The denouement?

[Tim Randal Walker]

"...almost entirely political and cultural." Actually, I would have to add pandemic.

[JasonBlack]

(10-01-2022, 08:00 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The name Vladimir Galouzine should give away part of the problem. In Soviet times, Italy was not part of the Soviet sphere of  politics, and any opera singer who did Italian opera was a likely defector.

Actually....several of my favorite opera singers are Soviets who performed Italian operatic music. A few examples

Anatoly Solovyanenko (tenor)






Mykola Kondtratyuk (baritone)





Elena Obraztsova (mezzo)

[nguyenivy]

(09-26-2022, 06:04 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(09-26-2022, 01:30 AM)JasonBlack Wrote:

Quote:I thought that it was Boomers who thought much about the last 1T as 'creepy'.

Thinking 1Ts are creepy is most common among idealists, but people of more individualistic temperament don't tend to be the biggest fans of them regardless of generational archetype. Likewise, more collectivist temperaments tend to dislike 3Ts regardless of archetype, more security oriented temperaments are more likely to dislike 2Ts, etc (I think we can all agree most people in general dislike 4th Turnings)

Apocalypse arises when those in power (Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini are extremes) seek to change the world at all costs and fail to recognize what those costs are. Those leaders who greatly devalue human life are the most dangerous at the time. When Satan Hussein gassed the Kurds, he went to the top of the list of leaders likely to start a war with the USA. This was when the Cold War was going on.  

Quote:

Quote:Maybe it was usually children who were most critical of a time in which they were children, whether Reactives during an Awakening, Civics during a mindless and chaotic Unraveling, or Adaptives who were stifled during a scary Crisis.

These are my thoughts as well. My impression of the 3rd turning was less "this is chaotic" and more "What the hell, man? Everyone is so irresponsible. I'm all for having a good time, but all anyone wants to do is spend more money they don't have and kick the can down the road until everyone else has to suffer the consequences".

That is exactly what I would expect. A 3T is nearly pure rot. Sure, some fun is part of it, but personal responsibility and collective purpose are not. 3T rot leads to the 4T. Federal deficits became surpluses in the 1990's and energy consumption shrank due to the fall of Communism (a libertarian trend). Then Dubya became President and the Right found pretexts for Big Government. Yuck! 

Quote:

Quote:It's telling that the GI culture of the last High is readily available at Goodwill as their kids clear out the vinyl LPs and primitive electronics of GI's who died over the last thirty or so years. Bing Crosby, Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, Perry Como, Patti Page, etc. in music? It all seems corny now for its insipid sentimentality.

Tbh, I've always been a fan of many GI singers. From the popular music of Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, Burl Ives and Mahalia Jackson, to opera singers like Franco Corelli, Eleanor Steber, Rise Stevens or Cornell MacNeil

OK, Sarah Vaughan. 

Talented musicians are to be found in all generations, as are some great voices. Of course classical music (including opera) has a tradition that largely transcends generational trends. So we have Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh ,Arthur Grumiaux, Henryk Szeryng, Erica Morini, Isaac Stern, and Mischa Elman on violin; Rudolf Serkin, Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, and Emil Gilels on piano. Can you really separate Lost Ernest Ansermet, Charles Munch, Karl Boehm and George Szell from GI's Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti, Rafael Kubelik, Jean Martinon, and Leonard Bernstein as conductors? Performance of classical music is timeless, with at most subtle trends that might take decades to cause subtle changes. Listeners' tastes might change, but that is a different matter.  This is more likely to appear in the repertory played, with such composers as Gretry and Raff almost completely disappearing from the repertory as 'new' composers appear.  

Quote:[quote pid='82716' dateline='1664173837']

Quote:Band material does get revival, if only because it was some of the best pop culture ever (think of Strauss waltzes, ragtime, and the original model for the Big Band pattern -- Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Considering that Mozart and Haydn wrote music that succeeded at multiple levels of aesthetic satisfaction, the question may be why people don't see the "classical" era of music as pop music at its best. It was so received at its time. Maybe American pop culture would be different had Glenn Miller lived to a ripe old age. Boomers would have reacted to the blandness of the GI culture even without the Vietnam War; there would have been an Awakening, and it would have been more strictly cultural. 

