Our lives are being sliced and diced by overload. I'm getting very dark vibes about Q1, 2025. Can't specify anything, don't believe it will be as dark as all that, but it persists. Dark. Darker than the sum of the parts of Project 2025, and what has been announced.

We had a very similar situation in the 1920s. Frightening similar with the KKK.

Exactly

Oh yeah…Holidays 🛐🕎💟☮️

but that is more "cancel culture" than disfavor

i can probably name 1, maybe 2 from the hollywood black list

on the other hand = assassins and serial killers ...........

Nothing more.

Disk full.

I agree with everything you wrote here.

And also, Happy Hanukkah. Eat latkes and celebrate the Maccabees.

Mac’ Bees and Cheese is my favorite! Crunchy AND tasty!😋

in George Orwell's 1984.

You are absolutely right about this collective amnesia.

It's why the fascists want to eliminate public education.

When I was a kid, 1st grade through 8th grade I went home for lunch And watched Art Fleming on jeopardy And ate lunch. I learned a lot Watching jeopardy, And it's also good for your brain as you get older.

I used to watch it with Alex trebek But I got out of the habit which I'm gonna get back into For the new year But I think it keeps your brain alert t keeps you more knowledgeable about world.

You're absolutely right People have very short memories and don't like to get into history

The old saying about history repeating itself is, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," which is attributed to philosopher George Santayana.

Our media should not be entertainment it should be giving us the correct information and providing the history that goes behind it.

Last edited Tue Dec 24, 2024, 04:25 PM - Edit history (1)

During the writer's strike, they showed some old Jeopardy episodes. The questions were very different. One, they skewed way more to the arts and literature. Second, I believe that it was things the contestants already knew.

The contestants now are professional trivia players. They study up on really obscure categories. They don't know these strange things by chance. They are all studying for the test, so to speak.

It's not the same at all (even though I still Iike Jeopardy). These contestants are playing for big bucks and post season tournaments. They aren't just enjoying their own general knowledge.

And she has claimed since the 1980s Jeopardy's "answers" (backward questions) have been steadally been declining in difficulty.

Some, like opera, were harder then, I think. But now they have all kinds of categories - mostly science - where you'd only know the answers if you were in that field or if you'd studied up. A few years ago, there was a category for "Squid"!

Now THAT is an anachronism nowadays.

I remember going home for lunch when I was a couple blocks from my elementary school but then that ended when I went to middle school. I don't think kids do that anymore because there are fewer and fewer parents home because they have to work (not counting the more modern trend of the remote workers).

It was kindergarten thru the 8th grade

Had an hour lunch

Soup and sandwich on a tray in front of the TV, Mom was home

Graduated from there in 1966

High school was in middle of town so had to bring it

but then transferred to a different one that was about 1.2 miles away so I took the train a couple stops to the end of the line and then walked about 4 blocks down to the school. Was amazed at having lunch "at school" at that point.

but it was from 3rd to 8th grade that I walked home from my public school to my lunch waiting for me and the TV tuned to Jeopardy with Art Fleming. I developed the Jeopardy habit at that age and am grateful it happened. My mom would frequently remark, “my kid is so bright because of Jeopardy!” Lol. I took breaks from time to time throughout my life, but always returned to one of my favorite healthy habits. I would get so excited as a kid when I infrequently knew the question to an answer before a contestant responded. I believe it was the catalyst for me to be inquisitive about the world, as well as a lifelong learner. I appreciated your post immensely, all aspects of what you expressed. Thank you.

All Jeopardy is concerned with is simple facts ("trivia" if you will), and in the US we are inundated with fact-based literature, using a very broad definition of "fact" because much of it is disinformation or downright lies. What is needed is training and practice in the art of intellectual analysis, and that is much harder to produce, not least because there are few qualified teachers. But it is also a discipline that does not lend itself to the kind of "objective" testing that was in vogue at least when I was in public school (don't know what the situation is now, as I haven't seen the inside of a public school for fifty years).

We don't need to know more facts, but we sorely need to understand how to tell what is a fact, and what facts are significant.

