… the movies, books, and toys that scared you when you were a kid. It’s also about kids in scary movies, both as heroes and villains. And everything else that’s traumatic to a tyke!
Through reviews, stories, artwork, and testimonials, we mean to remind you of all the things you once tried so hard to forget…
I’m not sure how I found this (as usual), but one of its posts is how …
Kids in this high-tech age don’t know how coddled they are when severe weather is forecast! Today, you’ve got all these electronic graphics with little maps in the corner, crawls across the screen, and now and then a weatherbabe (or weatherguy) may come on to give logical, reasoned updates.
Not so when I was a kid in the ’70s.
Even for a Severe Thunderstorm Watch, the programming would stop, the TV screen would fill with some ominous-looking graphic (still, of course, no movement back in those days) screaming whatever watch/warning it was in all caps, vivid colors…and worst of all, that infernal, screaming, shrill Emergency Broadcasting Service tone! Then usually an announcer with The Voice Of Doom would come on and provide the “public service” of warning us all of impending tornadoes, damaging winds and large hail that were SURELY going to target the house you lived in and make Dorothy’s tornado in THE WIZARD OF OZ about as scary as a silent fart.
Almost as bad were the “ALL CLEAR” statements that would come on-screen when the danger was supposedly past…except that the graphics were usually in more soothing shades of green and white.
The fake warnings created on YouTube are laughable compared to the horrifying simplicity of the bulletins back in the 1970s that made me want to scream running for the cellar – and, worse, my parents made me watch them because it was “educational“!
“Fake warnings,” you ask?
“Horrifying simplicity of the bulletins back in the ’70s,” you ask?
These relatively crude presentations occurred, of course, before color weather radar in the 1980s. (Previously weather radar was nothing more than World War II surplus air traffic radars.) For that matter, they all took place before TV stations routinely went to continuous weather coverage during tornado warnings, the first of which may have been …
He calls himself ‘Michael Alden,’ but says that this is not his name. He claims not to know his real name, nor who he is, nor anything that happened to him up until two months ago. Tonight we explore the mystery that is amnesia—the loss of a person’s memory, and with it, the loss of his humanity as well. I’m Walter Cronkite, and this is The 21st Century.”
Obviously, this never happened. As classic TV fans know, “Michael Alden” is the character played by Frank Converse in the cult classic series, Coronet Blue. And, as our ersatz Walter Cronkite says, Michael Alden has amnesia. He was dragged half dead out of the water, murmuring the words “Coronet Blue.” He has no idea what this means, nor about anything else that has happened to him up until the time he is rescued. He doesn’t even know his own name; he picks the name Michael Alden because it’s a combination of his doctor’s first name and the name of the hospital where he was treated. For the remaining thirteen episodes, Alden will search for clues as to his real identity, and what “Coronet Blue” really means—while the people who tried to kill him look to finish the job.
It’s a great idea for a television series, and had Coronet Blue existed in the real world (as is the case with many TV shows today), it’s quite likely that Alden would have been an ideal subject for a science program like The 21st Century (which aired on CBS from 1967-1970; it’s predecessor, The 20th Century, began in 1957). But just how plausible is the idea behind Coronet Blue? And how realistic is pop culture’s depiction of amnesia?
What do we know about Michael Alden? Not much. As Coronet Blue opens, he’s onboard a ship, one piece in a moving puzzle. It’s clear that he’s part of some kind of plot; a heist, perhaps, or some kind of undercover operation—we just don’t know. Quickly, it becomes apparent that something’s gone wrong, that his confederates have discovered something about him—he had ratted them out, he wasn’t who he claimed to be, something like that—and consequently he’s been targeted for death. There’s a struggle, he goes over the rail of the ship and into the water, the bad guys take a couple of shots at him (or are they good guys? We just don’t know), and after a time he’s dragged ashore, nearly dead, mumbling the words “coronet blue.” He recovers, physically. Mentally, however, he’s a mess. He doesn’t know who he is, how he got there, why someone would want to kill him, and he has no idea what “coronet blue” means. Michael Alden has amnesia.
In pop culture, the situation most like Alden’s is probably that of Jason Bourne, the character played by Matt Damon in the Bourne movies. Like Alden, Bourne is pulled out of the water after someone has tried to kill him; like Alden, he has no memory of his identity, although he retains his language and motor skills.
Both Alden and Bourne suffer from a type of psychogenic dissociative amnesia called “retrograde” amnesia. As opposed to “anterograde” amnesia, which affects the ability of the mind to form new memories, retrograde amnesia means the inability to recall things that happened before a specific date, usually the date of an accident or trauma. In both of these cases, we see how retrograde amnesia “tends to negatively affect episodic, autobiographical, and declarative memory while usually keeping procedural memory intact with no difficulty for learning new knowledge.
Now, within this fairly broad diagnosis, there are two subsets which we could be dealing with. The first, “situation-specific” amnesia, sometimes called “suppressed memory,” means that memory loss is confined to a specific traumatic event, with the victim able to remember things that happened both before and after the event. In the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare as a Child,” for example, Janice Rule plays Helen Foley, a woman who unknowingly suffers from such a condition: Helen has no memory of her mother’s murder, nor that the young Helen was a witness to the murder, until the appearance of a little girl (Helen when she was young; an apparition? A manifestation of her subconscious? It is the Twilight Zone, after all) brings her memory back in time to apprehend the murderer, who’s returned to eliminate the only witness—Helen.* That’s an example of “situation-specific” amnesia.
However, Alden’s amnesia appears more likely to be a type known as “global-transient”; in other words, a major gap in the part of the memory that relates to personal identity. The most common illustration of global-transient amnesia is a “fugue state,” in which there is “a sudden retrograde loss of autobiographical memory resulting in impairment of personal identity and usually accompanied by a period of wandering.” That last is significant, because the premise of Coronet Blue is built around Alden’s attempts to find out who he is, resulting in travelling—wandering—to different parts of the country, searching for anyone or anything that can help him discover who he is. And what coronet blue means, of course.
It’s likely that Alden’s doctors would have checked for some type of brain damage or other organic cause of his amnesia; they didn’t find anything, but even with today’s advancements in medical science, it’s unlikely that his amnesia was caused by anything as mundane as the proverbial “bump on the head.” Most of the time, psychogenic amnesia is traceable back to some type of psychological trigger; with Alden, it’s almost certainly related to the attack on him at the beginning of the first episode.
I wonder, though: does he really want to remember? Or is it fear—fear of what he doesn’t know—that keeps his memory from returning? All the time, though, he remains focused on “coronet blue,” and it’s not just because the theme keeps playing in the background. Find out the meaning, he knows, and it’s likely he’ll be able to unlock the mystery.
