On a more serious note - so much for the "echo boom":

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp..._usa_births_dc

U.S. Birth Rate at Record Low
Wed Jun 25, 3:34 PM ET
Add Science - Reuters to My Yahoo!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. birth rate fell to its lowest level since statistics have been kept, with teen birth rates down but the number of births to unmarried women at record-high levels, according to official statistics published on Wednesday.

More low-birthweight babies were born in 2002, the statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news - web sites) show -- probably a reflection of the increasing numbers of multiple births with fertility treatment.

In 2002, 4.019 million babies were born in the United States, down slightly from 4.025 million in 2002, the CDC said in an annual report on births.

The birth rate was 13.9 per 1,000 people, down from 14.1 per 1,000 in 2001 and down 17 percent from a peak in 1990 of 16.7 per 1,000.

More than a third of all births were to unmarried women, which, the CDC said, reflected the growing number of unmarried women in the population.

The CDC said there are fewer women of childbearing age in the United States as a relative proportion of the population. People are living longer than they did before, skewing the statistics toward the old-age end.

But women of childbearing age are also having fewer babies.

"Birth rates for women in their 20s and early 30s were generally down while births to older mothers (35 to 44) were still on the rise. Rates were stable for women over 45," the CDC said in a statement.

It is clear at least in some circles that the anti-intellectualism, which is endemic in an unraveling, is still alive and well.

TWO VERY INTERESTING economics pieces (yes, it is possible) in the New York Times yesterday. The first is a front page piece headlined Very Richest's Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, Data Show. The average income of the 400 richest taxpayers in the U.S. grew to $174 million, up from an annual $46 million in 1992. Meanwhile, in part because of cuts in the capital gain tax rate, the percentage of the income their paid in taxes declined, to about 22 percent from over 26 percent.

I can hear liberal tongues clucking. The rich are getting richer and they are bearing less and less of the burden.

I guess I'd ask them to consider another way of looking at the situation: This story could equally be read as a tremendous vindication of Republican policies. The cut in the capital gains rate encouraged some extremely rich people to more aggressively invest in new companies and ideas. Those investments paid off. New companies were founded, new jobs were created, new products went on the market and new needs were filled. Meanwhile these investors reaped much larger profits than they would have otherwise. Their incomes skyrocketed and as a result they paid much more into the federal treasury. Twenty-two percent of $174 million is a lot more than 26 percent of $46 million. So the least fortunate, who are sometimes the beneficiaries of government programs, benefit too.

This story is phenomenally good news! Maybe the message should be "Rich Pay Much More In Taxes, Provide Many More Social Goods."

Not being an economist I can't really say which slant is more valid. I only want to remind people that two radically different narratives can emerge from the same data. That's why we all have to question our assumptions from time to time.


NOT BEING AN ECONOMIST I often enjoy the Economic Scene columns in the business section. They often summarize huge amounts of economic research from journals the rest of us couldn't possibly fathom. Today, Alan Krueger summarizes the data on whether people really respond to opportunities to get rich. "Work hours are only weakly associated with pay," Krueger reports. One study found that on busy convention days, many cab drivers in New York actually worked fewer hours. They hit their target income and then they went home to enjoy it. But other, more experienced, drivers tended to work longer on good days, learning its best to make hay while the sun shines. Yet another study found that drivers work as long as they can until they get tired, regardless of income or the opportunities of the day.

Today's column left me feeling glad that I'm not an economist. Obviously people respond to incentives, but economists have feeble tools to explain human behavior. Think about when you find yourself working hard. Maybe you work hard because it is in your nature to do so, or maybe you are congenitally lazy. Sometimes you work it because there is money to be made. But more often you labor because you are engaged by your work, or you feel good at it, or you want to earn the respect of your co-workers, or you like to think of yourself as a hard worker. I suspect the work patterns for most of us in the information age are ridiculously disassociated with short term income and are much more likely to be associated with issues of character, spiritual goals, and native interests.

Moreover, why are economists studying cab drivers, whose jobs are hardly typical? They do not work with peers and thus do not confront peer pressures the way most other workers do. There are not huge fluctuations in tasks and challenges in a driver's life, the way there are in most lives. Cab drivers probably derive less innate spiritual satisfaction from their job than most people in the information age. Why don't economists study teachers or meeting planners or economics professors? Then they would find their tools explained very little.

Is it possible the information economy is making economists obsolete?


David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

I want to ask a question from the people on this forum, It has been nearly 2 years since 911, do you feel that North Americia is still the dying stages of the unravelling or gone into the early stages of a Crisis.

If you answered we are still in a unravelling, when do you think the Crisis will come?

Originally Posted by Tristan Jones

I want to ask a question from the people on this forum, It has been nearly 2 years since 911, do you feel that North Americia is still the dying stages of the unravelling or gone into the early stages of a Crisis.

If you answered we are still in a unravelling, when do you think the Crisis will come?

Somewhere between 2005 and 2009 would be my best guess

Originally Posted by Tristan Jones

I want to ask a question from the people on this forum, It has been nearly 2 years since 911, do you feel that North Americia is still the dying stages of the unravelling or gone into the early stages of a Crisis.

If you answered we are still in a unravelling, when do you think the Crisis will come?

For me, though I suspect a 4T has been triggered, it is probably too early to tell. If Strauss & Howe's generational allignment mechanism is correct, there is a high probability that we will see unambiguous signs of a 4T in the next couple of years. Next year's line-up of leading edge cohorts (61-43-22) puts us well within the last 2 or 3 turning changes. Add that 9/11 has primed the pump, making everyone edgy, and there you have it.