-- Mal

But my love of jeopardy was also about learning more and not just facts.

I would hope it would trigger people curiosity to want to learn more

Knowledge is powerful

I too have been out of high school for over 50 years

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." And so we do - both forget and repeat. Those of us of a certain age clearly remember the Vietnam war with its controversy and carnage, but that's ancient history to folks under 40 or so. Is it even taught in history classes? Would remembering it keep us out of other military quagmires? Apparently not, since Gulf War I started less than 20 years later - and well within the living memories of Vietnam veterans and perpetrators; and of course a few years later there was Gulf War II, supposedly a reaction to 9/11 but not really, which became another 10-year quagmire. Even the people who remembered Vietnam didn't remember Vietnam. Everything disappears down the memory hole.

But I have to admit, when they have stories from the 1960s, I wince a little.

Still, that was not as bad as the advertisement I got for "vintage clothes" -- in the style of the 1990s!

-- Mal

Someone here on DU recommended the book The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. It describes the cyclical nature of our history and the 80-100 year time span when everything repeats. I bought it and am halfway through. Amazing and eye opening, even if not all experts subscribe to the same theory. It makes so much sense, though!

they use the National Archives, the Federal Register, (auto) biographies, memoirs, personal journals/diaries, art, photography, court filings and proceedings, the Congressional Record, legislative debates, direct eyewitness testimony, live transcripts (as Bob Woodward did in War), newspaper and magazine articles, movies, music, and reliable data sources.

There are those who try to legislate the erasure of history, those who try to kill human memory through trauma/propaganda, but the truth always comes out -- about the North American indigenous holocaust, slavery, the war against women, the crimes against humanity. And so it is not those who win who get the last word on human history.

Humans who remember and write have advanced humanity for thousands of years. The digital world will never end the analog world.

This has been the season of hope for thousands of years, across continents.
Have faith in humanity. Don't lose hope.

moment. "Right now, I gotta buy Spam instead of ham or beef because that's what I can afford. Better get a new President, anybody else is better -- except that unknown woman who suddenly became black."

Merry Christmas to you, and all, as well. Seriously, take some time off and soak in the Merry! We will survive all of this and mankind eventually will come out the better for it. Right now, today, I believe that.

Apropos, see this SNL skit about a fictitious "Alexa" device for old people, the "Echo Silver". A couple of baseball fans are unaware that Satchel Paige died in 1982. (See 0:53-1:12).

Unfortunately, it can't all be chalked up to senility. As you mention, it's often the young who are truly out-of-touch with the wider culture.

While I agree with really everything you wrote, and when I think back on my high school education and wonder why I didn't grasp the enormity of the second world war, I usually come to the conclusion that my teachers were devoted to their task and did the best they could with the time they were allotted. I went to what was supposedly one of the top high schools in California at the time. But it was also a school where we "ran out of time" so we couldn't cover the Viet Nam War. Barely touched Watergate. I still have a chip on my shoulder about those oversights.

It was only after graduating from college that I took it upon myself to study the subjects that either: I was too immature to take seriously when they were taught to me, or were not sufficiently taught.

A lot of it is on us to learn history--that is what I've come to believe. So only after school do I feel I finally learned something about World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, World War II, Watergate and Viet Nam. I still have gaping voids of ignorance! The older I get, the more famished I am for history. Even things I lived through, like the Rwanda genocide, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the wars that tore apart former Yugoslavia (gigantic events), are hard to full absorb without a lot of additional reading and pondering. History is intricate.

Anyway, love your post. Happy holidays to you and yours!

We need to give that to our children, even if it is not our own history. My children know what the Reichstag fire was. I did not experience it, but I made sure they knew what it was. There is so much they are not learning in school!

Last edited Tue Dec 24, 2024, 12:26 PM - Edit history (1)

First off: Absolutely agree about the importance of memory and history to democracy. As a former newspaperman, I don't completely blame the media -- more its ownership -- but include a number of educators both public and private and too many parents for breeding and then raising idiots.

Like Crime, Ignorance Pays. Two cases:

Neil "Silverado" Bush should still be busting rocks in Leavenworth. The S&L Crisis was a disaster for the whole country...

