We started and ended with jazz yesterday, so it’s worth noting that today is the anniversary of the release of the first jazz record, “Darktown Strutters Ball”:
The number nine …
… seven …
… and five singles today in 1969:
Two more Beatles anniversaries today: “Love Me Do” hit number one in 1964 …
… four years before the Beatles started work on their only double album. Perhaps that work was so hard that they couldn’t think of a more original title than: “The Beatles.” You may know it better, however, as “the White Album”:
This is more a pop than rock anniversary: One of the funniest songs Johnny Cash performed, “One Piece at a Time,” hit number 29 today in 1976:
Birthdays start with Gary Brooker of Procol Harum:
After a recent summit between new partners China and Russia, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued an odd, one-sentence communique: “There can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be fought.”
No one would disagree, even though several officials of both hypocritical governments have previously threatened their neighbors with nuclear attacks.
But still, why did the two feel the need to issue such a terse statement—and why now?
Rarely has the global rhetoric of mass annihilation reached such a crescendo as the present, as existential wars rage in Ukraine and Gaza.In particular, Putin at least believes that he is finally winning the Russia-Ukraine war. Xi seems to assume that conventional ascendant Chinese military power in the South China Sea has finally made the absorption of Taiwan practicable.
They both believe that the only impediment to their victories would be an intervention from the U.S. and the NATO alliance, a conflict that could descend into mutual threats to resort to nuclear weapons.
Thus the recent warnings of Xi and Putin.
Almost monthly, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un continues his weary threats to use his nuclear arsenal to destroy South Korea or Japan.
A similarly monotonous Turkish President Recep Erdogan, who is pro-Hamas, regularly threatens Armenians with crazy talk of repeating the “mission of our grandfathers.” And he occasionally warns Israelis and Greeks that they may one day wake up to Turkish missiles raining down upon their cities.
More concretely, for the first time in history, Iran attacked the homeland of Israel. It launched the largest wartime array of cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and drones in modern history—over 320 projectiles.
Iran’s theocrats simultaneously claim they are about ready to produce nuclear weapons. And, of course, since 1979, Iran periodically has promised to wipe Israel off the map and half the world’s Jews with it.
Most ignore these crazy threats and write them off as the braggadocio of dictators. But as we saw on Oct. 7, the barbarity of human nature has not changed much from the premodern world, whether defined by savage beheading, mutilations, murdering, mass rape, torture, and hostage-taking of Israeli elderly, women, and children.
But what has radically transformed are the delivery systems of mass death—nuclear weapons, chemical gases, biological agents, and artificial intelligence-driven delivery systems.
Oddly, the global reaction to the promise of Armageddon remains one of nonchalance. Most feel that such strongmen rant wildly but would never unleash weapons of civilizational destruction.
Consider that there are as many autocratic nuclear nations (e.g., Russia, China, Pakistan, North Korea, and perhaps Iran) as democratic ones (U.S., Britain, France, Israel, and India). Only Israel has an effective anti-ballistic missile dome.
And the more the conventional power of the West declines, the more in extremis it will have to rely on a nuclear deterrent—at a time when it has no effective missile defense of its homelands.
In a just-released book, The End of Everything, I write about four examples of annihilation—the classical city-state of Thebes, ancient Carthage, Byzantine Constantinople, and Aztec Tenochtitlan—in which the unimaginable became all too real.
In all these erasures, the targeted, naive states believed that their illustrious pasts, rather than a realistic appraisal of their present inadequate defenses, would ensure their survival.
All hoped that their allies—the Spartans, the anti-Roman Macedonians, the Christian nations of Western Europe, and the subject cities of the Aztecs—would appear at the eleventh hour to stave off their defeat.
Additionally, these targeted states had little understanding of the agendas and capabilities of the brilliantly methodic killers outside their walls—the ruthless, wannabe philosopher Alexander the Great, the literary patron Scipio Aemilianus, the self-described intellectual Mehmet II, and the widely read Hernan Cortes—who all sought to destroy utterly rather than merely defeat their enemies.