The majority of GI music was more dry, but on the plus side 
- more suitable for adult audience, not radio stations full of people who think the ideal is to sound 16 years old
- less quite as self-absorbed. it was less about the singer personally and more about the music itself. 
- similarly, the point itself seemed less like "let's make the best music" and more "let's focus on our craft and produce beautiful singing.

[/quote]

1. The adult audience no longer includes GI's in significant numbers. It's telling that Millennial adults, who are much of the market for popular music today, have not been part of any "easy listening" revival. They are not reviving GI popular music, either. 

2. When I think of truly immature people I think of people who have never had to face the harsh realities of an economic order that puts elite power, indulgence, and gain above all else. Narcissistic personalities are terribly immature, and the cure for narcissism is to be in the position in which must spend a couple years doing mind-numbing, soul-crushing work that destroys any excess of self esteem. Work for a company that reminds people at every turn that someone else wants your job and that assumes that everyone who works there is a potential thief, and you will be humbled fast. At some point one may fully believe that nothing is so wonderful as to suffer for shareholders, executives, bosses, and customers from whom all blessings (survival and what else? Not much!) flow and one believes that liberals do nothing for one but raise taxes that make life tougher. Narcissists at the top of corporations, governments, and non-profits get away with sadism and often create an environment perfectly suited to masochists at the bottom. (The connection between narcissism and sadism, including economic sadism, should be obvious).

3. Narcissism is common among creative people of most kinds (writers, artists, musicians, and stage or screen actors). If they reach a certain level of competence they can easily dictate the terms of their work because they are who they are. There was only one Igor Stravinsky or Pablo Picasso at the time, and there is none now. Narcissism is the norm among politicians. Creative people need some individuality unless they are making predictable art such as that for some 'creative' corporation (let us say Disney, Warner) or something suited to ad copy.  

4. Teenagers are the ones being sold on mass low culture. Figure that the people who buy movie tickets and music singles (whether 45-rpm records in the old days or downloads today) or 'young adult' novels are heavily teenagers spending what little money they have (some of the rest will be on fast food) from allowances or chores. Relatively few GI's got to do this while still children, but they often got to turn the radio dial to Big Band music as children. Their parents may have preferred that the dial be turned to religious devotionals instead, but at least Big Band music was fun and squeaky-clean. Remember: by current standards most GI kids led hardscrabble lives which expressed themselves in Our Gang and Little Rascals shorts.  Kids not northern and western WASPs were largely poor. World War II changed that just in time for many Silent children getting to know the Good Life as their GI parents moved from the tenements to the suburbs.  It would take another Great Depression or the calamitous post-apocalyptic world of a horrific war to break that pattern. Boomers may have thought that GI's were doing well, but they saw GI's only in adulthood.

If adults are the only ones with the means to buy books and recorded movies, then they dictate what is available on the gramophone or in the library of entirely hard-cover books (cheap paper-back books were available starting in the 1930's, and the military offered a veritable library of cheap paper backs to soldiers and sailors during WWII), and no teen culture really appears. With television such programs as American Bandstand started to appear with the ability to market stuff to teens in the advertising... that changed everything. 

Say what you want, but there has been a boom in expensive boarding schools for kids -- largely in which the school administration can keep kids from having access to the mass low culture that their 'mere' middle-class contemporaries face. That is now one of the biggest class distinctions in America. 

