An interesting anniversary considering what tomorrow is: Today in 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Federal Communications Commission ruling punishing WBAI radio in New York City for broadcasting George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words. (If you click on the link, remember, you’ve been warned.)
Birthdays begin with Fontella Bass:
Damon Harris of the Temptations:
Today in 1969, Leslie West and Felix Pappalardi created Mountain:
Birthdays today start with Paul Williams of the Temptations:
Today in 1963, the Beatles recorded “She Loves You,” yeah, yeah, yeah:
Four years later, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” reached number one, and stayed there for 15 weeks:
I have to issue an apology. Not on my behalf, but on behalf of my generation. You see, we are the reason the world has to deal with a couple of self righteous, selfish, and entitled generations. It is because of us that things have taken such a turn for the worse.
When I was growing up, it was the beginning of the “self esteem” movement. We were taught that our self esteem was not only important, it was paramount. How we felt about ourselves was the most important part of our lives. It didn’t matter how it affected others, as long as we felt good about ourselves, we could do anything. As you can imagine, this particular attitude is not completely healthy.
So, naturally, we took that attitude and applied it to our children. Only we took it to a laughable extreme. We not only shielded our kids from negative feelings, we took steps to insure that nothing bad ever happened to them. We created the “bubble wrapped” generation. No hardships at all. Not even losing at sports. We gave them everything they wanted. We taught them that they were special and they didn’t have to worry about feeling bad and they deserve everything they want.
As you can suspect, that is not a wholly healthy attitude either. We sent out waves of young adults into the world who had no idea how to handle negative stimuli. They never were given the opportunity to experience hardships and learn how to deal with it. So now, being thrust into a world where they aren’t the center of attention, we have at least one entire generation who lack the basic skills to handle day to day life and they respond with the only mechanism that they know…primal rage.
As Razorfist described in his great rant, “Of School Shooters and Fabergé Eggs: A Rant” we created an entire generation (I think two, but that’s semantics) of Fabergé Eggs…ornate on the outside, perfectly hollow on the inside. The slightest bump or shake and the entire egg collapses in on itself…often with violent results.
We caused this. We caused the screaming. We caused the screeching. We caused the entitlement. We caused the shootings. We caused all of it. We created the most narcissistic, self obsessive, entitled generation the country has ever seen. We are now reaping what we sowed. The only question left is, can we reverse it?
So for that, I, on behalf of my generation, apologize. We didn’t mean it, but we did cause it.
Well, I don’t, because we didn’t raise our kids this way. We were not helicopter parents. I don’t believe we shielded our kids from the consequences of their actions, or from hurt feelings. Their schools may have overloaded on self-esteem, but their parents did not.
I would say our two sons have turned out quite well. They’re both fully (or more) employed responsible citizens living on their own, not in their parents’ basement, in their early 20s. Our daughter just graduated from high school, and is attending college this fall, so she doesn’t get a grade yet.
This is far from the first attempt to blame a generation for the faults of that generation’s children. Facebook Friend Greg Apologia writes the Christian Living and Influence blog in which he believes the current state of today’s permissive society is because of excessively permissive Baby Boomers, themselves the children of World War II veterans who wanted to provide for their kids and shield them from the horrors of what they witnessed. Of course, the world has the habit of creating new horrors in every generation.
I’m not entirely convinced in this theory because people of the same age who grow up during the same time might have similar shared experiences — for those of us in Gen X the space shuttle Challenger explosion, 9/11, the Great Recession and COVID-19 — but those experiences are shaped by where we are. Those of us celebrating (if that’s what you want to call it) Madison La Follette High School’s Class of 1983 40-year reunion grew up in a largely suburban, more white-collar than blue-collar part of Madison. That is a significantly different upbringing than growing up in an inner-city single-parent household, or growing up in a rural area.
I have concluded from observation that how children turn out depends a lot on the state of their parents’ marriage. My wife’s parents were married for 54 years. My parents have been married for 62 years. My generation is reputed for being the first “latch-key kids,” in which they would go home to an empty house after school because either both parents or the single parent was working. I don’t know about the importance of that (my mother was also working while we were in middle school), but I do believe that if your parents were divorced, divorce appears to you to be the natural state instead of parents staying married. Similarly those people who had absent fathers would see that as normal as well (and then act accordingly), to the great detriment of our society today.
Here’s an odd anniversary: Four days after Cher divorced Sonny Bono, she married Gregg Allman. Come back to this blog in nine days to find out what happened next.
Birthdays start with Florence Ballard of the Supremes …
Greg Ip opined Wednesday:
President Biden kicks off a national campaign Wednesday pitching his economic record to a deeply skeptical public.
The challenge: Biden really has two economic records. One of them begins in late 2021 and consists of a series of legislative wins on infrastructure, semiconductor production and renewable energy, which he then preserved in a debt-ceiling deal with Republicans. These policies could shape the economy for years to come.