These doomed cities and nations were reduced to rubble or absorbed by the conquerors. Their populations were wiped out or enslaved, and their once-hallowed cultures, customs, and traditions lost to history. The last words of the conquered were usually variations of “It can’t happen here.”
If the past is any guide to the present, we should take heed that what almost never happens in war can certainly still occur.
When killers issue wild, even lunatic, threats, we should nonetheless take them seriously.
We should not count on friends or neutrals to save our civilization. Instead, Americans should build defense systems over the skies of our homeland, secure our borders, ensure our military operates on meritocracy, cease wild deficit spending and borrowing, and rebuild both our conventional and nuclear forces.
Otherwise, we will naively—and fatally—believe that we are magically exempt when the inconceivable becomes all too real.
Donald Trump has been verbally buddy-buddy with dictators including Putin. However America’s enemies more or less behaved themselves when Trump was president. Unlike now.
Paul McCartney must like releasing albums in May. Today in 1971, he released his second post-Beatles album, “Ram,” which included his first post-Beatles number one single:
Birthdays today include Papa John Creech of the Jefferson Airplane:
Gladys Knight:
Today in 1975, Paul McCartney released “Venus and Mars” (not to be confused with “Ebony and Ivory”):
Birthdays include Ramsey Lewis:
April Wine drummer Jerry Mercer:
Another Beatles anniversary today: Their “Beatles 1967–1970” album (also known as “the Blue Album”) reached number one today in 1973:
Two unusual anniversaries in rock music today, beginning with John Lennon’s taking delivery of his Rolls-Royce today in 1967 — and it was not your garden-variety Rolls:
Ten years to the day later, the Beatles released “Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany, 1962,” which helped prove that bands don’t need to be in existence to continue recording. (And as we know, artists don’t have to be living to continue recording either.)
Meanwhile, back in 1968, the Rolling Stones released “Jumping Jack Flash,” which fans found to be a gas gas gas:
There are some things you’re not supposed to say in 2024 America, and Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker said some of them.
Speaking to a graduation crowd at conservative Catholic Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, Butker took on Joe Biden’s performative faux-Catholicism, transgender ideology and – most shockingly – suggested to female graduates that they would find a better, more rewarding, and more productive life as wives and mothers than in corporate-style careers.
For this, he received a standing ovation from the crowd. (The full speech is here.) The wider world, however, was not so appreciative. Most notably, the city of Kansas City, Missouri tweeted out a repudiation and a pointed indication that he lived elsewhere, in a community the since-deleted tweet specifically named. Facing complaints of “doxing,” the tweet was removed and Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas apologized. I’m not sure that naming the general place where somebody lives truly qualifies as doxing, but I’m also unclear as to why a municipal government thinks it’s its place to weigh in on what a non-resident private citizen says in a speech delivered in another state about social issues. There were also demands from assorted leftist activists that Butker be punished.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has weighed in, criticizing the city’s action, calling the mayor’s apology inadequate, and threatening to employ civil rights law: “I will enforce the Missouri Human Rights Act to ensure Missourians are not targeted for their free exercise of religion.”
Well, this is a tempest in a teacup, really. But I think it’s also a harbinger.
Over the past 50+ years, traditional ideas, like Butker’s, about marriage, child-rearing, and gender roles have been marginalized, in favor of those that put much less emphasis on, well, marriage, child-rearing, and traditional views about gender roles.
And now we’re facing a global baby bust, or as some are calling it, a “demographic winter” due to plunging birth rates worldwide. “Fertility rates have fallen way below replacement level throughout the entire industrialized world, and this is starting to cause major problems all over the globe. Aging populations are counting on younger generations to take care of them as they get older, but younger generations are not nearly large enough to accomplish that task. Meanwhile, there aren’t enough qualified young workers in many fields to replace the expertise of older workers that are now retiring. Sadly, this is just the beginning.”
Back in the 1960s we started to worry about a “population explosion,” and Paul Ehrlich’s highly influential bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” set the tone: Fewer people being born was better. All sorts of policies were driven by this concern, on topics ranging from sex, birth-control, and abortion, to the desirability of smaller, two-earner families, all the way to China’s disastrous one-child policy.