5. If you want music for its own sake, then listen to the preludes and fugues of Bach and especially Reger (Reger is not entertaining), the late string quartets of Beethoven and the string quartets of Bartok and Shostakovich which really are pure music. Then there is twelve-tone music that relatively few people (I am not one of them) 'get'. Medieval polyphony was typically intended to strengthen and confirm religious faith. Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn  Mozart, Chopin, and Dvorak wrote most of their works as entertainment or for some occasional use. Operas since Monteverdi have always been large-scale entertainment in conception if not now in practice. Some music is a mindless exercise in using a hook and a conventional feeling ("I'm En-or-ee the Eighth I am!" , "They're coming to take me away, ha! ha!, or "Like a Virgin"), but even something so sublime as Bach's Goldberg Variations or Puccini's Turandot that requires a huge investment in personal time for tuneful and clever music. In those two cases the music is clever and tuneful and satisfying. Maybe it takes some effort to appreciate music not from our time that is not so obvious such as Monteverdi madrigals or folk music from some other culture, but it is worth the effort. The perfect basis of long music such as Mozart's Divertimento for String Trio K 563 or the elegiac theme of the adagio of Bruckner's seventh symphony might not be as suited for an advertising jingle (on which Barry Manilow gets rich) -- but it certainly is coherent.  

OK, for musical coherence the folk-tune is still the model, and at that I can see great faults with some popular music, as in the examples I displayed above. For truly beautiful singing, listen to some medieval polyphony. Little could be more magnificent than Thomas Tallis' Spem in alium.
[/quote]

Interesting points about GI music given my own tastes may be a bit similar in this time & place: a Millennial who doesn't need lyrics (or is fine with lyrics in a language I don't understand) to enjoy music. Much of the electronic music I listen to doesn't necessarily have or need lyrics. I also enjoy new age music with vocals that aren't necessarily lyrics. I'm not sure how popular trance, techno, d&b, new age, or any other electronic type genres are now vs in prior Turnings, but one big reason I gravitated to electronic music was due to it being difficult to come across offensive lyrics (or any lyrics at all). I do understand however that not everyone can stand music that doesn't have a message to say or story to tell. So instrumental trance/techno/EDM tracks with either no lyrics or lyrics that don't play a large role may bore people. Was jazz or classical popular in the previous 4T among GIs? Most of my Boomer relatives can't seem to do music w/o lyrics.

[galaxy]

(08-15-2022, 07:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Crisis Era comes to an end with a sharp change in the political culture. For example, extremist behavior is no longer tolerated or trivialized.

Well, this year's election results look pretty interesting in light of that. I find it hard to imagine we're more than six years from the end of the turning now.

Bill Clinton was known for his "it's the economy, stupid."

For Republicans in 2022, perhaps the best advice would be "it's the crazy, stupid."

[pbrower2a]

(11-13-2022, 03:53 PM)galaxy Wrote:

(08-15-2022, 07:37 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Crisis Era comes to an end with a sharp change in the political culture. For example, extremist behavior is no longer tolerated or trivialized.

Well, this year's election results look pretty interesting in light of that. I find it hard to imagine we're more than six years from the end of the turning now.

Bill Clinton was known for his "it's the economy, stupid."

For Republicans in 2022, perhaps the best advice would be "it's the crazy, stupid."

Thank you for ratifying my intuition as I could not do credibly myself. I no longer trust mine as evidence of any reality beyond myself. I have been terribly wrong so many times that I need to get the opinion of others to evaluate what I feel as an impression of basic reality on anything not a simple judgment of aesthetics for which any coherent statement is equally valid.  

The last week was an agony for anyone alert to politics, but it was a week that seems like a year. Much happens quickly in the near-conclusion of a short time-frame. Much happens in a short time, and it is normal human behavior to feel that life goes on in slow motion at such times. Field Marshal  Erwin Rommel said that the day on which the British and Americans would be the literal Longest Day in history because it would determine not only a swift Allied victory. Within ten months the Soviets would take Vienna, Americans would  enter the second-largest pre-WWII German city (Munich) as if they were liberating it from a foreign occupation, Mussolini would be executed with his cadaver desecrated and his puppet "Social Republic of Italy" liquidated with little formality, Adolf Hitler would blow his brains out in a bunker, and the largest non-German city under Nazi rule (Prague) would be in open rebellion against the Nazis. The defeat of Nazi Germany was inevitable after D-Day, if not the final determination of spheres of control that were close to the line of contact between the Soviet Union and the western Allies. 