That fear of finding out what his past might be, though—that leads us to an obvious question: is Alden’s amnesia genuine? Is he a reliable narrator, or is he withholding something from the viewers?There are at least four episodes from the great legal drama Perry Mason that deal with amnesia. The first season episodes “The Case of the Crooked Candle,” and “The Case of the Desperate Daughter,” the fifth season episode “The Case of the Glamorous Ghost,” and the seventh season episode “The Case of the Nervous Neighbor” all involve Perry dealing with someone—generally a woman—claiming some form of amnesia.
Is there a significance in this gender distinction? Possibly. While there’s no particular evidence to suggest that women are more susceptible than men to amnesia, the victim in “Glamorous Ghost,” Eleanor Corbin, claims to be suffering from amnesia “after police find her running and screaming through woods near her apartment building.” Doubtless someone would have referred to Eleanor as being “hysterical.” And that term, as understood and applied to women, dates back over 4,000 years. The National Center for Biotechnology Information calls hysteria “the first mental disorder attributable to women, accurately described in the second millennium BC, and until Freud considered an exclusively female disease.”
Therefore, with Eleanor displaying no signs of physical injury, the suggestion is that her amnesia is a form of retrograde amnesia known as “hysterical reaction,” one that does not appear to depend upon an actual brain disorder. Perry accepts this diagnosis, at least insofar as it provides him with the opportunity to stall for time while he tries to assemble the facts. The police, however, are suspicious: and for good reason, as Encyclopaedia Britannicanotes darkly: “Although most dramatic, such cases are extremely rare and seldom wholly convincing.”
In fact, malingering—that is, the rational output of a neurological normal brain aiming at the surreptitious achievement of a well identified gain—is a constant threat in such cases. It’s understandable, then, that law enforcement officials have long been leery about such diagnoses, and for years they’ve pushed for some kind of standardized test for amnesia. Unlike the M’Naghten rule, which tests for criminal insanity, judging the legitimacy of amnesia claims defies application of uniform standards. As one expert remarks, amnesia cases “differ in onset, duration, and content forgotten” to the extent that it cannot be broadly defined in legal circumstances. And in a landmark case in England in 1959, a jury was called on to determine whether a defendant was faking amnesia, making him legally unfit to stand trial. The jury ruled he was faking (and convicted him, to boot). In truth, most cases of psychogenic retrograde autobiographical amnesia resolve themselves on their own accord, so if Hamilton Burger is willing to be patient, he might well be able to wait his suspect out. And, in fact, Eleanor Corbin is faking her amnesia, a deception which is soon uncovered by the police.* Could Michael Alden be doing the same thing?
The police were, it appears, suspicious of his claim; however, that suspicion was mitigated by the fact that he wasn’t accused of having committed any crime. Indeed, the only crime apparent seems to have been perpetrated against him. But if he is faking it, it’s reasonable to assume that the reason goes back to that mysterious scene at the beginning of the series. Which means that there’s something in his past he’s trying to hide, something very dark indeed. And he knows full well what it is.
Even a series as reliable as The Fugitive has an amnesia episode. It’s the ninth episode of the second season, “Escape into Black,” in which Dr. Richard Kimble is caught in an explosion at a diner. He awakens in a hospital, badly injured, and with no idea who he is or what has happened to him. Fortunately, there’s a social worker on the scene, one determined to look out for Kimble’s interests even though he can’t look out for them himself. Learning that Kimble had been asking about a one-armed man prior to the explosion, she renews the search herself. A good thing, too, because Kimble, having found out he’s wanted for murder and with no idea of whether or not he’s guilty, is on the verge of surrendering himself to Lt. Gerard.
We know how it ends, of course: Kimble regains his memory in time to escape Gerard and resume his search for the one-armed man. It’s mighty convenient for us all that his problem clears up before the episode ends—but how likely is it?
Well, it’s at least plausible. That same article from the Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that retrograde amnesia cases “usually clear up with relative rapidity, with or without psychotherapy.” Once Michael Alden’s doctors make their diagnosis (which, although it’s not mentioned by name, is almost certainly psychogenic retrograde autobiographical amnesia), then comes the treatment. Or at least it would, if Alden was willing to stand still for it. But he’s still running for his life, remember, and he realizes that he can’t afford to sit around undergoing extensive therapy to try and recover his memory. While that’s happening, the killers could catch up to him again, and this time they might not miss. (They could keep him in the hospital, of course, but then who knows if his insurance covers it, or even if he has insurance? It’s not as if they can look him up.) The treatment, however, would almost certainly have been a course of psychological therapy. Now, in the early decades of the 20th century, the therapy might have consisted of “truth serum” drugs such as barbiturates and benzodiazepines, and doubtless there are those who might wonder why his doctors didn’t try that. In fact, however, those drugs weren’t very successful in dealing with cases of amnesia—while they did make it possible for the patient to speak more easily about things, they also lowered the threshold of suggestibility, with the result that the information from the patient lacked reliability. By the 1960s, that kind of treatment would have been out.
It’s far more likely that a course of psychoanalysis would be suggested, and I think it’s intriguing that one of the possible diagnoses to come from such treatment would have been along Freudian lines, by suggesting that his amnesia was a form of self-punishment, “with the obliteration of personal identity as an alternative to suicide.” I wonder if that will come up in the course of the series? Is it possible that Alden’s apparent dual identity at the start of the series has to do with something so secretive, so horrifying, that his subconscious simply can’t deal with it anymore, with the result that he tries to sweep it all clean? In an early episode, someone shrewdly observes that he has an opportunity few people ever get: to make a brand-new start to life, with no baggage, nothing linking him to the past. Is that what he’s subconsciously trying to do, to divorce himself from something he doesn’t want to be reminded of? In such conversations, Alden invariably states that all he’s interested in is the truth of who he is, and if it turns out that there’s something bad in his past (in one episode, he thinks he might be a killer), well, so be it—that’s the risk he’s willing to take
And this, Walter Cronkite would probably discover, is where the story ends. In cases involving brain damage, doctors may be able to find a cause, and perhaps a cure. But Michael Alden’s case remains a mystery. It is likely, but not certain, that his amnesia will eventually clear up. It may happen relatively quickly, or it may take a protracted period of psychoanalysis. But as to how or why it happens, and how or why it resolves itself? And what the amnesiac goes through, a man without a past, whose continued survival depends on reclaiming that past? It is, surely, part of the mysterious world of the amnesiac. One thing is for certain, however: the trauma that Michael Alden faces is one that most of us will never have to deal with. …
Don’t wait; that should be the moral of the story. Do your living now, while you can, while you can still live in the present. That’s what Michael Alden does, in Coronet Blue. He does it because he has no choice. And really, neither do we. Life is not meant for inertia, but for movement. Forward movement. However you can, wherever you can, whenever you can. Even if you’re not like Michael Alden.