If you took all the economists in the world and laid them end to end, they'd still all point in different directions.

I think we are in the Crisis.

To the extent that we appear to be in a 3T its because the media and the government respectively are trying so hard to act like its business as usual, no Crisis here. This is not stupid or venial, well not mostly. This is because of the nature of the trigger. 911 was a huge terrorist act, and as a nation we are working overtime Not to Give in to Terror.

As the president said, get out there and shop, and the American people have listened. Well, or we would if the economy would pick up. We're trying to reassure ourselves that Nothing (too much) Has Changed. Fly American Airlines and you can defy bin Laden. You see.

Again, this is not entirely stupid. Our economy depends highly on consumer and investor confidence. If it weren't for the corporate scandals from the summer before 911, this tactic might even have worked to get Wall Street back on track. But in the long run it will bite us, on about a dozen levels.

So, yes, 4T, madly trying to reassure itself by playing 3T.

On the other hand, I'm not sure its so different from the last Crisis. You should take a look at pre Hayes commission entertainment in the early 30s. It gives "Joe Millionaire" a run for its money.

Originally Posted by angeli

I think we are in the Crisis.

To the extent that we appear to be in a 3T its because the media and the government respectively are trying so hard to act like its business as usual, no Crisis here. This is not stupid or venial, well not mostly. This is because of the nature of the trigger. 911 was a huge terrorist act, and as a nation we are working overtime Not to Give in to Terror.

As the president said, get out there and shop, and the American people have listened. Well, or we would if the economy would pick up. We're trying to reassure ourselves that Nothing (too much) Has Changed. Fly American Airlines and you can defy bin Laden. You see.

Again, this is not entirely stupid. Our economy depends highly on consumer and investor confidence. If it weren't for the corporate scandals from the summer before 911, this tactic might even have worked to get Wall Street back on track. But in the long run it will bite us, on about a dozen levels.

So, yes, 4T, madly trying to reassure itself by playing 3T.

On the other hand, I'm not sure its so different from the last Crisis. You should take a look at pre Hayes commission entertainment in the early 30s. It gives "Joe Millionaire" a run for its money.

Angeli pretty much describes where I see us as being right now. Also, keep in mind that the book 'The Fourth Turning' does suggest (on page 256 and 257) that as many as three to five years can pass after the Catalyst event before the Regeneracy begins in earnest. That would work out to anywhere from 2004 to 2006, using 9/11 as the Catalyst event base line. The fact that the Catalyst event did occur a little early in the saeculum could, in fact, make a five year pre-Regeneracy period more likely than a shorter one.

Originally Posted by angeli

As the president said, get out there and shop, and the American people have listened. Well, or we would if the economy would pick up. We're trying to reassure ourselves that Nothing (too much) Has Changed.

Again, this is not entirely stupid. Our economy depends highly on consumer and investor confidence. If it weren't for the corporate scandals from the summer before 911, this tactic might even have worked to get Wall Street back on track. But in the long run it will bite us, on about a dozen levels.

Excuse me, "not entirely stupid"? I take it then, you're for unemployment?

Don't get me wrong, to each his own. I don't think I'd waste my time running an election campaign on an Unemployment is good for America theme, though. What a waste of hard earned campaign finances that would be, eh?

I really do wonder about you crackpots out there. Is making any sense relevant at all to your way of thinking? Or is common sense to be avoided like the plague? Or is your abject disgust at the thought somebody out there might be getting rich so consuming an emotion that it obfuscates all rational thought?

Maybe if some of you lefties had a baby or two, instead of aborting them, you might see the relevance to having a job to provide for them, instead of hoping the economy sours so your party might get some political power out of the deal.

Originally Posted by ....

Originally Posted by angeli

As the president said, get out there and shop, and the American people have listened. Well, or we would if the economy would pick up. We're trying to reassure ourselves that Nothing (too much) Has Changed.

Again, this is not entirely stupid. Our economy depends highly on consumer and investor confidence. If it weren't for the corporate scandals from the summer before 911, this tactic might even have worked to get Wall Street back on track. But in the long run it will bite us, on about a dozen levels.

Excuse me, "not entirely stupid"? I take it then, you're for unemployment?

Don't get me wrong, to each his own. I don't think I'd waste my time running an election campaign on an Unemployment is good for America theme, though. What a waste of hard earned campaign finances that would be, eh?

I really do wonder about you crackpots out there. Is making any sense relevant at all to your way of thinking? Or is common sense to be avoided like the plague? Or is your abject disgust at the thought somebody out there might be getting rich so consuming an emotion that it obfuscates all rational thought?

Maybe if some of you lefties had a baby or two, instead of aborting them, you might see the relevance to having a job to provide for them, instead of hoping the economy sours so your party might get some political power out of the deal.

Regarding "sacrifice": FDR, by demanding sacrifice in the National Recovery Act, prolonged the Great Depression. Because the GD was a worldwide phenomenon, he may thus have helped bring about the rise of Hitler--bringing about WWII.

I felt the last turning as a child. It happened somewhere between 1982 and 1986. I am sure that by autumn 1985 things were different.
Turnings really manifest themselves in behaviors. Like the last turning.
Up until about 1983-84 people had longer hair, beards were fashionable for men. But somehow values changed, behaviors changed.
Our Boomer feminist Moms put away the dogma and became materialistic soccer moms. There were no more protests where us little kids were taken to attend, like the one against Nukes in the summer of 82 in Central Park.

Our younger second wave Boomer aunts and uncles began to marry off, settle down, and start having kids. They invested in homes, VCRs, settled down for the long haul.