One week ago there was much talk of a Republican wave in which the GOP would effectively turn the Democratic Party into strictly local politics in a few places in which nobody could ever expect GOP majorities. Republicans were going to win Senate seats in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Georgia,  Colorado, Nevada, and even Washington state. Speaker Kevin McCarthy would have a decisive majority in the House of Representatives. America could be in the inevitable path to becoming a theocratic-plutocratic Republic in name only (a Christian version of Iran), and everyone would be expected to click his heels and say the praises of government of the moneyed elite, by the moneyed elite, and for the moneyed elite that would never perish in America because any opposition would be rendered impotent and irrelevant even if it were not to be killed outright. Non-white people would know their subordinate places with those few who had achieved anything being relegated to roles as tokens. FoX News would be the definitive source for news acceptable as some new and perverse mainstream. 

The Democrats did not win a decisive and utter defeat of the GOP, but they have made the future one in which the GOP as now constituted face demographic trends that will slowly gut their national power. The GOP now has little appeal to people now under 45. That segment of the America will simply get older and will start to run for high offices and win surprising victories in unlikely places. People rarely change their core beliefs, but the political leadership can adapt. One may argue that people on the whole become more conservative with time, but parts of the Demoicratic Party can redefine conservatism to mean what used to be characteristic of the Republican Party:

1. recognition of tradition as a fallback when the avant-garde fails to get desirable results
   
2. treating law and order as an essential civil right at the expense of the criminal element ("Do the crime and do the time!")
   
3. acceptance of the validity of protocol and precedent as guides to personal and collective behavior
   
4. insistence upon a sustainable world
   
5. demanding integrity in all aspects of human life, including expectations of non-violence, political integrity, and sexual decency as norms
   
6. support of rational thought with the promotion of education to that end
   
7. limited government with government subordinate to the People 
   
8. a general desire to improve Humanity  
   

That could have been Eisenhower in the 1950's, but it could also be Obama in recent years. Obama may not support an economic hierarchy in which crony capitalists are all-powerful, and he recognizes multiple traditions as similarly valid. Korean-Americans and bourgeois blacks have very different traditions due to very different premises of culture, but those traditions have some shared values. He isn't for toxic masculinity, but a world of nuclear weapons and ICBM's makes toxic masculinity dangerous.  

What used to be conservative in one time (a quest for cultural uniformity, support of institutional hierarchies, the rich oppressing the poor, and promotion of superstition as the basis of obedience) may not be so effective now as it used to be. The world changes. Because the vast majority of Americans are not LGBT, and that LGBT rights expanded at the same time that America that America intensified a crackdown on sexually-related deeds that have nothing to do with LGBT issues (child molestation, kiddie porn, spouse abuse, and date rape), most Americans find a climate of greater, and not lesser, repression on sexual matters. Don't let me get into the topics of abortion and contraception, both of which have potential to become illegal nationwide should the Hard Right get its way. (I draw the line there. I want abortion to be safe, legal, and rare because few people will need it if men recognize a woman's right to say NO -- as in "HELL NO", "not with you", "not now", "not without protection", "not your way", or "not until we get married". Rape (including statutory rape) is a valid excuse because most women lack the means of taking care of a child who carries sociopathic tendencies from the genetic material of the rapist. Committers of incest are usually crazy, and it is likely that the child of an incestuous relationship has "crazy" genes. Life or health of the mother? If not, then the claims of anti-abortion advocates can be "pro-death" instead of "pro-life". If I have a daughter or granddaughter with an ectopic pregnancy, she is getting an abortion of the misplaced mass of cells that has a chance only of killing her. If someone wants an abortion for a trivial reason (such as "I don't want a black baby",  "I don't want to get fat", "I want to know what an abortion is like", or "It might force me to give up my job") then I might try to prevent an abortion for such reasons. Abortion is a tragedy, but so is amputation and so are certain cancer treatments.  

