If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too: If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same: If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss: If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much: If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!
This post may be completely superficial. Or maybe not.
It's about presentation.
Harriet Hageman, no matter what a person otherwise thinks of her, has a unique look. Sort of a Steampunk meets Southwestern Navajo type of style:
From Hageman campaign site: https://www.hagemanforwyoming.com/ Fair Use exception and directly linked in for copyright reasons.
Funky glasses lots of jewelry, a lot of which is turquoise.
From Billings Gazette which was from Wyoming Tribune Eagle. https://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/harriet-hageman-releases-first-paid-ad/article_04274d77-a57c-5a6c-a534-a3412cd6bc64.html Fair use and directly linked in.
Lynette Gray Bull is understated, but wears some things that emphasize the culture she's part of.
From Wyofile: https://wyofile.com/grey-bull-aims-to-be-first-wyo-dem-in-congress-in-44-years/
Even at that, however, it's notable. Hageman's appearance, most of the time, is loud, and includes a lot of turquoise. Gray Bull's is not. She's wearing a little turquoise and some ear rings, in the photo above, that are a bonafide part of the culture she is a bonafide part of.
Lynette Gray Bull from her campaign site. Very understated dress compared to Hageman, with some turquoise jewelry. Fair Use and directly linked in. https://www.greybullforcongress.com/
Hageman didn't always dress the way she does now. At Casper College, when she was an ag student, she wore blue jeans and polo shirts, the uniform of ag students, and she dressed much the same way when she was in law school. No loud earrings or jewelry, and no funky glasses.
Of course, a lot of us don't wear the same things daily now, that we did in school.
We've heard a lot about cultural appropriation in recent years. I don't think such things should be taken too far. I.e., I don't think it matters if a person of European American ancestry wears a traditional Chinese dress to the prom.
But on some sensitive issues, it's harder to say.
Last week the State Bar Convention was held and among the "break out sessions" was one on what used to be called "Indian Law" and maybe still is. They've had similar sessions in the past, but this year's was taught by a University of Wyoming professor who is a Native American. Because I was attending remotely (via Zoom) and had my audio turned down fairly low for a reason I'll not go into, I may not have heard all of the very first section perfectly, but it was clear that the professor was angry with European Americans.
Again, I'm not really going to do into this, but appropriating a lot of Native American style jewelry may not really be the best idea for a person running for office who is non-Native. Or does it matter?
Going from there, I'd note that Wyoming political races tend to leave a person's family completely out of the race as a rule. By and large this is a good thing, although I'd note that candidates themselves tend to interject their families into the races in some fashion.
Cheney's family was definitely interjected into all of her races from the onset. This was inevitable due to her last name alone, which by its very nature interjected the family legacy type of debate into the races, and the "where are you really from" issue into the race. Hageman's last name is one that should be familiar to long time Wyoming residents, but that hasn't come up much. If it were to, it should cause us to recall that her father was one of the Southeastern Wyoming legislators that backed a wildlife privatization bill. Cheney doesn't have a great record on public lands, I'd note, but then I'd also note that Barasso doesn't either. Nothing has come up since Lummis returned to office. Hageman, when public lands as an issue arose earlier, gave a very reserved answer to the question.
Anyhow, Hageman's parents probably won't make the news, and probably shouldn't. Gray Bull's haven't either, and probably shouldn't. But it's interesting to note that both have family in their photographs, and Hageman has emphasized it.
Hageman has noted in her campaign that she's pro family and loves spending time with her nieces. In her campiagn material, she's shown with her extended family, and is starting to be shown with her husband. Her husband is also a lawyer, some decade and a half older than she, and they have no children. We don't know why, and we aren't entitled to know why. Gray Bull doesn't talk about family in the same fashion, makes recent frequent reference to being pro abortion, but appears in photographs with her three children. So we have one candidate that speaks about family and appears with her immediate family, consisting of her husband, and we have one candidate that doesn't but appears with her three children, but no husband or significant other.
Again, this is all personal in nature. Does it matter?
Maybe not. The questions aren't going to be asked, and they probably shouldn't be.
But it does matter who people are behind what they claim to stand for. What their daily lives are like, and what has mattered to them on a really personal level.
Several hundred Greek residents of Cunda Island were massacred by the Turkish Army, with surviving children sent to orphanages.