But we have a couple of advantages over Mike: for one thing, he doesn’t know who’s shooting at him, but we know who’s shooting at us. Life is firing the bullets, and the one thing of which we can be certain is that one of them, somewhere, has your name on it, and another one has mine. For another, most of us don’t have to worry about our series being cancelled before we find out the answers.
There’s only one problem with this analogy, of course. We don’t know what “coronet blue” means either.
Come on. If you know cars you should be able to find a Dodge Coronet in blue …
… although finding one that isn’t in a blue and rust two-tone is a bigger challenge.
After this musical interlude …
… the first thought is that all of us who complain about the entertainment world’s lack of originality should realize that this is not a new phenomenon.
For those who want to know the secret of Coronet Blue, read this from IMDB.com:
Series Creator Larry Cohen, in his autobiography “The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker”, explained the mystery behind the series’ title and catchphrase. “When the Brodkin Organization took over the series, they wanted to turn it into an anthology. So they played down the amnesia aspect until there was nothing about it at all in the show. It was just Frank Converse wandering from one story to the next with no connective format at all. Anyway, the show ended after seventeen weeks and nobody found out what ‘coronet blue’ meant. The actual secret is that Converse was not really an American at all. He was a Russian who had been trained to appear like an American and was sent to the U.S. as a spy. He belonged to a spy unit called ‘Coronet Blue’. He decided to defect, so the Russians tried to kill him before he can give away the identities of the other Soviet Agents, and nobody can really identify him because he doesn’t exist as an American. Coronet Blue was actually an outgrowth of ‘The Traitor’ episode of The Defenders (1961).” However, anyone who has seen the show knows that the amnesia aspect was in fact not played down (one episode had Alden declining a golden opportunity to learn the truth about himself, or at least a good part of it, on moral grounds concerning the way the information became available to him). Other facts are that thirteen episodes were all that were filmed, and that from first air date to last is only fourteen weeks, fifteen potential weekly air dates if you include those at both ends, but only eleven of the episodes were aired. In any case, Cohen’s “seventeen weeks”, made in a book wherein he presumably had plenty of time to check and be certain that he got such fundamental facts correct, is indefensible. All this calls the validity of the entirety of his statement into question.
Maybe Cohen didn’t remember his own show. (Truth be told, most prolific TV producers appear to move on from one series to another. Gene Roddenberry took himself out of producing the third season of “Star Trek” and was working on other series, and probably would have forgotten about what became his most famous creation had it not survived after cancellation.)
Since the show lasted only one half-season as a summer replacement series, as with most other series Coronet Blue ended with no resolution. That prompts this comment from the original post:
I think I once read or heard that “Coronet Blue” had been filmed in 1965 with the intention of a January, 1966 premiere but the show was shelved and was kept “on the shelf” for a year-and-a-half.
“Coronet Blue” supposedly had high ratings when it finally aired in the Summer of 1967, but as star Frank Converse had committed himself to star in another series in the 1967-68 TV season (“N.Y.P.D.”), there was no way production of “Coronet Blue” as a weekly series could have resumed.
Even still, the producers of “Coronet Blue” COULD have made a two-hour TV-movie during one of “N.Y.P.D.”‘s production hiatuses, on which the loose ends could have been tied-up.
Since Coronet Blue was set in New York City, as obviously was “N.Y.P.D.” …
… the obvious solution would have been for Converse the detective to investigate the case of Converse the mysterious amnesiac.
And before you ask, if you put “Coronet Blue” and “N.Y.P.D.” together, you do not get …
American politics has become a tug-of-war between two generations. Boomers (and those older) dominate positions of power even as their capacity diminishes. Eighty-year-old Joe Biden has repeatedly displayed signs of frailty and confusion but, as far as we know, he’ll be running for re-election in 2024.
Over on Capitol Hill, eighty-one-year-old Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to freeze during public remarks and ninety-year-old Dianne Feinstein faces calls to retire from within her own party. While mental impairment is no impediment to serving in the United States Senate — if anything, it’s probably an advantage — the upper house is older than it has ever been. The average age in the Senate today is sixty-five. There are eight serving senators who were born during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.
Millennials frustrated by this gerontocracy want the boomers to shove off so their generation can take power and dramatically lower the median age in DC. New blood would be no bad thing but would going from rule by boomers to rule by millennials really be an improvement?
On the left, it would see leadership of the Democratic Party pass from the generation of acid, amnesty and abortion to the generation of privilege, pronouns and police abolition. On the right, the Republican torch would go from tax-cuts-for-Jesus Reaganbrains to Viktor Orbán fans who think they’re terribly edgy.
In the round, it would mean replacing the most coddled, entitled, insufferably certain generation in American history with the generation that comes a close second. Which brings me to my proposal for solving, if not all, then quite a lot of America’s problems: put Generation X in charge.
Gen X — those born between 1965 and 1980 — have the perfect political hinterland, forged in the fiery crucible of absolutely nothing. They had no war to protest, no draft to dodge. No counter-culture, no “Helter Skelter.” By the time they came of age, politics had escaped from the dread clutches of relevance and returned to its rightful place as the preserve of nerds, sociopaths, egomaniacs and other descriptions of Hillary Clinton.
Instinctively post-racial, mostly unfussed about private preferences, casually skeptical of authority, if Gen X has a political philosophy it is the great cause of not giving a fuck. Some might call them slackers but I consider them the chillest generation. The last to make a proper go of smoking, the last to do any drinking worth the name and the last to actually enjoy sex, which given the backdrop of AIDS is impressive. Besides, how can you not love a generation whose twin enthusiasms were cocaine and exercise?
Gen-Xers made careers for John Hughes and Cameron Crowe and Robert Zemeckis. They couldn’t get enough of watching their likenesses sliced up by summer-camp stalking psychos. They made hits of lowbrow sex comedies like Porky’s and Spring Break — and if you want to know why that’s super problematic, some joyless hall monitor called Melissa at VICE or the New Republic will explain in 1,000 breathless words.
They read Bret Easton Ellis and Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis — and Alice Walker, because someone had to. They Vogued and Walked Like An Egyptian and pretended to understand what Michael Stipe was on about. They found their sound in The Smiths and Tracy Chapman and Prince, and we’ll just gloss over the whole U2 thing. They started grunge bands in their parents’ garages and some of them ended up playing their music on MTV back when MTV played music.
Fine, Gen X is less buttoned up than the generation that came before and after. It has eclectic and easygoing tastes in popular culture. But are these really qualifications for running the world’s most powerful country? In a word, yes. In a Gen X word, duh.