Know your BFEE: They Looted Your Nation’s S&Ls for Power and Profit

But it was a practice run for the Banking Crisis...

Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set-Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.

"Control Fraud" is the term Edwin Black coined to describe what happens when the crooks buy the bank they plan to rob. Of course, no one who stole the money had to put it back. That privilege was given to the US Taxpayer.

Know your BFEE: Goldmine Sacked or The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One

Uniting both the worlds of business and government are the professional criminal class known as the GOP. How they got that way, paperwork and making sure it never does anything but mark them as anything but the owners:

Well argued.

"We are the weak link: deliberately undereducated and programmed by the corporate media "

You are 100% correct. This is all by design, and we allow them to do it, every time. When someone started doing that ridiculous dance on youtube (Twerking) so many people followed, now the trumpists are doing the "buffoon dance" maybe not understanding that the idiot cannot dance. I was watching the "PNC Golf Tournament" on TV, and the Lehman team did the dance every time they made a birdie.

There is a simple proof that people tend to follow, one you can test when you are driving.When approaching a red light on your car, if there are two or more lanes waiting for the green light already in line, one lane will be packed with cars, the other one is either empty or maybe one car is waiting there, everyone else followed the person who got there on the other lane, and it can be the right or left lane, it really doesn't matter, people do not discriminate, they will just follow. Test it, you will find out I am telling the truth on this.

People remember what impacts them.

You mention media figures like Cronkite or David Brinkley. I'm a Millennial, but I only know of them - no experience or really any familiarity with them. They were not of my time. I remember Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather. Or, if one wants to go locally, John Drury, Mary Ann Childers, and Diane Burns from Chicago. I remember Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Sammy Sosa, Jose Conseco, etc. etc.

They were prominent in my youth, so they are prominent in my memory. We pay more attention when young and become more scattered as we age. As we get older, our brains, our minds, and our priorities becomes more overstuffed. Not only with new information, but an accumulation of the old. The new begins leaving a less indelible impression than the formative.

We tend to retain what we use. People who do not live and breathe politics are not going to retain a wide swath of political information. (And flatly put, a lot of people who do live and breathe politics aren't great at history or remembering what happened ten or even five years ago - they just think they do. Dunning-Kruger writ internet). I have a degree in history, read a lot of history, and continue to engage in history in my daily life. So, I remember all of it. Ask me about things I learned in psychology just last year, and I might stare blankly. It just never comes up, so the mind discards.

Bemoaning that kids today don't watch black and white films would be like me asking a Boomer why they don't go to vaudeville shows. Gee, don't you like history?! Times change, tastes change, people change, and we all have our own things we enjoy doing and are interested in that is usually rooted in the environments with which we have formative experiences.

It's not an American thing. It's just a human thing.

As a “Boomer”, I will tell you that I watched a lot of filmed vaudeville over my lifetime and I am familiar with much of what came before me in the broadcast news world including Ed Murrow, HV Kaltenborn, Walter Winchell, Elmer Davis and others.

My generation watched and listened to a lot f what went before us. It is what was on tv and radio and what was discussed.

Because that's the bridge of time we're discussing. 1960 was 65 years ago. Lamenting that people aren't familiar with movies from 70 or 80 years ago is just odd. Sure, it's a shame. There's a lot of cultural richness there, but the expectation that they'll engage in it unless pointedly exposed is odd.

It's just rewarmed "Americans dumb, kids stupid - happy holidays!" Which is a bit miserable.

And we do have institutional memory. It's simply not the kind you're inured to. I can go on Reddit right now, and someone somewhere will bring up old movies, old bands, or old athletes who were relevant in their formative years. Younger readers and commenters get turned on to them. Just saw a long thread yesterday about lesser known 90s bands. I certainly know them, but a Gen Zer is unlikely to before reading the thread.

But then, you're probably unlikely to know them, too.

People seek out what things they're exposed to that interest them. You were exposed to different things and cultural history than I was than Gen Z is. So it goes. Circle of life, Simba.