Now I see the same thing.

Of my four childhood friends born 1977-79, TWO are fathers. Babies are coming, marriages are going on. Most of my friends who aren't married are all in serious monogamous relationships. They share rent, share everything. Strauss and Howe said that this would happen with later Xers. How we would create families earlier than early Xers in order to have support in a pretty hostile economic situation.


Things are just changing. This recent debate over Gay marriage and the smoking ban both seem like 3T events but this little era thats going on lacks the total lethargy of the 3T and the biblical chaos of the 4T.

The 4T was biblical chaos. Okies migrating to California. Soup kitchens crammed in every major city. I don't see that yet.
I'm back in the states, and other than the bog brand stores slowly creeping into St. Mark's Place (which is the America I love where there are "Stop Bush" signs everywhere), everything is peachy.

I think the crisis will come about 2005 for real.

Originally Posted by A Nature Spirit

Originally Posted by Justin-79

The 4T was biblical chaos ... I don't see that yet.

That's because we are still in the first two years, and the crisis will last around 20. Of course we haven't seen the worst of it yet!

thats because we are still . . . and the crisis will last around . . . of course we havent seen the worst . . . we just make it up as we go along you see

anarchy reigns get unreal get a not grip make it up defy convention defy authority defy everything in sight

nothing is real all is unreal

lose it now

A shattered nation?
That's a bit too dramatic. If you look at all 4T's historically it was pretty much biblical chaos from the get go. The Iraq invasion wasn't about September 11. It was about being a Bush and election 2004, which is unfortunately what September 11 has been boiled down to by the powers that be.

I disagree. I see it as Boston Massacre timing. It isn't the catalyst.

I wish there was a way to find out what 1770-1773 were like. I've wondered about the Boston Massacre equaling 9/11 as well. I guess one "good" scenario (maybe) would be a catalyst in 2005 (in an era of conservatism) because that would bring about the reformist liberals, which may or may not be good. I don't know. I just don't know anymore.

Some things I like about Bush, and some things I don't like.

Originally Posted by Justin-79

A shattered nation?
That's a bit too dramatic. If you look at all 4T's historically it was pretty much biblical chaos from the get go. The Iraq invasion wasn't about September 11. It was about being a Bush and election 2004, which is unfortunately what September 11 has been boiled down to by the powers that be.

I disagree. I see it as Boston Massacre timing. It isn't the catalyst.

a shattered nation

thats dramatic if you look at all 4ts historically it was pretty much biblical chaos from the get go

the iraq invasion is september 11 it was about being a bush and election 2004 which is unfortunately what September 11 has been boiled down to by the powers that be

i agree i see it as boston massacre timing it is the catalyst

Originally Posted by Dominic Flandry

Regarding "sacrifice": FDR, by demanding sacrifice in the National Recovery Act, prolonged the Great Depression. Because the GD was a worldwide phenomenon, he may thus have helped bring about the rise of Hitler--bringing about WWII.

The prolonging of the great depression was caused by the beggar thy neighbour protectionist policies that various nations instituted in the aftermath of Great Crash.

Originally Posted by Justin-79

Now I see the same thing.

Of my four childhood friends born 1977-79, TWO are fathers. Babies are coming, marriages are going on. Most of my friends who aren't married are all in serious monogamous relationships. They share rent, share everything. Strauss and Howe said that this would happen with later Xers. How we would create families earlier than early Xers in order to have support in a pretty hostile economic situation.


Things are just changing. This recent debate over Gay marriage and the smoking ban both seem like 3T events but this little era thats going on lacks the total lethargy of the 3T and the biblical chaos of the 4T.

The 4T was biblical chaos. Okies migrating to California. Soup kitchens crammed in every major city. I don't see that yet.
I'm back in the states, and other than the bog brand stores slowly creeping into St. Mark's Place (which is the America I love where there are "Stop Bush" signs everywhere), everything is peachy.

I think the crisis will come about 2005 for real.

Has anyone investgated the public mood from Great Crash in November 1929 to FDR's election three years later, I want to know if any of you see any parallels between that era and current era.

We had to do reports in US History this past year. It had to be on some topic between 1920 and 1945 or so. I purposely decided to research that time period (1929-1933), and called it "The Great Depression during the Hoover Administration".

I couldn't find much about the mood so much as I could find out events. Some things I did find out:
1. They were actually quite violent times, with riots breaking out in places demanding government aid.
2. People wanted to repeal prohibition, and this helped FDR who wanted to repeal it.
3. Hoover downplayed the problems like crazy. He would make speeches about how the economy was recovering (very reminiscent of baghdad bob denying the presence of US troops as US tanks go by in the background).
4. Banks would fail in spurts, say hundreds would fail in a month, and then the next month, it would only be half as much.
5. What was left of Hoover's popularity collapsed when he sent federal troops after the Bonus Army.
6. Many places, even far from the catalyst site, felt the effects within a week of the crash.
7. The moral crackdown on movies didn't occur until 1935, and movies and pop culture were still very racy for their time.
8. Basically, people were upset because the government wasn't even acknowledging there was much of an economic problem at all, and they wanted direct aid.
9. A thing about the democratic convention in 1932: Democrats had in the past lost what would have been a landslide victory due to nominating problems, and this would be the only way the dems would lose in 1932, if it happened again. Alfred Smith, who lost to Hoover in 1928, was a long shot candidate who ran merely to try to block FDR delegate votes, showing an obvious democratic rift (why, I have no clue). Of course, Alfred Smith did not block enough votes, so FDR went on to crush Hoover.
10. Sometimes homeless shelters were full and men had to sleep outside with newspapers. Men often felt humilitated that they couldn't provide for their families, and often deserted them.
11. Okies did NOT migrate to California in large numbers until the Dust Bowl, which did not start until right after the Regeneracy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jun29.html

It looks like the state of California is going to broke very soon, how are the politicians and people of California dealing with this looming disaster in a Unraveling way or a Crisis way.