Take the economy. There’s no better generation to lead on this than the one that falls smack-bang between boomers and millennials. The former entered a less competitive labor market, with fewer qualifications and those who did attend college paid a lot less for it.
They benefited from more job security, cheaper housing and a more active government, born into the economic stability fostered by the New Deal and coming into adulthood in time for the Great Society. Their grandchildren’s generation, in part because of boomers’ voting patterns in the Eighties and Nineties, came of age amid recession, precarity and pared back government.
Gen X understands both experiences, having shared in some of the boomer-era benefits while taking some of the hits that landed on millennials. They are well-placed to strike a balance between economic growth, competition and innovation, on the one hand, and economic security, social protection and an enabling state, on the other.
Ditto on another defining challenge, climate change. Gen Xers grew up appreciating the value of fossil fuels but also seeing their escalating impact on the planet. They are the ideal cohort to find a middle ground between carbon-clingers resistant to change and doom-mongering idealists who would shutter entire industries overnight. As for the culture wars, Gen X is the generation most likely to practice a laidback liberalism that says do what you want, think what you want, and say what you want, but you don’t get to decide what anyone else does, thinks or says.
There is an alternative to government of, by and for the nursing home and the dismal competing visions of those who would supplant the current order, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s wokeocracy on the left and Vivek Ramaswamy’s neo-Trumpism on the right. Between boomers’ self-enrichment and millennials’ identity-obsessed illiberalism there is a generation that can lead America with cool heads. A generation that can fix some of the mistakes made by boomers and head off some that millennials are itching to make. Everybody wants to rule the world, according to a seminal band of the era, but only Gen Xers should be allowed to.
This is not a new concept. In 2017 Peter Weber wrote:
What would a Gen X president have to offer? You may still think of Generation X as the slackers from such ’90s classics as Singles, Reality Bites, and, well, Slackers. But that was then. Now, they’re the tough, no-nonsense former latchkey children. “Gen-X did not inherit the military structure of the Greatest Generation, the class structure of the Silent Generation, nor the automatic economic growth given to the baby boomers,” GOP consultant Brad Todd wrote in The Atlantic last year. “Instead, they inherited the latchkey kid autonomy that came from a skyrocketing divorce rate, and the adult career uncertainty ushered in by post-industrial economic transition.”
As a generation, Pew tells us, Gen X is politically about halfway between the more conservative boomers and the more liberal millennials — whether that’s a shifting-right-with-age phenomenon or something deeper is presumably to be determined. But it seems more complicated than simply occupying the political center. “It was Gen Xers who popularized the phrase ‘socially liberal, economically conservative,’” generational researcher David Rosen wrote at Politico in January 2016, “an ideological orientation reflecting their underlying distaste for authority.”
If that’s true — tax cuts and gay marriage? — it isn’t true for Gen X’s political footprint. The most powerful Xer, Paul Ryan, is socially conservative and economically very conservative. Ditto Ted Cruz, the Gen Xer who came closest to the presidency. If the Greatest Generation lived in the penumbra of FDR and the boomers in the brief-hot glow of JFK, Gen X grew up with Jimmy Carter — a proximate doppelgänger of Mister Rogers — and especially Ronald Reagan.
The Republican Gen Xers venerate Reagan, but they’re offering a purified version of Reaganism, sort of like the Gipper was a band and they’re going to play only his best albums, original vinyl, on their political turntables. They probably genuinely love trickle-down economics, but as a practical matter, this Reaganphilia makes political sense, too, because the Republican Party, and especially the part of it that votes in primaries, is older and more more conservative than the general public (and Gen X). …
The important difference between Gen X and its demographic older and younger siblings is in tone, though, not policy. It isn’t that Gen X doesn’t have its own aspirations, it’s just that, collectively, it has seen the limits of ideological windmill-tilting and moral preening and recognizes the value of pragmatism. “If generations could be said to have mottos,” Rosen argues at Politico, “Gen X’s would almost certainly be Nike’s omnipresent corporate slogan: Just Do It.”
Boomers had a dream; Gen X has its own dreams but what it really wants is a plan. It has mortgages and car payments and kids to put through college.
… the two main political parties being what they are, the best shot for achieving a Gen X America lies in compromise, finding common ground between a vibrant Gen X right and Gen X left. Real compromise used to happen in Washington — say, when Reagan worked with the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass major immigration and tax reform. It has been rarer since the boomers took over Washington in 1995, but it could happen again, if we can move past their decades-old ideological blood feuds. …
So, when the boomers finally retire (with their Social Security checks financed by Gen X and millennials), there’s a chance for a new politics in Washington. But for that to happen, Gen X needs good politicians. Trump’s last-gasp-boomer presidency is drawing candidates willing to take a leap of faith toward Congress in 2018, and so maybe that is when Gen X will gain a House majority. But the midterms are a year away, and Gen X is still Gen X.
“Though much derided, members of my generation turn out to be something like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca — we’ve seen everything and grown tired of history and all the fighting and so have opened our own little joint at the edge of the desert, the last outpost in a world gone mad, the last light in the last saloon on the darkest night of the year,” Rich Cohen writes in Vanity Fair. “There never were enough of us to demand the undivided attention of advertisers and hitmakers, we have been happy in our little joint, serving from can till can’t astride the Sahara. We have been witnesses, watching and recalling.
Being on the oldest end of Generation X and as someone suggested more than once to run for … something …
… I find this amusing on the eve of my high school’s 40th class reunion, as well as this 2022 piece from Ben Jacobs:
It’s a drowsy rainy Thursday at the Iowa State Capitol, and Iowa State Representative Cherielynn Westrich is speaking to a school group about how a bill becomes a law. The state Legislature is out of session, and only a handful of members are lazing about the chamber catching up on correspondence. Westrich, a petite cheery blonde, is just finishing up explaining how a lawmaker can summon a legislative page to their desk if they have a specific request to add to a bill. Her audience is a group of about two dozen middle school-aged kids seated on the floor in the back corner of the room.
Just then, another legislator, Steve Holt, interrupts with a smirk. It’s a school group from his district but he had left Westrich babysitting them for a few minutes. “You all know a fun fact about Rep. Westrich?” he asks. “She was in a famous rock band when she was young; you can find the videos on YouTube.”
Westrich then tries to explain her past to the school group of children too young to remember Kanye West at the VMAs, let alone the mid-90s alternative rock scene. “Well so, you guys know who Madonna is? Madonna signed my band to her record label, and we toured all around the world and got to play all the big coliseums like Madison Square Garden, and then we had videos — you guys know about MTV? — we had two of them, and you can still find them online from a long time ago back in the 1900s.”