President Harding vetoed the version of the Bonus Bill that reached his desk. On the same day, the Fordney-McCumber Tariff Act created the highest tariffs in US history.
The Rohwer War Relocation Center, a Japanese American internment cap, opened in Desha County, Arkansas.
Popular myth has held that all internment camps were in the West, but this one obviously wasn't. 8,500 people were held there during the war, in a location that was probably as alien as imaginable from their homes.
FWIW, the current population of Desha County is nearly half of what it was in 1940.
The British occupied Tamataave on the east coast of Madagascar in their undeclared war on the Vichy French in Madagascar.
The British also concluded Operation Anglo, the long-running raid on Rhodes, successfully.
The 4,157 man 7th Marine Regiment and one battalion of the 11th Marine Regiment, land on Guadalcanal. Additionally, food arrives, allowing the Marines to go back to full rations.
Japanese Prince Kuni Kuniyoshi and his wife on this day in 1922.
The Turkish Army, or rather the army of the revolutionary Young Turks, which had replaced the Turkish parliament and brought about what would effectively be the modern era in Turkey, captured Artake and Pergaea, ending, completely defeating the Greeks. On the same day, the Canadian government informed the British government that Parliament (the British one) would have to act before Canada would send troops to the Dardanelles.
Canada knew that Parliament would be reluctant to do this, and the Canadians were reluctant to form military units for an Anatolian expedition.
Who could blame them?
Hungary was admitted into the League of Nations.
Just this week, FWIW, Turkey was declared by the EU to be essentially a post, or quasi, democratic state. By its own admission, it's an Illiberal Democracy, but it nonetheless took offense.
The former Kasier Wilhelm II announced his engagement to Hermine Reuss of Greiz. His first wife, the Kaiserin August Victoria of Schleswig-Holstein had died in April 1921. Hermine was a widow.
In spite of the fact that the German monarchy did not exist, the announcement was unpopular with German monarchists as well as with Wilhelm's sons, who deemed it too soon to the Kasierin's death.
She'd outlive the former Kaiser by six years and see the emergence of post-war Germany, passing in 1947. Following her second husband's death in 1941, she moved to Nazi Germany and lived on his retained estate in Silesia. She fled the advancing Red Army in 1945 and was arrested by the Soviet thereafter. She died at age 59 in a small apartment she had secured in Frankfurt.
The Yankee's won the pennant, defeating the St. Louis Brown's
This turned out to be quite a week in television history, or more properly two weeks. On this day, the day after the Bob Newhart Show premiered, M*A*S*H did.
Okay, now down to the perhaps even more recalled television series M*A*S*H..
This is one Korean War drama that nearly anyone who owns a television has to recall, as it's still on television all the time as a rerun.
I was a fan of this series as a kid, but I have mixed feelings about it now, even though I'll occasionally catch it as rerun even now. Well acted and written, the very long running and hugely popular television series was billed as a comedy when it was first released, even though it was a dark comedy even then. While it always had comedic elements, as the series progressed towards its final seasons it was heavily moving towards being a drama.
The series varies distinctly from its early, middle and late seasons. The early seasons are extremely faithful to the book and do a better job of portraying the feel of the book than the later seasons. The middle seasons were perhaps the most comedic, and the late ones the most dramatic.
While this series was enormously popular, its only the really early ones that get the feel of the book, and to some extent, the Korean War, right. The series ran so long that the tour nature of the war, in which servicemen were in the war for only a little over a year, is completely lost. Running much longer than the war itself, the series began to have sort of a peculiar feel to it, for those history minded.
One thing worth noting about the series, as compared to the movie, is that the Radar Reilly character, who is played by Gary Burgoff in both the film and the series, and is the only actor to make that transition, was played much differently in the series. The movie portrays the character much more accurately than the series, outside of its first couple of years, as the movie (and the first year or so of the series) accurately reflects that character as a cynical devious professional soldier, as opposed to the lovably childlike character he later became in the series.
On material details, the most accurate ones in terms of materiality are the early ones, but the series never became bad in these regards.
My review remains the same as the 2016 entry above.