Didn't Strauss and Howe warn people that a looming governmental financial disaster was looming in the Crisis to come?

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/op...partner=GOOGLE

Oblivious in D.C.
By BOB HERBERT

Of all the challenges we face, none is more troubling than the fact that thousands of Oregonians ? many of them children ? don't have enough to eat. Oregon has the highest hunger rate in the nation."

? Gov. Ted Kulongoski, in his
State of the State address.

Those who still believe that the policies of the Bush administration will set in motion some kind of renaissance in Iraq should take a look at what's happening to the quality of life for ordinary Americans here at home.

The president, buoyed by the bountiful patronage of the upper classes, seems indifferent to the increasingly harsh struggles of the working classes and the poor.

As Mr. Bush moves from fund-raiser to fund-raiser, building the mother of all campaign stockpiles, states from coast to coast are reaching depths of budget desperation unseen since the Great Depression. The disconnect here is becoming surreal. On Thursday the National Governors Association let it be known that the fiscal crisis that has crippled one state after another is worsening, not getting better.

Taxes have been raised. Services have been cut. And the rainy day funds accumulated in the 1990's have been consumed. If help does not materialize soon ? in the form of assistance from the federal government or a sharp turnaround in the economy ? some states will fall into a fiscal abyss.

That already seems to be happening in places like California, which has been driven to its knees by a two-year $38.8 billion budget gap, and Oregon, which has seen drastic cuts in public school services and the withholding of potentially life-saving medicine from seriously ill patients.

Most states have been unable to protect even the most fundamental services from damaging budget cuts.

"Few states have succeeded in exempting high-priority programs such as K-12 education, Medicaid, higher education, public safety or aid to cities and towns," according to the compilers of the Fiscal Survey of States, a report produced jointly by the governors' association and the National Association of State Budget Officers.

Scott Pattison, director of the budget officers' group, said, "If economic conditions remain stagnant or worsen, and if budget shortfalls continue next year, the states will have exhausted many of their options for countering a weak economy."

The budget crisis in California, where an unpopular Democratic governor is politically paralyzed and the Republicans in the State Legislature refuse to consider raising taxes, is potentially catastrophic.

Jack Kyser, a public policy economist in Los Angeles told The Associated Press: "People are nervous. There's a real chance for a meltdown that could have rippling effects throughout the nation. This is something of a different magnitude than we've seen before."

The governors' association called the fiscal survey the most accurate gauge of the health of state budgets. Its discouraging findings were released as the president was preparing a fund-raising swing that added millions more to his campaign stockpile, and as the Internal Revenue Service was reporting that the nation's richest taxpayers were accumulating an even greater share of the nation's wealth.

Some Americans are missing meals and going without their medicine, while others are enjoying a surge in already breathtaking levels of wealth. So what are we doing? We're cutting aid to the former while showering government largess on the latter.

There's a reason those campaign millions keep coming and coming and coming.

A Times article last week noted that the wealthiest 400 taxpayers accounted for more than 1 percent of all the income in the United States in 2000, "more than double their share just eight years earlier."

The influence of the wealthy has always been great, but it hasn't always been so cruel. Especially in the past six or seven decades there were many powerful political and civic leaders who looked out for the interests of the less fortunate and pressed their claims for treatment that was reasonably fair.

That's changed. The Bush juggernaut, at least for the time being, is rolling over everything that dares to get in its way. And fairness is not something it is concerned about.

Here we go.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...9/MN134705.DTL

Recall-drive antics perplex world
Pundits wonder whether Californians are progressive or just nuts

Washington -- Students of politics are gazing West and once again wondering whether Californians are cutting-edge or crazy.

The state that gave the nation a movie star president, the Grateful Dead, and smoke-free bars is now threatening to recall its sitting governor without a whiff of scandal and within a year of his re-election.

Observers can't be sure if they are watching a populist wave that will sweep statehouses from Carson City to Columbus, or another episode of the Golden State follies.

"A lot of people -- not only in California -- are fed up with their representation," said Mike Collins, a Virginia-based Republican strategist.

"Whether this takes hold remains to be seen, but ideas that are initially seen as kooky, whether it's miniskirts or Disneyland, take hold in California and become normal in America," Collins said.

Eighteen states have provisions for recalling their governor, yet it has happened only once. In 1921, third-term North Dakota Gov. Lynn Frazier, a Republican, was recalled in the midst of an agricultural recession. The setback was only temporary. Frazier returned to politics the following year and served 18 years in the U.S. Senate.

But just as California's Proposition 13 spurred initiatives from coast to coast a generation ago, some believe recall clouds will blow East.

"If you can make this happen in California, other governors will be concerned," said Dane Waters, president of the Initiatives and Referendum Institute, a nonpartisan and nonprofit think tank outside Washington.

"California is a trend-setting state," Waters said. "It will energize the recall movement across the country. It will wake people up to this method of checking their leaders."

But many doubt that the California experience can be duplicated.

PERFECT POLITICAL STORM

The shaky California economy, memories of the energy crisis, disdain for Gov. Gray Davis among his fellow Democrats, and desperation among Republicans for any statewide office have created a perfect political storm that would be difficult to replicate anywhere else.