The children laugh politely, and then it is time for them to go back to their school bus. Both their tour of the Iowa State Capitol and brief excursion into ‘90s nostalgia were over.
But, for Westrich, neither was. The first term Iowa Republican was a Zelig-like figure in ‘90s pop culture. She worked for Flea, played with Spike Jonze in her first band and turned down the opportunity to appear on “Jackass.” But she’s perhaps best known for playing keyboard with the Rentals, a ‘90s band that scored a single hit with the song “Friends of P.” while touring the world with performers like Blur and Alanis Morissette.
Now, 20 years later, after getting inspired to enter politics by former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, Westrich is a solidly conservative state representative from blue-collar southeast Iowa who is pro-gun and anti-vaccine mandate. It may be an unusual trajectory for someone who played moog synthesizer in a popular alternative rock band, but, given the politics of people in her generation, it actually might not be unusual at all.
Gen Xers, which can be roughly defined as those born between 1965 and 1980, came of age under President Ronald Reagan amid the end of the Cold War. The popular image of Generation X has never quite fit in within any easy political framing. It’s the generation that produced grunge rock and gangsta rap but also reached cultural consciousness at the height of the “greed is good” 1980s memorialized in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. In fact, if there was any popular image of this generation’s politics, it was that they were apolitical. The slackers depicted in Richard Linklater movies or the grunge rockers in flannel were almost devoid of political inclination save a generalized cynicism and MTV’s “Choose or Lose” campaign, which was designed to simply convince young voters that politics matters at all. After their first election in 1984, they bounced back and forth in presidential elections — although exit poll data doesn’t always provide a clear generation breakdown — but were never at all particularly progressive and veered to the right of the nation as a whole.
And there were always hints of a more right-wing inclination culturally even if they may have been camouflaged by the less politically charged atmosphere at the time. The first major political depiction of this cohort was on the sitcom Family Ties, where Reagan-loving teenager Alex P. Keaton clashed with his liberal boomer parents. As Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini put it to Politico, “the MTV generation has always been a little bit more conservative.”
Now, though, there is no confusion: Generation X is safely Republican. One model from 2014 measuring only white voters through the 2012 election shows those born in the mid-to-late 1960s being the most Republican-leaning of all, more so than the older Boomers and Silent generation. In a poll released in late April by Marist/NPR that separated voters by generation, Generation X had the highest level of disapproval for Biden and were the generation most likely to say they would vote for a Republican candidate in the midterms if they were held that day.
While voters have historically tended to be more conservative as they age, that has accelerated with Generation X. In fact, Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, told me that Generation X has now become the most conservative generation, surpassing the Boomers in their rightward tilt.
Some of this has to do with broader historical forces that were out of anyone’s control. The political atmosphere in which voters first cast ballots and became politically aware leaves a lasting impact through their lives. As Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson told me, “If you first became aware of politics during Reagan/[George H.W.] Bush/Clinton era, you’re more likely to lean a bit more to the right.” This was a time when even Bill Clinton was proclaiming “the era of big government is over
Westrich, born in 1966, fits in with the oldest and, according to some studies, most conservative tranche of this generation. The first presidential election she would have been eligible to vote in was Reagan’s 1984 landslide, and she would have come of age at time in which there were few strong personalities defining the Democratic Party. Exit polls from that year show Reagan improving by 15 percentage points over 1980 among voters under 30, which was the biggest change in any individual demographic that year.
For Westrich, the ‘90s were not particularly political times either. There was no discussion of Newt Gingrich or Hillarycare on the tour bus. Instead, it was a nerdy nomadic experience going from city to city and country to country. In lieu of political talk, Westrich and fellow keyboardist Maya Rudolph (who would later become famous on Saturday Night Live) would make humorous videos on their Super 8 camera.
For her, even joining the band was the result of a series of accidents. It was a side project of Matt Sharp, the bassist from Weezer. In the year leading up to the release of Weezer’s hit debut, the Blue Album, Sharp had some downtime. He used it to record a demo with some friends. A small punk rock label got a hold of it and became interested. Sharp roped in two friends, one of whom was Westrich, to pretend to be the band behind the demo.
It worked, and the two, along with Weezer’s drummer, Patrick Wilson, and the guitarist from Westrich’s band at the time, Rod Cervera, started recording an album before ever playing any live shows together.
The result was repeated rehearsal sessions at a studio broken up by games of hacky sack while Ronnie James Dio, the former lead singer of Black Sabbath who was recording in the same building, sat in and watched.
At the time, Westrich stood out for her hobby of repairing vintage cars rather than any political inclinations. As Sharp recalled, “there weren’t too many Moog-playing … mechanically inclined synthesizer players in the alternative landscape of 1995.”
In fact, Sharp couldn’t really recall much political engagement at all at that time. “We were quite young and had our minds on other things and don’t think any of us were too engaged in that stuff.”
Westrich didn’t recall any political conversation either. She said at the time she “felt like politics was for rich people.” “Everyone in politics had money,” she said, “and I just felt that was never going to be for me because I grew up … without a lot of money.” She couldn’t even recall any candidate who had ever really inspired her before Trump and described her past votes as just “picking between the lesser of two evils” and often just voting against incumbents of either party.
In the decades since leaving music, Westrich reached an entirely different niche of quasi-celebrity as a mechanic on Overhaulin’, a reality television show where a team of auto mechanics surprises someone by rebuilding their car into a custom hotrod. Westrich took great pleasure in noting to me that while there were other women on the show, she was the only fully-fledged mechanic who actually worked on the cars.
Westrich’s introduction to politics didn’t come until 2016. Having recently moved to Ottumwa, Iowa, to be with her long-term boyfriend, she was coaxed into volunteering for Trump’s general election campaign by a friend with whom she worked out. In Westrich’s telling “she kept talking about making phone calls and knocking doors for Trump and asking me to go and I kept saying ‘no thanks.’”
Eventually, though, she relented and went to Trump’s campaign office.
She found that she enjoyed the process of engaging with voters. “It was fun talking to people,” she said, and she enjoyed able to give them good information. “They really weren’t doing their homework,” she said of the voters she talked talk to. “They felt informed because watching evening news, but really weren’t able to go beyond that.”
It was an unlikely path to a political career, and in keeping with her roots, she often sounds less like a savvy political insider and more like an average voter who is still figuring out which party is right for her. Her thoughts on her own political journey also shows how Gen X voters square their conservative views with the independent streak one also finds in the alternative culture they gave a name to.
Although she was attracted to politics by Trump and voted for him twice, she has not embraced the personality cult around him and struck discordant notes about the 45th president at times. She certainly didn’t like his temperament, but she made clear that she was still a fan of his policies, pointing to achievements like “supporting our veterans” and “getting innocent people out of prison.” She also praised him as “the first candidate who was anti-establishment enough that I took a second look at him.” “I thought he may be someone that was actually different from the Clintons and Bushes,” she said.