He is right though,, It's like any of the high priced seminars people pay to attend. They say most people will only retain a small percent of everything they hear at one of those things like ten percent or so if that, even educational ones, not just promotional ones. Take the promotional ones, Only a few of the attendants actually make something of it later if they follow through otherwise these things are usually just a big pep rally for most and they soon after discard what little they learned and pursue it no further

In Anchorage, Alaska in '67. I have to say that they really weren't all that good in a live show. Maybe a long flight into the frozen tundra tarnished their glow. 😀

I can believe they received a lot of help from the audio engineers, as almost every other group did. CSNY were awful -always. I saw them a few times, never improved. Santana on the other hand…wow.

was Skye Saxon and the Seeds. The best was a young Charles Lloyd and the Turtles were close. And then... I enlisted in the AF to avoid being drafted because I was 1A and it was a whole new world.

Still can't hear that song enough.

You're right though, the names.....just drift into oblivion.
Great Post.

"the United States of Amnesia."

It doesn't help that our media--including what passes these days for journalism--is focused on click bait and sensationalism. This isn't new of course, "If it bleeds it leads" has long been a truism, especially in broadcast news. And yellow journalism is a long standing American tradition.

But in the past there were attempts to temper this. Broadcasters like Murrow and Shirer, for instance, were conscientious about trying to provide more depth to their reporting, which often landed them in trouble with their corporate masters, especially Shirer, who took no prisoners when it came to confronting Nazism. More recently, there's the example of Dan Rather and his becoming a virtual "unperson" at CBS, to the point that his reporting of the Kennedy assassination has been dumped down the memory hole at that once vaunted institution.

I see three factors at play here.

First, there is the corporate absorption of much if not all of the mass media, including newspapers. Whereas as late at the 1970s there were numerous daily newspapers and weekly news magazines owned independently--often by families with a history and stake and a pride in their reporting--we now have a few mega corporations that regard "news" as just another product, on a par with toilet paper and video games and soft drinks.

Second is the marked decline in literacy across the board, but especially among younger people. The most common complaint I received as a university instructor was that I assigned too much reading to my students. I'm talking maybe twenty to thirty pages a week. This was seen by a significant portion of my students as onerous verging on cruel. And these were university students, presumably among our society's most literate. I've had younger folks tell me, with some evident pride, how little they read. At least one of them--working in medicine--simply said, "I don't read books." And so the sad fact is that many folks today get their "news" from Facebook, Tik Tok, YouTube and other social media that are generally superficial, inaccurate, and very often downright lies. Add to this that this new technology makes it incredibly easy for a few malevolent actors--Elon Musk being a case in point--to manipulate the narrative to the extent that millions now are subject to the whims of the very few who have only their self-interest in mind.

Finally, and this is something I've been thinking about for a while now, the very nature of the new technology has had by and large a deleterious effect, especially in America. By that I mean the proliferation of smart phones has has an effect similar to that of radio in the 1930s. Radios were then relatively new, and went from being a more or less luxury item that very few owned to being a feature in almost every household. The technology itself then conferred a sort of legitimacy on those who used it--sometimes to good effect, such as FDR's "fireside chats," but far more often as a way of manipulating the public and spreading hate and disinformation. Hitler and Goebbels were masters at this, and their use of radio goes a long way to explaining their hold on the German public. Soon after coming to power the Nazis made radios available free to the public, which shows how important they considered this medium. There are numerous photos of families gathered around, staring intently at the one radio in their living room. The fact that this voice came to them via this "miracle" in technology, something so new and startling, conferred on it an added and by and large unquestioned legitimacy. This was often done at the very edges of consciousness, that is to say people were by and large unaware of the effect the nature of the technology had on molding their beliefs.

I think we're now seeing the same phenomenon with the rapid proliferation of smart phones. The technology itself--this hand held instrument pumping images and sound direct to the individual user--confers a credibility to what is seen and heard that other media conduits can't match. This is by and large unacknowledged, unconscious, but prevalent among users. Add to this how the technology is inherently alienating and anti-social, consumed not in groups--like the old newsreels for instance--by almost entirely individual by individual. Then too there is the inherently seductive nature of moving images linked with sound, and we now have a medium that is reshaping our political culture in ways difficult to measure and well-nigh--for the present anyway--impossible to counter.