But it turns out that Ehrlich was criminally wrong, and now the chickens are coming home to roost, as we face what Brink Lindsey calls a global fertility collapse.
Countries all over the world are trying, with limited success at best, to boost birth rates. Subsidies are nice, but the costs of raising children – in terms of not just money, but time and emotional effort – are too high for almost any imaginable subsidy to overcome.
So what can change people’s behavior? Well, it was changes in social mores more than anything else (outside of China) that encouraged people to have fewer children. My mother reports that when she was young, you weren’t really considered an adult until you were married and had kids. People who were still single past a certain (fairly low) age were considered unserious, cases of arrested development, or just losers. Married men were favored for promotion, on the presumption that they had families to support. Unmarried women were seen as losers, and faced some degree of social isolation as they reached early middle age.
TV shows featured happy families with multiple children. Commercials, etc., just assumed that most people lived in families with multiple children. These attitudes had a strong influence on people’s actions.
Ehrlich’s book, and the accompanying social attitudes, changed that. Big families were seen as a step toward that ‘70s dystopia, “Soylent Green.” (Ehrlich even lobbied the FCC to pressure TV networks to ensure that large families were always portrayed negatively).
I would not be surprised to see governments doing the reverse of Ehrlich, and encouraging better treatment of large families. (Which today probably count as families with three kids). Though I doubt our U.S. government will be among them, unless things change.
In addition, of course, more traditional groups – see Butker, above – will gain influence simply because they’ll be a bigger proportion of the population. As Mark Steyn says, the future belongs to those who show up, and traditional religious groups – trad Catholics, Evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, conservative Muslims and Hindus – are reproducing at a substantially higher level than, well, let’s say the groups that protested Butker’s speech.
Will this be good or bad? I don’t know. Mostly it will just be. Demographic forces don’t care much whether we like them or not.
But it may happen faster than you think. Plenty of women want careers, and that’s fine, and they should be able to have them. But there are undoubtedly a lot of women who follow a career track because they think they’re supposed to. All the feminist progress of the last 50 years, after all, has led to substantial declines in women’s happiness according to the General Social Survey. (The General Social Survey also says that the happiest people are married mothers and fathers.) And I see women college students saying on social media that if they could choose it, they’d be stay-at-home moms in a single-earner family. Right now, most of them are afraid to say it except on anonymous platforms, but as with many preference cascades, that could change.
(Of course, one reason for the shift to careers and away from the MRS degree in the 1970s was the wave of divorces, as no-fault divorce arrived and many women who thought they’d be stay-at-home moms in a single-earner family found themselves having to become full time earners themselves. Most divorces today are initiated by women, but there was a wave of husbands “trading up for a newer model” as they left the wives who put them through medical school, etc., back then. The insecurity that that created probably contributed both to careerism among women and to a reluctance to have too many kids.)
Unlike Harrison Butker, I’m not holding myself out as a role model here. When I married Helen she was finishing her Ph.D., and I don’t think I ever had a single serious girlfriend who wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. (And we only had one – terrific – kid, though we in fact wanted to, and tried to, have two or three, something that alas wasn’t in the cards.)
But what I want or favor isn’t the point here. The point is that the population collapse that I was writing about nearly 20 years ago, and that Philip Longman was writing about in Foreign Affairs even before that, has now become obvious to everyone. We’re headed for the biggest global population drop since the Black Death, and that’s going to produce dramatic social changes. (As indeed did the Black Death.)
The future does belong to those who show up, and those who show up are likely to have the attitudes that caused them to do so. So is Harrison Butker a harbinger? Quite probably.
Two Beatles anniversaries today:
1964: The Beatles make their third appearance on CBS-TV’s “Ed Sullivan Show.”
1969: “Get Back” (with Billy Preston on keyboards) hits number one:
Meanwhile, today in 1968, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful were arrested for drug possession. (Those last five words could apply to an uncountable number of musicians of the ’60s and ’70s.)
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 