In her recollection, her interest in Trump was prompted by his positions on trade. However, looking back six years later she confessed, “I’m going to forget all the facts.” She tried to recall: “I did my research back then into what was happening with Paris Trade Accord [a reference to the climate agreement that the Obama administration had entered into] and things … I didn’t like it, and Trump was against it. I said, ‘Ok, great.’”
This is roughly consistent with Bonier’s analysis of Gen X voters, which has found that they are very concerned about the economy, somewhat concerned about retirement (although nowhere near as much as Baby Boomers) and not terribly concerned about issues like the environment or guns. These general trends were echoed by John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard University’s Kennedy School who found that on economic issues, Generation Xers leaned far more to the right than any other generation.
Her journey to supporting Trump was also a typical one for Gen Xers, As Anderson explained Trump in particular had an effect polarizing politics along generational lines. Younger voters broke heavily towards Democrats while older voters broke heavily towards the GOP.
From there, Westrich was recruited to run for office by local activists in what was a traditional Democratic area in and around Ottumwa against an eight-term incumbent. Although she lost on the first try in 2018, Westrich won in 2020.
Yet, despite being a Republican elected official, she still maintains a certain insistent independence. In fact, she insisted that she had kept her independent registration until two weeks before her first election until she was told that Iowa election law did not offer her much of a choice. She still insisted that she votes for “the person,” not “the party.” “That may disappoint some Republicans,” she said, but “you have to elect the people who will do the right job.”
In the past, that meant she would deliberately switch back and forth to vote against incumbents “just to get them out of power.” Now, in reality, as an incumbent herself, that meant she was still just supporting Republicans.
Westrich’s journey may be unusual in its details, but it still captures the political arc of her generation. Increasingly, the demographic base of the American right will be those too young to remember Watergate but too old to have spent much if any of their childhood on the Internet. It’s not just their life experiences that differ from other generations. At a time when American politics is increasingly polarized around education and racial views, Generation X maintains higher rates of racial resentment than succeeding generations while still having lower rates of educational attainment..
That may have been true, but it was also a hint of the politics to come. Gen X is full of contradictions, but not surprises — at least not when it comes to politics. In 2024, and probably for many years afterward, the fate of the GOP will rest safely in the hands of Gen Xers such as Westrich. First they were latchkey kids and then they were slackers — but now, they’re Republicans.
Paul Ryan for president? The GOP could do worse, except in the opinion of Trumpers who, it must be said regardless of the polls, are backing a candidate who lost in 2020, whose backed candidates mostly lost in 2022, and who will lose in 2024 if he’s the GOP nominee. Of course, Florida Sen. Maco Rubio, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Utah whatever-he-was Evan McMullen all ran in 2016, and all obviously lost to Trump.
The GOP presidential field now includes from my g-g-g-generation South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, 57; former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, 51; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, 44; and former Texas Rep. Will Hurd, 44. There are also former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, 57; Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, 56; South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, 51; and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, 46, who might run or might change his mind, in Sununu’s case, against running.
Whatever you think of those on the preceding two paragraphs, each seems unlikely to drop dead tomorrow due to age, or make you question their faculties or mental state. They and we of Gen X have gone through three cataclysms in our adult lives — 9/11, the Great Recession, and COVID — in which national leadership left a great deal to be desired. Some of us may have learned from them.
Former vice president Mike Pence took aim at former president Donald Trump and his “populist followers and imitators” during a speech in New Hampshire on Wednesday titled, “Populism vs. Conservatism: Republicans’ Time for Choosing.”
Pence told a crowd at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College that Republican voters “face a choice” between conservative principles and the rising populist movement. He said populists are replacing limited government and traditional values with “an agenda stitched together by little else than personal grievances and performative outrage.”
Pence warned that leaning into populism could lead to a future where “our party’s relevancy will be confined to history books.”
“It may live on in some populist fashion, but then it will truly be, in a cruel twist, Republican in name only,” he said.
“Will we choose to go down the path of populism and decline? I believe we stand at a crossroads,” Pence said. “I have faith that Republican voters will once again choose the good way.”
Pence took direct aim at his former running mate. “The Republican Party did not begin on a golden escalator in 2015,” Pence said, referring to Trump’s presidential announcement at Trump Tower in New York.
“Donald Trump, along with his populist followers and imitators — some of whom are also seeking the Republican presidential nomination — often sound like an echo of the progressive they would replace in the White House,” Pence said.
He also suggested Trump’s position on entitlement reform is “identical” to President Biden’s.
Trump called on Republican lawmakers not to “cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security” when they began negotiations with President Biden and Democrats over a measure to raise the debt ceiling in January. “Cut waste, fraud, and abuse everywhere that we can find it, and there is plenty of it. . . . But do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security. Don’t destroy it,” Trump said at the time.
Pence went on to criticize Florida governor Ron DeSantis for having “used the power of the state to punish corporations for taking a political stand he disagreed with.” The comment seemingly referred to DeSantis’s ongoing feud with Disney, which filed a lawsuit against the governor and other state leaders in April accusing them of participating in a “targeted campaign of government retaliation” against the company that began last year when it spoke out against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law.
Pence, meanwhile, also called political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy “one of former president’s populist protégés” and knocked his support for raising the inheritance tax.
But the former vice president’s advisers told reporters ahead of the speech on Tuesday that the former vice president’s remarks are not directed specifically toward Trump or Ramaswamy. It would be “much too small an interpretation” of his speech to focus on any one political figure, the advisers said.
They also accused former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott of claiming to be classical conservatives while adopting some populist views. “Which might be even more dangerous, because it seems like it’s pandering,” an adviser said.
Pence warned that the move toward populism over conservatism could strip America from it’s role as a global leader and erode constitutional norms.
While some may question how Pence can distance himself from the populist movement after having served with Trump, the former vice president said: “When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative. And together, we did just that. But he and his imitators make no such promise today.”
Pence’s speech, which is a callback to Ronald Reagan’s 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid, comes weeks before the second presidential debate is set to take place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
From the moment Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, his critics on the left have bewailed the overwhelming support he receives from evangelical Christians. How could those who claim to esteem traditional moral values—monogamy chief among them—support a profane libertine like Mr. Trump? The implicit charge was that socially conservative Christians cared more about political ends than about moral values. But the charge was specious. Their political ends were perfectly consistent with the values they purported to hold, even if the agent through whom they sought to promote those values (Mr. Trump) didn’t exhibit them. And anyway I’m not sure what choice socially conservative religious voters had on Election Day in 2016. Were they supposed to vote for Hillary Clinton?