"Recall elections are usually pretty localized and idiosyncratic," said Thomas Cronin, president of Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., and the author of "Direct Democracy: The Politics of Initiative, Referendum & Recall," one of a very small number of books that explore the topic.

"To me, it looks pretty California-specific," said Jenny Drage Bowser, an analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures. "I don't know if you've got another state with the same level of dissatisfaction with government and the same magnitude of budget problems."

Yet interest is growing in California's upheaval.

A front-page Washington Post story earlier this month served as a wake-up call to the nation's political elite that California was turning a quiet summer into one of the most raucous campaign seasons in memory.

Reports from Capitol Hill to Kuala Lumpur have by now chronicled California's gubernatorial intrigue, rarely failing to mention the state's most recognizable political figure -- Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"Terminator vs. Governor: Crisis in California" reads a headline in the Montreal Gazette. "The Governator" reads a more succinct headline on the same theme in the Mirror of London.

OTHER STATES GETTING IDEAS

"It's like watching a slow-moving car crash," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D- Walnut Creek, who like many Californians in the nation's capital is often asked: "What the hell is going on out there?"

As coverage of California's turmoil increases, so does interest in recalls.

"Until this thing with Gray Davis happened, no one called us about it," said Waters, recalling just one or two phone calls to the initiative institute on the topic over the past five years. And then, Waters said, in the past month he has received more than 100 calls from people trying to get information on the process in their own state.

Most states make it more difficult to qualify recall measures for the ballot. California requires signatures of 12 percent of those who voted in the previous election, but most states require 25 percent. If California had such a threshold, it would take close to 2 million valid signatures to qualify for the ballot, rather than the 900,000 under current law.

"Welcome to California -- the wild, wild West," a recall opponent told the Observer of London, one of many publications to portray California as teetering on the edge of political anarchy.

New York Times columnist William Safire offered side-by-side comparisons of Davis' troubles and those of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who also faces a recall threat. The Chicago Tribune compared California's upheaval to a "runaway train," while the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described it as a "political earthquake . . . with tremors that could extend across the nation."

FEINSTEIN WEIGHS IN

All of which does not wear well on those with a vested interest in California's reputation.

"The recall makes California look terrible," said California Democratic Sen.

Dianne Feinstein, who was quick to condemn the idea, but more hesitant to rule out the possibility she might wind up on the ballot.

"I believe very strongly it is a terrible mistake," Feinstein said. She is concerned, among other things, that the turmoil will prompt New York bond houses to lower the state's credit rating, costing taxpayers millions of dollars in interest payments.

"Just when people are looking for stability, it creates instability," she said.

"It's like a grade-B movie," said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Rancho Palos Verdes (Los Angeles County), one recent afternoon before racing off to catch a plane.

Of course, Washington's airport is named after a grade-B actor, a Californian named Ronald Reagan.

In my absence from the Wider World of the Web, it had become clear to me that, from the Boetia of the adoring bumpkins where our Muses first arose to the Greatest Nation on this (and perhaps other) Earths in this Third Millennium (after the rumored death of Pan) where they now reign, a certain Progress has obtained:

• Calliope, the chief, that impeller of eloquence, must surely be reverenced by her Reality Programming idolists at the television [far-seeing] networks. One's life seems suddenly large and brave as against TIVO's commanding visions.
  
  Clio has charmed our President, who now speaks to the throngs upon the matter of History, Pot-Calling-the-Kettle-Black Revisionist History to be sure, but History still. That Dubya would take time off from his present adorations of Asclepius as Pill-Poppers-in-Chief with his fellow triumvirs- Mr. Frist and Mr. Kennedy- speaks of Clio's charm.
  
  Euterpe spreads the joy of music to downloading thieves everywhere; only the RIAA seems not to bow its collective head.
  
  Terpsichore and her dancing Democrats who stand on every side of every issue and then change to the tune of the time (but, just a few beats slow for the Massachusettsian with the rich wife and a few beats fast for the Vermonter with the felonious familial) .
  
  Erato has reached into the SCOTUS with her languages of love. These alcolytes find beauty {or is it TRUTH?} in the strangest of places and the stranges of cases...but it has become difficult to recognize which end is up (not that there is anything wrong with that) when Constitutional Penubras cast their darkling lunar shadows upon Aphrodite's private apartments.
  
  Polyhymnia has invaded Ares' armed lairs and now the SecDef intones Zen-like sacred verse in a surprising variety of styles from the haiku to the Dr. Seussian. Mr. Rumsfeld is our Hesiod, our Rupert Brook.
  
  Urania seemed to have fallen to Texas earth but has now sent two packages to dusty, red Mars to surveil for the Pancho Villas our future. [and perhaps the Yemeni and Iraqi Villas of our present].
  
  Thalia gives the Nation-Builders and their ilk a vision of the pastorale- Arcadia in Irak (in time, in ten years time) with Mr. Wm. Kristol as Daphnis and Ms. Condi Rice as Chloe, Elysium among the Afghans- adding to our architectures of adventure on Cap-Haitien and Cape Mesurado which are now the forgotten Islands of the Blessed and the ignored Land of the Free.
  
  Melpomene, the tragic Muse, did strike at our S.W.O.T.E. and removed all recall of her years in that riverine Arcadia of the Ozarks when she saw the Futures at will and glory years as the Amazon of Pennsylvania Avenue. But, the Senator from New York was allowed a specteress scribe (was it Eleanor R.?) to channel enough wisdom to meet the demands of Simon & Schuster...it did not make the S.W.O.T.E. richer than Her Majesty Elizabeth II as it did the Potteress; nor did remove the stained blue rival's raiment...and allowed her eight millions and millions more. And, should Melpomene relent, Gray Championship would be her justly due...as principled as Churchill; as honest as Abe.