Radio of course still plays a role, and as it's mostly owned by the right, its impact by and large is still deleterious. But it has now been superseded by hand held visual devices that hold a fascination with the technology itself not seen since the 1930s.

And as in the 1930s, it seems this fascination bodes little that is good in the coming decade.

I apologize for being so long winded.

Best wishes to you and yours,

Thucy.

perhaps best seen with the Kennedy/Nixon debate of 1960, and earlier than that the McCarthy/Army hearings of 1954. Then too the role of TV ads can't be ignored. Certainly with the advent of TV our politics became more visual, for good or ill. Perhaps its finest hour was during the Vietnam War, when for the first time relatively uncensored depictions of the reality of warfare were disseminated. The resulting public skepticism about American involvement led to a backlash, where we now have "embedded" journalists whose content is strictly controlled by the military powers that be.

Even so, for some reason I don't think the technology itself gave TV the same degree of legitimacy to its content as radio in the 1930s, and smart phones today. I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps because people were already familiar, through radio, with the idea of broadcast media, and so TV was seen as only the visual extension of what was already quite familiar. Then too, one of the things that make today's smart phones so different is their portability, giving them a much more personal feel than TV, and thus making the technology that much more pervasive and different from previous visual media.

But really, I can't say for sure why TV seems--to my mind at least--not to have had the same tectonic effect on our political culture as radio and smart phones. And I could be wrong about that--perhaps TV did have that impact, conveying an almost unquestioned legitimacy to its users, and I'm just not seeing it. But looking at the history, I just don't see TV engendering same sort of quantum leap, the same enormous qualitative difference in our politics that radio in its first decade and smart phones today have made.

On the other hand, the late 1950s and the decade of the '60s were a definite turning point in our politics, which is also when television became so very prevalent. I'll have to think about this some more--these posts here being a sort of first draft for my analysis, such as it is.

Anyway, thanks for commenting, and best wishes to you and yours.

We were the first generation that didn't have to entertain itself. (I was born in 54)

Mom used to read 4-5 books a week. Both parents played musical instruments and it was not unheard of for Mom to sit at the piano and the whole family would join in singing.

We've gone from living reality to watching "reality."

From participants to observers.

Thanks for your insights on this. Gives me more to think about.

They would rather spend their time having fun, watching TV, playing video games, etc. They literally can't be bothered!

It was advertising on radio and teevee that conditioned the masses to seek out everything that gave them the convenience of having time to be entertained. It was one of the most important things, to be entertained, a sign of wealth to have to time for it. So it becomes the gold standard, entertainment and all of its trappings.

This is only a portion of a massive social ill that is being ignored.

I could sense this in high school. I went thru the Cuban missile crisis watching cronkite and our neigbor crying what is happening in Cuba while my mother could not understand the dire circumstances . She wanted to go shopping.

I was the only one in the family who watched world news. My dad read sports and obituaries., my mother read the fashion ads and Hollywood gossip. I hid in the library.

I left America at age 21. No regrets.

Season's Greetings to you too. (also looks like this isn't sunk, it was on home page when I logged on)

And a general dumbing down in education, both parochial and public/secular. Social media and TV require short attention spans.
The MAGATS will get what they deserve. The rest of us will get what we don’t deserve.

We are moving very fast now with technology, but I believe we will find harmony at some point worldwide

I am not a big fan of history, other than personal stories that people share. The only real history that I remember from high school was about the Nazis and they drilled that into us

Here are the Dalai Lama's words
Also, for thousands of years people believed that only an authoritarian organization employing rigid disciplinary methods could govern human society. However, people have an innate desire for freedom and democracy, and these two forces have been in conflict. Today, it is clear which has won. The emergence of nonviolent "people's power" movements have shown indisputably that the human race can neither tolerate nor function properly under the rule of tyranny. This recognition represents remarkable progress.

https://www3.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol7_1/Lama.htm

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is eighty-nine years of age. He has been living in exile since 1959. He assures his followers that he will live for several more years, possibly until he is 113