The idea that lust for power explains evangelical support for Mr. Trump is one form of a larger accusation leveled by liberals and progressives against Republicans in the Trump era. Every time a Republican praised the 45th president, it was an indication of the party’s “fealty” or “near-total fealty” or “total fealty” to the president. And every time a Republican candidate took Mr. Trump’s view on a subject, it was an instance of the president’s “grip” or “iron grip” or “death grip” on the GOP.
I gladly concede that many Republican candidates and officeholders aligned themselves in unseemly ways with Mr. Trump. Some sang his praises as president despite having scorned him as a candidate. Others took up his crotchets as their own—voter fraud, trade deficits—having never complained about those things before. And many—though far from all—remained silent about his erratic, frequently childish and vulgar personal behavior. Still, some form of “fealty” by Republicans to a sitting Republican president is unavoidable, and it was hardly surprising that the head of his party had a “grip” on it.
Whatever may be said about the GOP’s solicitous attitude to Mr. Trump during the years of his presidency, it compares favorably with the left’s omertà in the face of President Biden’s obvious mental infirmity, incompetence and what appears to be a history of self-enrichment.
Mr. Trump’s election occasioned some unlovely shifting of principles on the right, but it also precipitated fierce debate. Some Republicans refused to find fault with the new president for anything. Others made their peace with his election but remained critical when his conduct and decisions merited it. A few made it their mission to destroy him. Right-oriented policy organizations and conservative publications endured rancorous public schisms. Conservative religious leaders, including evangelical Christians, fell out with each other.
That is more than one can say for the Democratic Party and the mainstream left of the 2020s. The deficiencies of Mr. Trump are different from those of Mr. Biden, but the latter’s personal culpabilities and political liabilities are what any normal, uninvested person would call grave. Mr. Biden’s cringe-making decline is on display nearly every time he appears in public; examples are too many, and too painful, to describe. His diminished state might be funny in a novel or a movie, but in the real world it’s a continuing invitation to bad actors to engage in devilry and expect no consequence.
And yet with a tiny number of unremarkable exceptions, Democratic politicos say nothing.
The stupendously incompetent pullout from Afghanistan occurred early in Mr. Biden’s term, and the horrors it produced would have destroyed any other presidency—a bomb killing 13 Marines; a retaliatory drone strike killing zero terrorists and 10 civilians, including seven children; a White House affecting unconcern for hundreds of Americans trapped inside the country; Afghan citizens pitifully clinging to a departing U.S. military plane, some of them falling to their deaths; former Afghan allies left at the mercies of the Taliban; billions of dollars worth of military equipment abandoned in the field; women and girls forced to drop out of school. Forgive the indecorousness, but it is undeniable that this calamity was a consequence of some combination of senility and incompetence. Yet the number of high-level Democrats who expressed more than vague “worry” and “concern” is somewhere between small and nonexistent.
You might have expected a credible Democrat, maybe a retired military officer, to challenge Mr. Biden in a primary. But no; the party rearranged its traditional primary schedule to begin with South Carolina and so make any primary challenge nearly impossible. I await the stream of articles in the New York Times and Washington Post about Mr. Biden’s “iron grip” on his party.
The Hunter Biden revelations would have generated calls for resignation in a time of more sanity and less rancor. Text messages indicating the young Mr. Biden was selling access to his father, a maze of shell companies seemingly meant to hide transactions, strong evidence that the Justice Department monkey-wrenched an investigation into that activity—none of it provokes curiosity on the left. That one of the associates Hunter badgered for payment works for a company with ties to the Chinese government is also, for Democrats and the left’s pundit class, a matter of no interest.
This newspaper’s editorial page managed to provoke Mr. Trump into many all-caps condemnations. Has any center-left outlet provoked Mr. Biden into one of those fits of rage for which he is famous?
The leftist journalist Franklin Foer’s book “The Last Politician,” to be published Tuesday, relates some episodes that reflect poorly on President Biden. The passages I’ve been able to glean, however, look mild—mainly a lot of unflattering things said about Mr. Biden, anonymously, by allies and aides. That these rather gentle slights have attracted so much attention isn’t a measure of their severity. They remind us, rather, that for 2½ years no one on Mr. Biden’s side has dared to say anything disparaging of him.
Yesterday while my wife and I were sort of working to get ahead of the week, I stopped long enough to call an old friend to wish him a happy birthday. …
He was a full on Democrat-Farmer-Labor Walter Mondale lib, I was a Reagan Republican but as strange as it was, we became friends. …
Needless to say, he hates Trump with the heat of a thousand suns.
He knows my political bent so he started rattling off all the things Trump had done.
As usual, nether Trump, Ron DeSantis, nor anyone in the GOP had done any of that. Honestly, his litany sounded like the worst BlueAnon graphic novel ever conceived in the fever dreams of a leftist. It was true Bad Orange Man stuff.
So, I let him go understanding that it was pointless, so when he ran out of breath, I said:
“You know, for the first time in my life I might not vote for someone who uses their family to enrich themselves, who colludes with our enemies, is protected by elected officials in Congress who lie for him and then uses the media to hide his treason.”
I went on to list all the things that Biden has done – or had people do for him – acting as if I was talking about Trump.
My friend literally was not cognizant I was talking about Biden. He is totally locked into “See no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil” mode where Biden is concerned.
Imagine his surprise when I told him I was talking about Joe Biden.
He then began to argue that none of what I said happened even though I offered to send him links to favorable leftist media where even they admitted it did.
He simply said he didn’t need any cites because he knew Biden was a good man who would never do things like that.
I figured out what the issue was and I told him that he was using everything he imagined Trump did, but didn’t, as a wall to block the real issues with Biden.
We ended the call somewhat less cordially than it began, but I think we are still friends, at least for the next year. …
It completely sums up the Democrat Party’s willful blindness to the cringing awfulness of Joe Biden and that the real damage Biden and his minions are doing that is even greater than anything their jaundiced brains could imagine Donald J. Trump ever did.
Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson has documented a strange mix of catastrophism and overconfidence that dominates the thinking among Republican voters. “Republicans both deeply fear a 2024 loss and can’t fathom its actually happening,” she wrote. And the focus groups she conducts for the New York Times bear this conclusion out. Though their political views and values differed, precisely none of the eleven Republican participants in her last sample could envision a scenario in which Joe Biden won reelection in 2024. That doesn’t just also apply to Donald Trump if he emerges as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. They think it is especially true of the former president, who Republican primary voters appear to believe is Biden’s strongest hypothetical opponent.
The theories that political observers posit to explain the Right’s certitude are unsatisfying, partly because they are predicated on a variety of uncharitable assumptions about Republican voters. For example, the notion that Republicans refuse to entertain the prospect of loss because Trump has coached them into believing that he didn’t actually lose the 2020 election is one unsatisfactory theory.