That record, though, is overshadowed by the record of his first months in office, when his American Rescue Plan pumped $1.9 trillion of demand into a supply-constrained economy. The result was the tightest job market in memory and a surge in inflation that still hangs over Biden’s approval ratings and his prospects for re-election.
There was a definite horn rock theme today in 1968, as proven by number seven …
… six …
… two …
… and one on the charts:
Today in 1971, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were sentenced on drug charges. And, of course, you could replace “1971” with any year and Jagger’ and Richards’ names with practically any rock musician’s name of those days.
Or other people: Today in 2000, Eminem’s mother sued her son for defamation from the line “My mother smokes more dope than I do” from his “My Name Is.”
Birthdays start with LeRoy Anderson, whose first work was the theme music for many afternoon movies, but who is best known for his second work (with which I point out that Christmas is less than six months away):
Barack Obama, in a recent interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, said:
It’s very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth. And so, part of my argument has been that unless we attend to that, unless we make people feel more economically secure and we’re taking more seriously the need to create ladders of opportunity and a stronger safety net that’s adapted to these new technologies and the displacements that are taking place around the world, if we don’t take care of that, that’s also going to fuel the kind of mostly far-right populism, but it can also potentially come from the left, that is undermining democracy because it makes people angry and resentful and scared.
The obvious criticism of Obama here is that he and his wife are walking, talking, “massive concentrations of wealth.”
Obama and his wife signed the largest book deal in history, $65 million, for their memoirs. The Obamas signed a separate production deal with Netflix worth an estimated $50 million. The Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground, signed a $25 million deal with Spotify that lasted three years. Barack Obama reportedly makes as much as $400,000 per speech, but reportedly made almost $600,000 for speaking at a conference in Colombia. Michelle Obama makes $200,000 per appearance.
The Obamas rent a mansion in Kalorama (a neighborhood in Washington, D.C.); bought a mansion and estate in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; bought another house in Rancho Mirage, Calif.; and still have their old home in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
In April 2010, then-president Obama declared, “At a certain point, you’ve made enough money.” Apparently, Obama hasn’t reached that point yet.
But it’s not just that Obama is objecting to the concentration of wealth while becoming fabulously wealthy himself. It’s that Obama’s assessment of what is driving modern American populism is likely quite wrong. He’s attempting to shoehorn a cliched left-wing progressive complaint about America to fit as an explanation for the current popularity of right-wing populism.
Perhaps some American populists on the Left are driven by an objection to massive concentrations of wealth. But right-wing populists in the United States adore a man who lives in a mansion in Mar-a-Lago and who brags about how wealthy he is. American populists may well sneer about the out-of-touch wealthy elites rigging the system, but they largely nodded when Trump named Steven Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury, Wilbur Ross as Secretary of Commerce, and Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Trump’s cabinet featured 17 millionaires, two centimillionaires, and one billionaire.
Tucker Carlson made $20 million per year at Fox News, and few populists on the right saw that as any kind of problem. Populists have little objection to anybody being super rich, as long as those rich people tell them what they want to hear. And what populists particularly love hearing is that they’re being dissed.
Keep in mind, most Trump supporters aren’t poor, or even necessarily on the bottom half of the nation’s income scale. In the 2016 Republican primaries, Trump voters’ median income exceeded the overall statewide median, sometimes narrowly but sometimes substantially. In the general election, like the primary, “About two thirds of Trump supporters came from the better-off half of the economy.” Further analysis found “support for Trump was strongest among the locally rich — that is, white voters with incomes that are high for their area, though not necessarily for the country as a whole.” Polling in 2020 found that the higher a person’s income, the more likely they were to say the economy would improve more in a second term of Trump than under Joe Biden. In the 2020 election, Trump did better among voters making more than $50,000 per year than he did among voters making less than $50,000 per year.
(I should pause to remind readers that back in 2016, Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out the limitations of measuring a person’s wealth by self-reported income level, without taking the local cost of living into account. The average household income in Staten Island is $113,335, but that doesn’t make it a particularly high-status place to live by the standards of New York City.)
So why is Obama looking at MAGA America and concluding that what truly drives its members is “massive concentrations of wealth” and economic insecurity? Because Obama’s assessment of Americans in flyover country hasn’t changed much since 2008, when he declared:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Obama has his explanation for why many religious, gun-owning, and working-class Americans have their views, and he’s not interested in updating or revising his assessment. Inherent but unspoken in his conclusion is that his own presidency didn’t do much to change the conditions of these voters, leading them to vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
I would argue that America’s right-of-center populists aren’t all that driven by resentment or a lack of opportunity (more on this below). They’re often most driven by a perceived lack of respect.