“Just as I cultivate an altruistic intention, I’ve had dreams about living long. In one dream I was climbing steps, 13 steps, which I interpreted to relate to the prediction that I could live to the age of 113”—applause rippled across the audience. “Since the time of Gendun Drup, the Dalai Lamas have had close relations with Palden Lhamo. I had a dream in which she told me I’d live to be 110”—there was more applause. “Meanwhile, Trulshik Rinpoché requested me to live as long as Thangtong Gyalpo. He is said to have lived until he was 125; may I do so too.

https://tibet.net/his-holiness-the-dalai-lama-reassures-once-again-to-live-over-113-years/

who became a great friend and I believe, confidante of the Dalai Lama. We were very impressed.

Everything you said is true. And, everything you mentioned is either a direct of indirect symptom of a society that has embraced the worship of unfettered capitalism. They are literally living their own deaths at the hands of oligarchs who could care less until there are no more workers. Then, you will see some Terminator-style crap start to happen in earnest. They re not worried as much about robotic A.I. yet because there are still so many people to exploit, but you watch... they now have control of the largest hedge fund in the world... us. Watch what happens now. If we don't stop ignoring the fact that it needs to be treated as a lion in a cage. You keep opening the door more and more, it eats you. You keep the door tightly closed and restrictions in place, and it becomes a show piece for the circus. That is what capitalism should be to us. Without the leash, it is a wild animal and will kill us all while we are trying to pet it.

I hope everyone has a blessed Christmas, Chanukah, Kwaanzaa and (my fave) Yule. May the spirits watch over you and keep you. May the joy you embrace in this season spill over into the new year.

Blessed Be

BaldguY

What this & prior cycles shows is the lack of morals
from the Christian Nationalists that voted blindly. We
will see, very soon, the extent they will try to go with
their "end times" BS.

Was skimmed not taught. Now days it's just completely rewritten and forgotten.

It wasn't till college I had a history class. And that was Art History. What was happening outside of art was also taught as influences on the art. And man that was eye opening. Man has been going through the same struggles since the dawn of civilization.

As for the example of The grassroots: I do post them and other bands through the years that I don't hear on ," classic rock" or "oldies" stations on the radio. They only play certain groups and the same old songs that were real mainstream. I post them in music appreciation so the young people here will hear them. And your point taken..
But that is also part of marketing. Planned obsolescence so the masses will replace evengood stuff. The old thing might still work perfectly but you need the new. And to make things seem fresh and new the stuff that the "new" is copying must be forgotten.

As for the term " low- down," this song is from the 30s ( and likely even before that) but your friend would think it's from 1993 since it was finally recorded then by a major studio. I've seen the phrase used in print as far back as the 1800s.

In my high school we had two world history teachers. One was a man the other a woman. Everybody dreaded getting the guy because he was really tough , lot's of kids didn't pass his class and it was required. This was in the last of the seventies into the early eighties, The guy was actually living history as every now and then he would open his shirt to show the scar from a bullet wound he had gotten on Guadalcanal. Because of his life experience he was a very demanding tough teacher since he believed we should not be ignorant of what went on before us and the sacrifices made by Americans before our time. I aced his class because I was interested where lot's of kids were not

My history teacher in high school called me his little Sophia because he thought I looked like a younger Sophia Loren. That's how serious he took teaching history.

theme. In reality, it is the most interesting subject (at least to me). And a Happy Holidays to you.

We live in an interesting time.

Facts taken with no context are dry and boring. And pretty useless. It matters not if you know the date of the Battle of Waterloo yet don't know why it mattered. In public school "Social Studies" classes, at least when I was in school, why things mattered was never in the syllabus. Because that's information that can't be graded by an optical computer on a "true/false" basis.

-- Mal

What bands or musical acts will be remembered from the early 2000s onward? My interest in current music began to wane around then, and I doubt many will remember the names of bands like Artic Monkeys some 50 years hence. I listen occasionally to what is touted as ‘university rock’ and find it bland and homogenous from one song to the next. Just wait until AI-generated music becomes all the rage. Better than the real artists!