Three weeks ago, I wrote that, while Trump and Biden were running even in the polls, I thought Biden had the edge for next year’s general election, because I just didn’t see how Trump was making or could make gains among the undecided (assuming there are any truly undecided).
Today, there’s evidence I might need to re-think that. I still doubt that Trump is making any converts. But what might be happening is something I underestimated: that while Trump fails to gain, Biden is slipping.
The evidence is in a NYT article by Nate Cohn titled, “Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden.” The subhead is, “It’s a weakness that could manifest itself as low Democratic turnout even if Trump and Republicans don’t gain among those groups.”
Why is this important? Because, as the last two presidential elections tell us, even a marginal erosion of black support for Biden in, say, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia could throw Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania to Trump, and with it the election.
The Times notes:
On average, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just 53 percent to 28 percent among registered nonwhite voters in a compilation of Times/Siena polls from 2022 and 2023, which includes over 1,500 nonwhite respondents.
The results represent a marked deterioration in Mr. Biden’s support compared with 2020, when he won more than 70 percent of nonwhite voters. If he’s unable to revitalize this support by next November, it will continue a decade-long trend of declining Democratic strength among voters considered to be the foundation of the party.
Given Biden’s narrow winning margins in just a few swing states last time, a slippage to that extent would make Biden’s winning them again a long shot, and probably put Trump in the White House.
The Democratic Party’s share of support among non-white voters has slipped across every demographic category — gender, age, education and income.
Mr. Biden’s tepid support among these voters appears to be mostly responsible for the close race in early national surveys, which show Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump all but tied among registered voters even as Mr. Biden runs as well among white voters as he did four years ago.
Could it be that black voters have had enough of their cities being hollowed out by roving gangs of thieves, with the consequent dozens of store closures; or of their young men being murdered while prosecution standards go flaccid under progressive DA’s; or of public education dooming their kids to lousy jobs or no jobs because they never learn to read or add or speak decent English?
I don’t know. I’m not a sociologist. But sooner or later, these things were bound to register, and black people — whom the Left has taken for years as ciphers and fools — might be in the process of showing they’re no such thing.
…the possibility that [Biden’s] standing will remain beneath the already depressed levels of the last presidential election should not be discounted. Democrats have lost ground among nonwhite voters in almost every election over the last decade, even as racially charged fights over everything from a border wall to kneeling during the national anthem might have been expected to produce the exact opposite result.
That passage wonderfully illustrates how much the stupid passes for the sage among those who write the NYT (and a legion of other, similarly liberal outlets). Hey Lefties, wake up! Neither working class black people (nor any other working class people who think) are going to be thrilled when illegal immigrants are taking their jobs, and doing so just as the taxes they pay are financing the services illegals absorb. And the Times’ breezy assumption that blacks support gestures of contempt for the United States is worse than merely patronizing. It’s disgusting and almost certainly false — or, as the Times would airily say, “without evidence.”
I mean, hello! Just because the Harvard and NYU and Vassar grads who work at the Times have had their brains turned to mush doesn’t mean that black people have. People who have to live with their daily dose of wages falling behind Bidenflation, and crime and drugs and vagrancy at the streetcorner, and failing and dangerous public schools, have a grip on reality that the editing room at the Times could really use but has next to no chance of getting.
Many of Mr. Biden’s vulnerabilities — like his age and inflation — could exacerbate the trend, as nonwhite voters tend to be younger and less affluent than white voters. Overall, the president’s approval rating stands at just 47 percent among nonwhite voters in Times/Siena polling over the last year; his favorability rating is just 54 percent.
Support that tepid among what should be the Democrats’ strongest constituencies has to be ringing alarm bells inside the White House. If that doesn’t, these two paragraphs buried down in the article will:
The survey finds evidence that a modest but important 5 percent of nonwhite Biden voters now support Mr. Trump, including 8 percent of Hispanic voters who say they backed Mr. Biden in 2020. Virtually no nonwhite voters who say they supported Mr. Trump — just 1 percent — say they will back Mr. Biden this time around. In comparison, white Biden and white Trump supporters from 2020 say they will return to their previous candidate in nearly identical numbers.
Beyond voters who have flipped to Mr. Trump, a large number of disaffected voters who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 now say they’re undecided or simply won’t vote this time around. As a consequence, his weakness is concentrated among less engaged voters on the periphery of politics, who have not consistently voted in recent elections and who may decide to stay home next November.
When, as was the case in the last two elections and is likely to be in next year’s as well, the outcome is determined by narrow margins in three or four states, each with significant black and/or Hispanic populations, the Times is spot on in noting that even a modest shift toward Trump could tell the tale.
Still, before too much cheer about getting rid of Biden seeps in, it’s worth remembering that Trump might not be Biden’s Republican opponent, and that if he’s not, it remains to be seen whether Trump’s (relatively high, for a Republican) appeal to minority voters would also accrue to a different candidate like Ron DeSantis on Nikki Haley. But that’s yet another imponderable: What a DeSantis or Haley might lose in not having Trump’s appeal to minority voters, he or she might gain in re-establishing support in the suburbs — support that has been battered by exactly the rouge, rough-and-tumble style that Trump uses so well in building his more populist appeal.
It’s anyone’s guess how it will work out. But one way or the other, the NYT’s account of Biden’s slipagge among his most needed constituencies counts as good news for anyone who thinks the country cannot continue on its present path.
The number one single in the U.K. todayyyyyyy in 19677777777 …
One yearrrrrr laterrrrrr, the Beatles recorded Eric Clapton’s guitar part for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” making him the first non-Beatle on a Beatle record:
The College of Rock and Roll Knowledge reports:
… The Beatles’ George Harrison was heading in to London for a recording session for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. His neighbor, Eric Clapton needed a lift into London, so George offered to take him. George had a different idea though. Harrison wasn’t happy with his own guitar tracks on the song so while driving, he asked Eric to come to the session and do a track on. Clapton at first refused, saying that “nobody (famous) ever plays on the Beatles records!” but George insisted. Clapton came in and the invitation has its intended effect: the band members were completely professional and Eric’s solo sounded great. As Clapton was listening to a playback, the thought his solo wasn’t “Beatle-y enough,” so the solo is run through an ADT circuit with “varispeed”, with the session engineer manually ‘waggling’ the oscillator: Engineer Chris Thomas has recalled: “Eric said that he didn’t want it to sound like him. So I was just sitting there wobbling the thing, they wanted it really extreme, so that’s what I did.” The effect sounded like the guitar was run through the Leslie rotating speaker of the Hammond B-3 organ cabinet.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 