So, I went away, and did retrun to this a-Musing space in 3T time and Imperial place.



We are all Boetians Now!

HTH

Welcome back Mr. Saari!

Originally Posted by Virgil K. Saari [imposter

]In my absence from the Wider World of the Web, it had become clear to me that... [snip nice try]

imposter

i pervert impervious to this charade am not amused

in the name of all thats holy righteous and true hereby demand an end to this nonsense of one masquerading as the one and only vks

"We are all Boetians Now!"

cute

i demand an investigation of this obvious imposter

now

In honor of the reappearance of a our beloved Anglophile paleoconservative farmer, I present this essay penned by a British Academic. It was originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Enjoy!

Standard Fair Use disclaimers apply.

Only in America

By ERIC HOBSBAWM

Looking back on 40 years of visiting and living in the United
States, I think I learned as much about the country in the
first summer I spent there as in the course of the next
decades. With one exception: To know New York, or even
Manhattan, one has to live there. For how long? I did so for
four months every year between 1984 and 1997, but even though
my wife, Marlene, joined me for the whole semester only three
times, it was quite enough for both of us to feel like natives
rather than visitors. I have spent a lot of time in the U.S.A.
teaching, reading in its marvelous libraries, writing, or
having a good time, or all together in the Getty Center in its
days in Santa Monica, but what I learned from personal
acquaintance with America was acquired in the course of a few
weeks and months. Were I a de Tocqueville, that would have
been quite enough. After all, his Democracy in America, the
best book ever written about the U.S.A., was based on a
journey of not more than nine months. Alas, I am not de
Tocqueville, nor is my interest in the U.S.A. the same as his.

If written today, de Tocqueville's book would certainly be
attacked as anti-American, since much of what he said about
the U.S.A. was critical. Ever since it was founded, the U.S.A.
has been a subject of attraction and fascination for the rest
of the world, but also of detraction and disapproval. However,
it is only since the start of the cold war that people's
attitude to the U.S.A. has been judged essentially in terms of
approval or disapproval, and not only by the sort of
inhabitants who are also likely to seek out "un-American"
behavior in their own fellow citizens, but also
internationally. It substituted the question "Are you with the
U.S.A.?" for the question "What do you think of the U.S.A.?"
What is more, no other country expects or asks such a question
about itself. Since America, having won the cold war against
the U.S.S.R., implausibly decided on September 11, 2001, that
the cause of freedom was again engaged in another
life-and-death struggle against another evil, but this time
spectacularly ill-defined enemy, any skeptical remarks about
the United States and its policy are, once again, likely to
meet with outrage.

And yet, how irrelevant, even absurd, is this insistence on
approval! Internationally speaking, the U.S.A. was by any
standards the success story among 20th-century states. Its
economy became the world's largest, both pace- and
pattern-setting; its capacity for technological achievement
was unique; its research in both natural and social sciences,
even its philosophers, became increasingly dominant; and its
hegemony in global consumer civilization seemed beyond
challenge. It ended the century as the only surviving global
power and empire. What is more, as I have written elsewhere,
"in some ways the United States represents the best of the
20th century." If opinion is measured not by pollsters but by
migrants, almost certainly America would be the preferred
destination of most human beings who must, or decide to, move
to a country other than their own, certainly of those who know
some English. As one of those who chose to work in the U.S.A.,
I illustrate the point. Admittedly, working in the U.S.A., or
liking to live in the U.S.A. -- and especially in New York --
does not imply the wish to become American, although this is
still difficult for many inhabitants of the United States to
understand. It no longer implies a lasting choice for most
people between one's own country and another, as it did before
the Second World War, or even until the air-transport
revolution in the 1960s, let alone the telephone and e-mail
revolution of the 1990s. Binational or even multinational
working and even bi- or multicultural lives have become
common.

Nor is money the only attraction. The U.S.A. promises greater
openness to talent, to energy, to novelty than other worlds.
It is also the reminder of an old, if declining, tradition of
free and egalitarian intellectual inquiry, as in the great New
York Public Library, whose treasures are still, unlike in the
other great libraries of the world, open to anyone who walks
through its doors on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. On the other
hand, the human costs of the system for those outside it or
who cannot "make it" were equally evident in New York, at
least until they were pushed out of middle-class sight, off
the streets or into the unspeakable univers concentrationnaire
of the largest jail population, per capita, in the world. When
I first went to New York, the Bowery was still a vast human
refuse dump or "skid row." In the 1980s it was more evenly
distributed through the streets of Manhattan. Behind today's
casual mobile-phone calls on the street, I still hear the
soliloquies of the unwanted and crazy on the pavements of New
York in one of the city's bad decades of inhumanity and
brutality. Human wastage is the other face of American
capitalism, in a country where "to waste" is the common
criminal slang for "to kill."