Thank you for a well thought out summary.

I feel like it's an absolute curse that I've been a political junkie since the sElection of 2000. And even before that, I was raised by two civil-rights activists (my parents). Consequently, my siblings (two are gone but my wonderful sister's still here- eight years older than I) and I have marched, volunteered, etc. for most of our lives.

It's just hard to wrap my head around the fact that people simply don't remember or don't care about real events! And here we are.

Fascist playbook. In one pic:



You left out Festivus!
Cheers.

From which I wrote many years ago, albeit far more eloquently than I.

History does not repeat itself, but the echoes are there for those who listen.

I have been disturbed for decades by the downgrading of History. Americans seem to have the attention span of fruit flies.
There are many exceptional B&W movies (my favorite is Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman never needed to speak a line, her face told us everything).

Most recently, two nights ago, I saw a 1930's documentary on Mussolini. You'd have to be a complete moron not to see the parallels between him and DJT. It looks almost comical, but then again, so does DJT. I wonder if he'll try to get out of the country and receive the same fate as El Duce'?

I grew up in the NYC Public School System during the 50s. In the 3rd Grade, we were learning Civics. I cannot count the times I've had young people listen to me when I explain "the system". The hard part is getting them away from "screen time". They get it, but you have to break through the barrier that has been erected.

Fare thee well my friend. Keep up the good work!

Something similar happens to landscapes, at least in California & probably other places with rapid development.
Buildings and landscape just disappear ... replaced by something else. You just don't quite have any anchor for the memory of what was there, nobody remembers or cares (& why should they, a good question in any event). What business was there before? What was on that corner before this thing was built? Were there wetlands here before this salt pond (or a salt pond before these wetlands)?

One thing I have noticed is nostalgi-fication. A lot of people express the feeling that they're living in some fallen world, like things were so much better a few years or fifty years or centuries ago. I can't say it is or isn't true for some individual but ... it does seem like selective memory and motivated reasoning.

I read a disturbing book a while back, sort of an opposite facet to nostalgia
https://web.archive.org/web/20170902234845/http://chuckklostermanauthor.com/books/but-what-if-were-wrong-tr/but-what-if-were-wrong-hc
"But What If We're Wrong?" is how to/how would we look at the world of today from some point in the distant future. What would survive? What would look important? What would still be important? It doesn't really take into account the sentiment of the OP but it is an interesting addition.

The book "The Plotters" by Un-su Kim really opened my eyes to the increased use of assassination these days.

Originally, dictators would simply order the military to kill someone causing problems but once a country becomes a democracy, leaders use outside assassins. It keeps the deaths at arms length from them. And assassination has become a profession onto itself. Many are ex-military so they know what they're doing.

Russia's favourite method is defenestration - throwing someone out of a window. Crude, effective and cheap. Making a body completely disappear though is a much more complicated (and expensive) assignment.

Now, big businesses seem to have caught on to this method of dealing with 'problems'. Is it a coincidence that two whistle blowers from Boeing died lately? One from a car accident after he testified to Congress(?) and the second one from suicide the day before he was set to testify. Deaths like these are actually becoming common. Which is frightening.

Read Un-su Kim's book and you'll start to question any and all suspicious deaths. And be prepared for more of them after January.

The only comfort I have is knowing that some folks just have to learn the hard way. They will learn. Many will suffer unnecessarily, but they will learn. Maybe humanity will survive. Maybe not.

That being said the issues, for me, revolve around what I and, I am sure, others call theomythology. The civic mythologies of the country raised to the status of theological dogma. Any discussion which is in opposition to the dogma is deemed “anti-American”. Added into this are the concepts of complicated vs complex. Taking apart a car engine or transmission is complicated. My brother-in-law split his tractor in order to repair its transmission. He had never done anything like that before but he watched videos and meticulously catalogued where each part went. It was complicated. It was not complex.

Complexity, for me, involves uncertainty, the condition that Rumsfeld was laughed at when he said it. I laughed at him too. But he stated something that is true. Perhaps it is the step before karma hits when one makes a decision on a course of action. Karma or the law of unintended consequences. The issues we face are complex. They always have been. We have managed to muddle our way through them with some degree of success and not a few failures.