If one goes back to Edmund Burke, a conservative favorite to this day, one recognizes that the preservation of social rottenness is the cause of dangerous revolutions including the worst aspects of the French Revolution. One can fault the vileness of Imperial Russia for the Bolshevik Revolution. 

On the other side it is easy to see what is not conservatism in the Hard Right:

1. demagoguery that plays upon mass resentments
   
2. rejection of reason as a means of finding solutions -- have faith instead, and fault people for lacking faith
   
3. disdain for intellectual activity, including the arts
   
4. economic hierarchy that simply preserves existing elites in their roles while denying opportunity for others
   
5. superstition and bigotry, and the overall rejection of human kindness
   
6. alignment with world figures hostile to democracy here and elsewhere for political advantage or self-gratification
   
7. recklessness in foreign policy
   
8. bigotry that divides and humiliates
   
9. corruption and cronyism
   
10. dirty tricks as a political norm
    
11. gross dishonesty (FoX News) or flagrant promotion of cruelty in news media (Alex Jones' InfoWars) 
    
12. rejection of electoral results that fail to go the way that one wants them to go (January 6. 2021)
    

Get it?
     
The Left-Right divide is not simply the divide between those who support capitalism and those who seek to destroy or constrain it. People can oppose bankers, manufacturers, and merchants as challenges to their semi-feudal agenda or because the successful capitalists are largely members of minority groups such as Jews in much of the West (think of Hitler in Germany) or south or east Asians (think of Idi Amin in Uganda). Although I expect workers to insist upon getting more than what capitalists deem fit to offer as wages, I also recognize the need for enterprise. I look at Reconstruction of the post-Civil War South with the prospect that Freedmen were going to establish their own world of commerce and industry, and I see a viable solution to everything but the racist bugaboo of keeping the races separate and of securing cheap labor on behalf of the land-rich former slave-owners.      

..........................

In close races in which demographics decides all, the difference between R and D wins could be that some people whom  one would have expected to vote one way did not vote. This may in part reflect the pattern of deaths by COVID-19.  In 2020 the death tolls from COVID-19 were still relatively even in partisan victimhood. Protecting oneself from COVID-19 was certainly wise even when the means of self-preservation were to avoid pointless gatherings and wearing masks. Liberals were usually rushing inoculation sites as early as possible to get the first shot and then the booster. Over 65 and having an auto-immune disorder (even if it was "only" psoriasis) I got both at the first opportunity. I was delighted to see soldiers delivering the shots, indicating that the Biden Administration recognized that COVID-19 was a clear and present danger meriting such a response. I volunteered at a couple of mass inoculations. When I went to the store and saw fellow shoppers wearing masks as I did I said "Thank you for wearing a mask". 

By 2022 the death tolls from COVID-19 may have reduced the potential GOP vote to a greater extent than that it reduced the D vote.

[pbrower2a]

I'm old enough to remember when children were taught that singing from the chest was ideal for expressive power. It was also so for public speaking. Have we abandoned that? 'Fraid so. I would go back to the old school if at all possible for singing.

......

Now for politics. I don't know yet whether it is comic or tragic, but the Republican House majority seems unable to elect a Speaker of the House. Typically the vote goes down Party lines, but there is enough of a rift within the GOP to prevent Kevin McCarthy from becoming Speaker. God forbid that we should have a war, an economic meltdown, or a natural disaster in the next two years.

The GOP has become an authoritarian Party, and those are especially prone to rifts due to a command-and-control practice that ensures that people in some marginalized faction gets the shaft. This faction has little in common with Democrats, so no deal is possible for a Democrat to become Speaker. Try again with someone else? The results might be the same.

The House of Representatives has the power of the budget, and I can imagine the GOP trying to go on a "My Way or the Highway" approach, which will ensure gridlock. I see little reason for it to change its ways. The confrontation will remain even if the effectiveness completely vanishes.

[pbrower2a]

How about the little donnybrook in the House?

[pbrower2a]

I don't know where to put this, but I suggest that obsolete ideas have a way of dying near the end of a Crisis Era:




Got it?