I can be interestingly remember the television advertisements for this series, which made me want to view it. My father, who was a Korean War era Air Force veteran, didn't show a lot of enthusiasm for watching it, and I can't recall if we watched the early episodes when they originally ran. We did end up becoming loyal viewers of the series during much of its long eleven season run, although my interest started to wane in the series final years. By September 1983 I was in university and I missed the final year at that time, including the highly regarded and hugely viewed final episode, which I saw shortly thereafter, probably as a rerun that next year or so.
On the same day, North Vietnam released three American POWs, all aircrewmen.
The Uganda People's Militia attempted an invasion of that country from bases in Tanzania.
The same USAAF B-24, dispatched from Ascension Island, that bombed the U-boats with the Laconia survivors on September 16 returned and bombed them again. Vichy French cruisers arrived and took on the remaining survivors, over 1,000, although 98 crewmen, 133 passengers, 33 Polish guards and 3,394 Italian POWs were lost during the entire event. The number lost due to American bombing is not known.
The Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Albania declared its autocephalous nature at the conclusion of a conference. That status would be recognized by the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1937.
Metropolitan Visarion Xhuvani, the head of the Albanian Orthodox Church during its unrecognized autocephalous stage.
Today there are seventeen autocephalous, i.e., self-governing, Orthodox Churches, with the most recent one to be granted that status being the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The topic can be a bit controversial in a larger Apostolic Christian sense, as the Catholic Church, which is also comprised of self-governing churches, and which by far makes up the largest body of Christians on Earth, does not recognize the theological claim of the Orthodox Churches that occupant of the Chair of St. Peter is the head of all the Apostolic Christian churches. For its part, Orthodoxy recognizes the legitimacy of the Chair of St. Peter, but holds its occupant to be the "First among Equals". The Catholic Church recognizes the legitimacy of the Orthodox Churches, but disputes its position on that point.
Orthodox Churches that obtain autocephalous status must do so through the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is the head of the "Mother Church".
The Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico formed through the union of a number of similarly minded parties. Its goal was and remains independence for Puerto Rico.
Flag of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico.
The viability of Puerto Rico as a potential independent state is increasingly questionable. It would always have been a small country, but the territory has become increasingly economically distressed. Finding a legitimate reason for it not to obtain statehood, however, is also increasingly difficult to do.
The Kansas City Speedway held its first race.
The USGS guys were out again.
This photograph below is interesting. It's the first one I can recall of a man wearing a t-shirt as outerwear.
The Bob Newhart Show premiered on CBS. One of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, it would run only until 1978.
I'm actually fairly surprised, as I well recall the show and would have thought that it premiered a little later than 1972. Having said that it has always, in my memory, seemed very early and mid 1970s, not late 1970s. My family watched it regularly.
The show was set in Chicago at a time just after the television Rural Purge which would feature a lot of television comedies set in mid-sized Midwestern cities. WKRP In Cincinnati, for example, was set, obviously, in Cincinnati. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in Minneapolis.
Earlier that same week, on September 14, the nostalgic The Waltons commenced airing. While fondly remembered, I never liked it. I really dislike Spencer's Mountain, which is based on the same source material.
We didn't watch The Waltons, but even back then I had the feeling I ought to like it. I never did and never have. It always, even in the 1970s, had the feel of a show filmed in the 1970s, with the look of the 1970s, trying to be about the 1930s. It ran until 1981. Additionally, the set and the fact that it was tapped made it impossible to suspend awareness that you were, in fact, watching it in the 1970s.
The show was unusual in that it had a rural setting at a time in which most television shows did not. It was also unusual in that it presented a very clean, romanticized, look at the Great Depression, something that was well within living memory of many of the viewers. In this fashion, it contrasted with the earlier Spencer's Mountain, which was centered on desperation. Both were based on the work of Earl Hamner Jr. who had grown up in Depression era Virginia. Hamner died in 2016 at the age of 92.
FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt reviewed a draft of Bob Woodward's news story on Watergate by telephone and confirmed an anonymous tip that money from Maurice Stans had been used to finance the break in of the Watergate Hotel. Felt did so undercover, using the odd and somewhat perverted cover name Deep Throat.
The U-156 and U-507 picking up the survivors from the Laconia.