But at the core of the problem solving processes used are some complexities which hinder our problem solving. Of course every generation to a degree thinks that they are unique. It is likely through most of human history this was not the case. The generations were not much different than those who went before. The invention of the printing press followed by the explosion of science/mathematics and then the Industrial Revolution and so on moved technology and accessibility of information forward at speeds undreamed of. Postman, Huxley and Orwell feared what would happen if government was able to control the man-created “God in the Machine”. Their warnings were prescient but misplaced. Government has always been a tool for imposing organization on society. Many times government was and is used for oppression. Other times it is not. Our current situation is not the fault of government because the concept of government itself, being a tool, has no inherent morality or immorality. The only morality imposed upon government is that of men. The morality government is now being injected with is the morality of wealth/power. Heinlein wrote in Citizen of the Galaxy that people will do strange things for money but they will do stranger things yet for power over money.

We know that institutional memory which doesn’t exist as human memory but is rather a belief in the creation of institutions that both establish freedom but also demand responsibility is critical to the success of a society. Imo, the USSR failed because by the time of Brezhnev et al the belief could no longer be supported. It eventually collapsed of its own weight. The same is likely true of the PRC as time progresses.

Here, we are seeing our own slow-moving collapse. All of the agitprop used is designed to provide simplistic solutions to complicated and also complex problems. This is because of one truly complex problem: emotional and psychological growth lags behind technological growth. The more information inundates humans at greater speed the more many will be drawn to the simplistic solutions of the charlatan.

This all allows for wealth/power to increase its hold while itself is more and more unleashed.

We allow what we worship to become that which rules us.

Sorry for rambling.

I think some people have a kind of post Covid amnesia that comes from a strong desire to declare that the whole pandemic was nonsense (what happens then to those we lost?)

There is also an entire industry of wing-nuttery dedicated to spreading that amnesia while marinating the amnesiacs in anxiety and panic.

Perhaps this is done to sell us more garbage?

Covid was a highly traumatic event. A lot of people would like to ostrich it out of sight.

.... I was in shock the whole time, beginning with the shutdown of voting in Florida and having the Supreme Court elect the president. After 9/11 people lost their jobs if they were from the Middle East. Phil Donahue lost his TV show because he opposed the Iraq war. Joe Wilson went to Niger to prove that Sadam had never bought 'yellow cake' (uranium) from Niger. Bush punished him by outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent. That ended her career. Bush had evangelicals in Africa teaching the people that abstinence was the cure for AIDS, even if you were married. No mention of condoms.

Just a preview of what's to come.

Some didnt know their governor.
I dont think its a new thing

How much the capacity for attention span has degraded in the vast majority of people. The push to always be moving forward has become ridiculous. To the point that I remember after the 2016 election, I think it was only not even a year after, that people were saying that it was a very long time ago l😹😹

I think in part, for some anyway, it may have something to do with the harshness and stresses of life here. Especially in the past few years. People are also faced with a daily onslaught of constant news of all sorts. It’s hard to keep track of it if you follow it at all.

My history classes were excellent for the most part.

As a philosopher said, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. While it may not be true in all cases I think it still holds a lot of weight.

But we have and have not had any longer term memory for decades. Too much stupid information overload. Can't sort out true from false, so they believe everything that feels right to them.

We also have no individuated culture. Thr Suptemicists keep screaming about immigrants replacing our culture, but every single one of us came here from somewhere else, snd brought the old sod culture with us. Everything from xmas to Halloween is based I other cultures... other religions. These nazi idiots are just too stupid to see it. If America has any kind of culture, im ashamed to say, it's a gun and violence culture. And. In my opinion, that needs to be stamped out no matter what the cost.

Since the advent of Rush Limbaugh and Jimmy Swaggart, and mass media consolidation, people have been tricked into voting against their best interests time and time again. It's the media - whether it's cable TV (Fox, Newsmax) or social media (X, Facebook, etc).The media is corrupt AF and they are only getting more corrupt.