Yet, unlike other nations, in its national ideology the U.S.A.
does not simply exist. It only achieves. It has no collective
identity except as the best, the greatest country, superior to
all others and the acknowledged model for the world. As the
football coach said: Winning is not just the most important
thing, it is all there is. That is one of the things that
makes America such a very strange country for foreigners.
Stopping for a brief holiday with the family in a small, poor,
linguistically incomprehensible seaside town in Portugal, on
the way back from a semester in New England, I still remember
the sense of coming home to one's own civilization. Geography
had nothing to do with it. When we went on a similar holiday
to Portugal a few years later, en route this time from South
America, there was no such feeling of a culture gap overcome.
Not the least of these cultural peculiarities is the U.S.A.'s
own sense of its strangeness ("Only in America ... "), or at
least its curiously unfixed sense of self. The question that
preoccupies so many American historians of their own country,
namely, "What does it mean to be American?," is one that
rarely bothered my generation of historians in European
countries. Neither national nor personal identity seemed as
problematic to visiting Brits, at all events in the 1960s,
even those of complex Central European cultural background, as
they seemed in local academic discussions. "What is this
identity crisis they are all talking about?" Marlene asked me
after one of them. She had never heard the term before we
arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in 1967.

Foreign academics who discovered the U.S.A. in the 1960s were
probably more immediately aware of its peculiarities than they
would be today, for so many of them had not yet been
integrated into the omnipresent language of globalized
consumer society, which fits in well with the deeply
entrenched egocentricity, even solipsism, of American culture.
For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the
passion for egalitarianism but individualist, that is
anti-authoritarian, antinomian, though curiously legalistic,
anarchism has become the core of the value system in the
U.S.A. What survives of egalitarianism is chiefly the refusal
of voluntary deference to hierarchic superiors, which may
account for the -- by our standards -- everyday crudeness,
even brutality with which power is used in and by the U.S.A.
to establish who can command whom.

It seemed Americans were preoccupied with themselves and their
country, in ways in which the inhabitants of other
well-established states simply were not with their own.
American reality was and remains the overwhelming subject of
the creative arts in the U.S.A. The dream of somehow
encompassing all of it haunted its creators. Nobody in Europe
had set out to write "the great English novel" or "the great
French novel," but authors in the United States still try
their hand (nowadays in several volumes) at "the great
American novel," even if they no longer use the phrase.
Actually, the man who came closest to achieving such an aim
was not a writer, but an apparently superficial image-maker of
astonishingly durable power, of whose significance the British
art critic David Sylvester persuaded me in New York in the
1970s. Where else except America could an oeuvre like Andy
Warhol's have come into being, an enormously ambitious and
specific, unending set of variations on the themes of living
in the U.S.A., from its soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles to its
mythologies, dreams, nightmares, heroes, and heroines? There
is nothing like it in the visual-arts tradition of the old
world. But, like the other attempts by the creative spirits of
the U.S.A. to seize the totality of their country, Warhol's
vision is not that of the successful pursuit of happiness,
"the American dream" of American political jargon and
psychobabble.

To what extent has the United States changed in my lifetime,
or at least in the 40-odd years since I first landed there?
New York, as we are constantly told, is not America, and, as
Auden said, even those who could never be Americans can see
themselves as New Yorkers. As indeed anyone does who comes to
the same apartment every year, a vast set of towers
overlooking the gradual gentrification of Union Square, to be
recognized by the same Albanian doorman, and to negotiate
domestic help as in years past with the same Spanish lady, who
in her 12 years in the city has never found it necessary to
learn English. Like other New Yorkers, Marlene and I would
give tips to out-of-town visitors about what was new since the
last time they had landed at JFK and where to eat this year,
though (apart from a party or two) unlike the permanently
resident friends -- the Schiffrins, the Kaufmans, the
Katznelsons, the Tillys, the Kramers -- we would not entertain
at home. Like a real New Yorker, I would feel the loss of a
favorite establishment like that of a relative; I would
exchange gossip at the regular lunches of the New York
Institute for the Humanities at New York University, with the
mixture of writing people, publishers, show persons,
professors, and United Nations staff members that makes up the
local intellectual scene -- for one of the major attractions
of New York is that the life of the mind is not dominated by
the academy. In short, there is no other place in the world
like the Big Apple. Still, however untypical, New York could
not possibly exist anywhere except the U.S.A. Even its most
cosmopolitan inhabitants are recognizably American, like our
friend the late John Lindenbaum, hematologist in a Harlem
hospital and jazz-lover, who, sent to Bangladesh for a project
of medical research, had traveled there with a collection of
jazz records and his ice-cream scoop. There are a lot more
Jews in New York, and, unlike in large stretches of the United
States, more people there are aware of the existence of the
rest of the world, but what I learned as a New Yorker is not
fundamentally at odds with what little I know of the Midwest
and California.

Curiously, the experience, what in the '60s they used to call
"the vibes," of the U.S.A. has changed much less than that of
other countries I have known in the past half-century. There
is no comparison between living in the Paris, the Berlin, the
London of my youth and those cities today; even Vienna, which
deliberately hides its social and political transformation by
turning itself into a theme park of a glorious past. Even
physically the skyline of London, as it can be seen from where
I live on the slopes of Parliament Hill, has changed --
Parliament is now barely visible -- and Paris has not been the
same since Messieurs Pompidou and Mitterrand have left their
marks on it. And yet, while New York has undergone the same
kind of social and economic upheavals as other cities --
deindustrialization, gentrification, a massive influx from the
Third World -- it neither feels nor looks like a city
transformed. That is surprising when, as every New Yorker
knows, the city changes every year. I myself have seen the
arrival of fundamental innovations in New York life, such as
the Korean fruit-and-vegetable store, the end of such basic
New York lower-middle-class institutions as the Gimbel's
department stores, and the transformation of Brighton Beach
into Little Russia. And yet, New York has remained New York
far more than London has remained London. Even the Manhattan
skyline is still essentially that of the city of the 1930s,
especially now that its most ambitious postwar addition, the
World Trade Center, has disappeared.