A United States Army Air Force B-24 attacked the U-156 while survivors of the Laconia were on the foredeck. The U-156 dove, leaving the survivors abandoned at sea, although later German U-boats surface and try to recover the survivors. Karl Donitz thereafter issued the following order:
All efforts to save survivors of sunken ships, such as the fishing out of swimming men and putting them on board lifeboats, the righting of overturned lifeboats, or the handing over of food and water, must stop. Rescue contradicts the most basic demands of the war: the destruction of hostile ships and their crews.
The orders concerning the bringing-in of captains and chief engineers stay in effect.
Survivors are to be saved only if their statements are important for the boat.
Be harsh. Remember that the enemy has no regard for women and children when bombing German cities!
On the same day, the Germans penetrated the northwest suburbs of Stalingrad.
The Communist Albanian National Liberation Movement was founded.
British troops landed with heavy artillery in Turkey in order to prevent the Turks from taking control of the Dardanelles following the Greek defeat. Meanwhile, Anastasios Charalambis became Prime Minister of Greece in the midst of a military revolt, replacing Nikolaos Tirantafyllakos, who had stepped down. His service would last but a single day before King Constantine called upon him to abdicate and Sotirios Krokidas was appointed by the military as the new premier.
Things were not going well in Greece.
The League of Nations approved the Trans Jordan Memorandum setting the boundaries of the Kingdom of Jordan and Palestine. Those boundaries formed the later frame for the boundaries of the state of Israel.
Lev Kamenev was named to a position which was the functional titular equivalent of Prime Minister of the Soviet Union. Kamenev assumed the position as Lenin was becoming increasingly ill.
He was, of course, executed during Stalin's regime, during which the swimming pool of blood rose higher.
Henry Ford enacted a lock out of his plants, idling 100,100 workers, rather than pay what he regarded as profiteers in the coal and steel industries.
Work was progressing on the James Scott Water Fountain in Detroit.
A Federal grand jury indicted the Watergate burglars, E. Howad Hunt, and G. Gordon Liddy. Richard Nixon met with White House staff attorney John Dean on covering up hte White House role in the Watergate story. At the meeting, Nixon Chief of Staff H. R. Halderman and Dean also discussed plans to get revenge on Nixon's enemies.
John Dean.
The ARVN regained Quảng Trị after a three-month effort.
The province had been taken in the 1972 Easter Offensive, and in fact it had been the first major North Vietnamese victory in that effort. The ARVN offensive retook most of the province, but not all of it. The northernmost part of the area would remain in NVA hands until the end of the war.
The province has a large Catholic population and remains an area with several sites important to Vietnamese Catholicism. During the Communist occupation, a large percentage of the residents of the province became refugess.
The Japanese I-19 fired fatal torpedo shots at the USS Wasp and USS O'Brien, and damaged the USS North Carolina off of Guadalcanal in a single torpedo run of six torpedoes.
The USS O'Brien being hit, the Wasp is burning on the left.
The I-19 had a devastating career in the Pacific War until its luck ran out on November 25, 1943, when it was sunk by the USS Radford.
On the same day, Italian frogmen placed limpet mines on the British SS Ravens Point at Gibraltar, sinking her, but not beyond repair.
The United States Army Air Force bombed Kiska for the second day in a row.
The USGS was at it again, taking photos on the Colorado.
I have to say, as somebody who started off in geology, this is leaving me envious.
Turkish forces on this day, fresh from defeating Greece, and followed by the murder of Armenians, approached Çanakkale and advanced on the Allied positions there.
The British government reacted with backbone, issuing an ultimatum. But the British commander on the location did not deliver it. British Conservatives, moreover, did not support going to war against Turkey over the issue, contrary to British Liberals Lloyd George and Winston Churchill (yes, at this point in time Churchill was a Liberal). The French did not a war either, nor did the Canadians, whose significant Dominion status mattered given that the British felt that they needed Dominion support. Having defeated the Greeks, the Turks quickly backed down, defusing the crisis, but contributing to one for Lloyd George.
In another Dominion, the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland and two associates suspended habeus corpus in Ireland due to the Irish Civil War.
Firestone commenced production of rubber tires in Canada. Oddly enough, on the same day William and Alfred Billes combined their savings to purchase the Hamilton Tire and Garage Ltd. which would be multiple retail lines company Canadian Tire.