They didn’t go to the right schools, they don’t work in professions that are glamorous or celebrated, their religious faith is mocked and derided, and Hollywood portrays them as a bunch of ignorant hicks. Many of them live in “flyover country,” which is seen as culturally backwards, easily and justifiably ignored. They work for a living and do not benefit from affirmative action, but they’re told that they have it easy because of “white privilege.” A lot of government officials treat their constitutionally protected ownership of a gun as a major problem to be solved, but shrug their shoulders at the insecure border and illegal immigration. Lots of Americans see a criminal-justice system that comes down like a ton of bricks on pro-life protesters while prominent big-city district attorneys declare they won’t prosecute whole classes of crimes.
The Obama team openly spoke about how its voters were a “coalition of the ascendant” — minorities, the millennial generation, and socially liberal upscale whites, especially women. This term means there must be a corresponding “coalition of the descendant” — whites, older Americans, social conservatives, married couples, and men. No one likes hearing that they’re outdated, sinking, or losing importance or relevance. Run around boasting that you don’t need certain demographics of voters long enough, and those demographics will conclude that they don’t need you, either.
Erick Erickson has an appropriate thought as we near Independence Day:
I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while and finally got motivated to write about it when I saw this tweet from Nate Silver. He tweets, “Kind of amazed how well the ‘Did You Possibly Feel A Small Pang of Joy? Here’s A Reason To Stay Miserable’ genre continues to do, though it was a pandemic thing but still going strong.” He highlights three stories: one against those rooting for orcas; one denouncing traveling from home; and one against using ice in cocktails because of climate change.
As Sonny Bunch notes, there is a reason environmentalists are so often the bad guys in movies. Thanos wanted to save the universe by killing half of humanity. In the Godzilla movies, the bad guys are environmentalists who want to unleash monsters to kill humanity and save the planet. In Aquaman, the bad guy thinks humans are destroying the earth. Go back to the Kingsmen movie and Samuel L. Jackson played a crazy environmentalist who wanted to wipe out the poor, unenlightened non-celebrity.
In real life, 60 Minutes has tried rehabilitating Paul Ehrlich, a Malthusian, in just the past year. New York City wants to regulate coal and wood-fired ovens out of existence. The feds want to take away gas stoves. Together with corporations, they want to ban the family road trip by forcing us into electric vehicles. More and more corporations push us to pay a small fee for climate offsets. They’re even pushing the trans agenda as a back door way to sterilize kids to prevent Paul Ehrlich’s population bomb.
Add into that the reaction to Noah Rothman’s piece at National Review on “The War on Things That Work.” You might have thought Rothman has carved up a sea turtle with plastic utensils. Leftists heaped scorn and disgust on him for making a very straightforward point:
By itself, an electric range, a heat pump, an ugly LED bulb, or a paper straw is a minor irritation. In a mandated aggregate, they look like a society-wide assault on the dignity of personal choice. Activists, like-minded bureaucrats, and their allies in elected office are, in the name of climate change, waging war against products and conventions that make everyday life work. For the targets of their hostility, they would substitute alternatives that either perform less effectively or demand more of your time and money. And you’re expected to bear this burden indefinitely. Or at least until you communicate your displeasure in no uncertain terms at the ballot box.
Rothman is absolutely right, and the left got angry at him for pointing it out.
These people are miserable and want you to be miserable. They cannot laugh. They have no sense of humor. They have chosen misery, lab-grown meat, and veganism. They have turned their backs on the ultimate plant-based food — cow, charred on a wood-burning flame — in favor of white guilt and childlessness.
That’s going to be on the ballot in 2024. Americans who can laugh at things have a way to break through. Most Americans, I think, are getting resentful of the bitter malcontents always lecturing us and sucking the joy out of life like Dementors from Harry Potter.
This is why I don’t discount Tim Scott, who always has a smile and laughs at these absurdities with an upbeat, positive message about America. It’s why I think Mike Pence, who believes in the greatness of the country, has an opportunity to carry a message forward. Haley, DeSantis, and all of them really can use the left’s misery and madness to rally Americans against it.
The left is dominant in cultural institutions. They don’t care for the country. They think your skin color defines your lot in life. Just look at the Yale-graduated New York Times editorial assistant who wrote that believing hard work can propel you forward in society just props up white supremacy. They are a loud minority who should be mocked, laughed at, and repudiated.
The GOP should put happiness on the ballot in 2024. Run against the misery of the Dementors who suck joy out of life, would deprive you of smoked meats and Neapolitan pizzas, and want to force you to stay home and masked.
Today in 1975, David Bowie found “Fame”:
Today in 1978, the UN named Kansas ambassadors of goodwill:
Two birthdays today are from the same group: Drummer Bobby Harrison was born two years before bassist Dave Knights of Procol Harum:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 