe for that I am game). We have endured the worst economic meltdown since the horror of 1929-1932, and at the least we have had no new Hitler. On the other hand, we have failed to draw the right conclusions from this one, ones that were obvious when FDR was President and resistable when Obama was President. Obama seems much like the successor of the FDR-Truman era with the sort of personality one expects from the best sort of Reactive ("I Like Ike") and proved himself competent at everything except at building partisan support (see also Eisenhower). Obama falls short of the Mount Rushmore-and-FDR group of great Presidents because his successor is Donald Trump and not JFK. (I rank Ike sixth). Will Parks and Recreation, a gentle comedy set in an Indiana suburb, be unwatchable should we end up with a sick re-run of Donald Trump as President (this time he first purges Democrats into exile, prison, or the morgue) or a term of current Florida Governor Ron "Book-Burning Comes Next) De Santis arises in which smart kids cannot access the books that they need (Nineteen Eighty-Four and Fahrenheit 451) for assessing the political reality? That's the next step after Heather Has Two Mommies. Or is it All Quiet on the Western Front, a work that militarists abhor because it shows the madness of aggressive warfare? The economic agenda of the GOP and the John Birch Society (as if there is any meaningful difference anymore) is that 95% of the People must suffer for the sybaritic indulgence of 1%, as is so in any aristocratic society (Imperial Russia was a prime illustration of how that works. 4% of the people of such a society would fare well irrespective of the system as enforcers, senior military officers, and high-level professionals. Lenin's revolution succeeded when he started paying the police and the military. So did John Adams, Benito Juarez, Corazon Aquino, Vaclav Havel, and Nelson Mandela, which shows the essence of power even for benign leaders.
I hope that We the People have learned an essential lesson from Donald Trump, of what not to accept in a leader. "Others will pay" is the appeal of demagogues Left and Right, whether Lenin or Hitler. Trump appealed to the worst in white people doing badly and in privileged white people alike, and succeeded. Trump succeeded at making the rest of us... pay.
Because we are approaching the end of a Crisis Era (and the Crisis for most Americans is COVID-19, which has killed on he scale of modern warfare if not thermonuclear war. We have the demographic effects of a military calamity far worse for America than was World War II, and we have yet to sort it out. I have my idea of how a world in which I am unlikely to live long (I am 67) will turn pout to be. Maybe it will resemble something more like my childhood, only with more inclusion. Maybe we can live well with the austerity of style that I associate with the 1950's, but Hell No to Jim Crow! Oh, by the way -- treat autistic people as the 'alternatively competent' people that we really are.
*An aside on Schubert. In one of the darkest moments of life, when I was searching for some Valium in my soon-to-be-late father's medicine cabinet before going to a nearby liquor store to get the complement for a suicide I listened to the Octet for Strings and Winds by Schubert. The catharsis that led through every emotional expression possible led me to not search more for the Valium or to lie my way into getting a prescription for it.
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.