Back to Turkey, the Turkish Orthodox Church was formed. The church is not recognized by the Eastern Orthodox. Pavlos Karahisarithis was the first Patriarch of what was termed the Autocephalous Turkish Orthodox Patriarchate, which he presided over until 1962. The church principally consistgs of Orthodox Karaman Turks and numbers 47,000 adherants today.
The Council of Foreign Relations commenced publication of Foreign Affairs.
The other day I got an email from some news source about "quiet quitting". I only read the headline and the first paragraph, so I didn't inform myself on whatever it was about in any depth.
Then this headline hit the news sources:
Conan O'Brien's assistant who's 'quiet quit' her job for over a decade says it's okay to be 'mediocre' and find ways to do the 'minimal amount of work possible'
Now there's a blizzard of such stories, so many in fact that I saw a story about how many there are. Another story, on NPR, put it this way:
Over the last several weeks, the concept of "quiet quitting" has exploded like a supernova across the media universe.
And they don't all apply to just the US. Here's one about our supposed arch economic nemesis, the People's Republic of China:
Before ‘quiet quitting’ in the U.S., there was ‘lying flat’ in China. How the anti-work movement swept the world’s two largest economies
Apparently "quiet quitting" means two things.
To some people, it apparently means just doing as little as possible and not getting too invested in your job.
Conan O'Brien's longtime assistant just wrote a book on the topic, and claimed this status for herself, which is interesting. In some ways, the book sort of recalls the 1967 film How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.1
The other meaning is close, but not quite the same. It means to do the amount you are paid for, and nothing else. I.e. your own time, is your own time. Again, the NPR article put it this way:
"You're still performing your duties, but you're no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it's not — and your worth as a person is not defined by your labor."
Indeed, both of these trends have the latter as their common theme.
So what is going on here?
I probably ought to put my usual peremptory rejection of the Stauss-Howe Generational Theory in here, as once again I'm citing to it, but there's something generational going on here, I'm pretty sure. Interestingly, it really shows where the theory is lacking, vindicating, I suppose, my skepticism about it. This trend is generational, but it doesn't fit into the "this generation, then that" categorization the Stauss Howe theorist back. About the only thing that rings true on this development is that changes tend to follow a crisis.
Crisis you say?
Well, I could hand you a veritable cornucopia of crises. COVID-19 provided a huge one, and perhaps just now we're really getting to learn what its long term societal impacts are. As one Lying Flat Chinese individual noted:
But when the pandemic hit, life as he knew it came to an abrupt stop. Like many other workers Covid made him reassess his priorities in life.
Chatting with artist friends back in his home town it struck him how although they had little money they always had something interesting to say about their day and what they were up to - while all he had was work.
From the BBC.
Anyhow, what that would mean that they should have these sets of characteristics.
What I've observed before here is this regarding the generations that follow the Boomer, and the Boomers themselves. The Boomers were the most fortunate generation, as a generation (individual stories can and often do run counter to a generation's story). They were born into a post-war world in which wealth was abundant like never before. Their parents sent large numbers of them to college at a time when you could still get a good job with just a high school diploma. The US was the dominant economic power.2
Like spoiled children often do, in their late teen early adult stages, they rebelled against their parents, and did so spectacularly. But also, like privileged children, they came back into the fold pretty quickly as a rule.
Again, huge disclaimer, this might apply to you if you were listening to Richie Havens at Woodstock, but very well might not if you were listening for the VC in Vietnam. Individual circumstances vary.3
As a generation, however, the same generation that didn't want to trust anyone over 30, hit their 30s, and went into careers of all sorts. Pretty soon, the same generation that was lampooning their parent's generation for being interested in "plastics" was looking for all sorts of new uses for it.
As a huge generational cohort, and one that stepped over their parent's heads economically pretty quickly, they've been enormously reluctant to let go of the reins.4 The ultimately irony is the same generation that criticized their parents, a damaged generation that had grown up on the Second World War and the Great Depression, they ultimately espoused much of the same ideals in the workplace, even though they damaged much of their parent's generation's ideals in other areas (more on that in a separate post coming up).