Is this apparent stability an illusion? After all, the U.S.A.
is part of global humanity, whose situation has changed more
profoundly and rapidly since 1945 than ever before in recorded
history. Those changes there looked less dramatic to us
because the sort of prosperous high-tech mass-consumer society
that did not arrive in Western Europe until the 1950s was not
new in America. Whereas I knew by 1960 that a historic chasm
divided the way Britons lived and thought before and after the
middle '50s, for the U.S.A. the 1950s were, or at least looked
like, just a bigger and better version of the kind of 20th
century its more prosperous white citizens had known for two
generations, its confidence recovered after the shock of the
Great Slump. Seen from the outside, it continued along the
same lines as before, though some sections of its citizens --
mainly the college-educated -- began to think differently
about it, and, as the countries of what is now the European
Union became more modernized, the furniture of life with which
European tourists came into contact began to look less
"advanced," and even a bit tatty. California did not seem
fundamentally different to me driving through it in the 1970s,
1980s, and 1990s from what it had looked and felt like in
1960, whereas Spain and Sicily did. New York had been a
cosmopolitan city of immigrants for all my lifetime; it was
London that became one after the 1950s. The details in the
great carpet of the U.S.A. have changed, and are constantly
changing, but its basic pattern remains remarkably stable in
the short run.

As a historian I know that behind this apparent shifting
stability, large and long-term changes are taking place,
perhaps fundamental ones. Nevertheless, they are concealed by
the deliberate resistance to change of American public
institutions and procedures, and the habits of American life,
as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called in more general terms
its habitus, or way of doing things. Forced into the
straitjacket of an 18th-century Constitution reinforced by two
centuries of Talmudic exegesis by the lawyers, the theologians
of the republic, the institutions of the U.S.A. are far more
frozen into immobility than those of almost all other states.
It has so far even postponed such minor changes as the
election of an Italian, or Jew, let alone a woman, as head of
government. But it has also made the government of the U.S.A.
largely immune to great men, or indeed to anybody, taking
great decisions, since rapid, effective national
decision-making, not least by the president, is almost
impossible. The United States, at least in its public life, is
a country that is geared to operate with mediocrities, because
it has to, and it has been rich and powerful enough to do so.
It is the only country in my political lifetime where three
able presidents (F.D.R., Kennedy, Nixon) have been replaced,
at a moment's notice, by men neither qualified nor expected to
do the job, without making any noticeable difference to the
course of U.S. and world history. Historians who believe in
the supremacy of high politics and great individuals have a
hard case in America. That has created the foggy mechanisms of
real government in Washington, made even more opaque by the
sensational resources of corporate and pressure-group money,
and the inability of the electoral process to distinguish
between the real and the increasingly restricted political
country. So, since the end of the U.S.S.R., the U.S.A. has
quietly prepared to function as the world's only superpower.
The problem is that its situation has no historical precedent,
that its political system is geared to the ambitions and
reactions of New Hampshire primaries and provincial
protectionism, that it has no idea what to do with its power,
and that almost certainly the world is too large and
complicated to be dominated for any length of time by any
single superpower, however great its military and economic
resources. Megalomania is the occupational disease of global
victors, unless controlled by fear. Nobody controls the U.S.A.
today. That is why, as I write my autobiography, its enormous
power can and obviously does destabilize the world.

(Unfortunately, nothing that has happened since the above
paragraph was originally written calls for a revision of the
views expressed in it. The "occupational disease of conquering
powers" has been reinforced by the Iraq war. The policies and
strategic ambitions of the global dominators have destroyed
the genuine "coalitions of the willing" on which U.S.
supremacy could rely in the cold war, and even more so in the
international mobilizations of the first Persian Gulf war and
after 9/11. They have left the U.S.A., unable to win a
plurality of free votes in the U.N.'s Security Council, in
unprecedented isolation and global unpopularity, surrounded by
fear rather than hope. The world has unquestionably been more
destabilized not only -- patently -- in the Middle East but
everywhere: in Europe, where the European Union is divided and
weakened and NATO has crumbled; in East Asia; in what existed
of an organized international system, whether of states or
nonofficial organizations. As the victorious U.S.A. prepares
for the post-Iraq presidential elections, uncertainty
surrounds even the public discourse, which veers between the
language of ruthless power politics, self-delusion, lies, and
Orwellian newspeak.)

Our problem is not that we are being Americanized. In spite of
the massive impact of cultural and economic Americanization,
the rest of the world, even the capitalist world, has so far
been strikingly resistant to following the model of U.S.
politics and society. That is probably because America is less
of a coherent and therefore exportable social and political
model of a capitalist liberal democracy, based on the
universal principles of individual freedom, than its patriotic
ideology and Constitution suggest. So, far from being a clear
example that the rest of the world can imitate, the U.S.A.,
however powerful and influential, remains an unending process,
distorted by big money and public emotion, a system tinkering
with institutions, public and private, to make them fit
realities unforeseen in the unalterable text of a 1787
Constitution. It simply does not lend itself to copying. Most
of us would not want to copy it. Since puberty I have spent
more of my time in the U.S.A. than in any country other than
Britain. All the same, I am glad that my children did not grow
up there, and that I belong to another culture. Still, it is
mine also.

Our problem is rather that the U.S. empire does not know what
it wants to do or can do with its power, or its limits. It
merely insists that those who are not with it are against it.
That is the problem of living at the apex of the "American
Century." As I am 86 years of age, I am unlikely to see its
solution.

Eric Hobsbawm is a fellow of the British Academy and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught at
Birkbeck College, University of London, and the New School
University. He lives in England. This essay is adapted from
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, to be published
in the United States by Pantheon Books in August.