So, what occurred, it seems to me, is that the generations that followed the Boomers more closely resembled some prior generations rather than have bold new features. Generations Jones, growing up in the boomers wake but also enduring the tail end of a crisis, the 1970s inflation, came to have much the same view that the Depression Era or World War Two era generation did about work, although they differed on many other thins. Better find some and keep it. They simply endured the Boomers as they had little choice, knowing that they were going to be seated at the children's table forever, must like teenagers in their mid-teens who find themselves seated with ten-year-olds at the Thanksgiving Table. No, you can't choose your own cut of turkey. No, you can't have a glass of wine. Yes, you are getting gravy whether you like it or not.
The Millennial's, and the generation behind them, seem to me to be a lot like the generation that fought World War One, that being the supposed Lost Generation. No matter how they are defined by demographers and social scientists, those generations, when looked at, generally came into their own young, as prior generations had, and had little concept of employer loyalty. Indeed, the same generation in the teens and twenties was often strongly pro labor and strongly anti "fat cat".
I've noted these two instances before, but regarding this generation, back with the Pritzker Military Library still had its excellent podcast, it had a very good podcast regarding that generation. An author had interviewed a large number of very elderly American Great War veterans, and their interviews had some striking similarities. One veteran recalled how he'd graduated from high school, taken a job at a local insurance brokerage right after that, fought in the war, came home, went back to work for it, married and lived out his entire life right there, ultimately owning the brokerage. Collectively the men interviewed, many of whom were from farm families, had the view that life was hard, sudden death was common, the war came, it was hard, and sudden death was common, got out of the service, and life was hard, with sudden death being common.
World War One was one more thing.
So how does this relate to quiet quitting and laying flat?
More than you might suppose, I'd submit.
Generation Jones silently concluded, almost from the moment that they turned 18, that life was hard, and they were going to have to work in the shadow of the Boomers, with the Boomer set to use up as much of everything absentmindedly and remaking the world in the plastic image of the time, as The Graduate lampooned. Their opinions didn't matter, and never would. They pretty much resigned themselves to dying at their desks, and now that they're nearly 60, they're still resigned to it, with that resignation reinforced by their fellows, set to die at their desks, and often by their spouses, who grew up in the same era and are afraid of any thought that a person would do anything other than keep on keeping on, until the last row is plowed, and the tired mule dies in harness.
And to make it all the better, the Great Inflation, the horror of the economic times when they entered the workforce, has returned, robbing them at the begging of their entry into the work force, and cheating them at the period that should be the end.
Millennials, X and Y are different, however. And maybe in this way, they're looking back.
Romanticizing the past is really dangerous. Past times were typically much less ideal than we'd like to imagine. But things in fact can be lost.
Much of what we see today in general family trends is merely a return to the past. Adult children who are not married living at home is a return to the past. Even married children living in a parent's home is a return to the past. Not really feeling like moving all over the country, and focusing on work to support your life, rather than it being your life, well. . . that is in some ways too.
Footnotes
1. I'm not going to read it, in part because Conan O'Brien isn't funny. Also, however, writing a book is a pretty ambitious endeavor and I somewhat doubt that the author had quietly quit, but who knows.
2. This isn't intended to be a bash on the Baby Boomers post, and indeed, most of the post on this site that seem to, aren't meant to be. What this post documents is trends.
There are no perfect generations, I'd note, including the "Greatest Generation" that has come to be untouchable. If this were a much longer post, it'd go into that in some detail as well, as much of what we're seeing right now stems from their experiences, with lives shattered from the Great Depression and World War Two, and being unable to really put them back together thereafter.
Right here, however, is a good place to note this. The parents of the Boomers were different to start with, as they had been through a crisis that dated back to 1929 and their lives had no chance of being normal until 1945. The impact on the personality of the generation was inevitable.
3. See 2. This can't be emphasized enough.
When I was a National Guardsmen in the 1980s my unit was full of Vietnam Veterans who hadn't gone to college and who had instead gone to war. Their histories didn't match that of the generational archetype in a lot of ways.
4. A bizarre example of this was given to the country the other day when the Biden White House had James Taylor perform at the signing of a bill. Taylor performed Fire and Rain.
Seriously?
Fire and Rain was released in 1970.
In terms of years passed, this would be equivalent to having had Al Jolson sing That Haunting Melody at the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was the top hit of 1912. For that matter, Taylor's era was closer to Glen Miller's than to the current one. There's no way having Taylor signing at a White House event makes it relevant to most current Americans given that most were born after 1970s.
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