Tag: America That Was

What If We’re Not Doomed

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How many times have pundits (including my humble self) declared that we are already irrevocably tobogganing down the slope toward the decline and fall of the American Empire?  Probably too many to count.  And it’s not as if there isn’t a lot of dysfunction everywhere you look.  I won’t go through the litany.  It’s almost endless but all we have to mention to provide an undeniable example of societal rot and insanity is the spectacle of the American Medical Association embracing “gender affirming” treatments for minors including hormone therapies, mastectomies, hysterectomies and castration.

But what if things are about to improve?  Suppose the Trump administration is followed by the Vance administration and during this reprieve from leftist lunacy the country gets its financial health back to a greater extent.  Let’s go with that scenario.  People have enough money to buy houses again and raise kids and plan for the future.  What would that look like?  Of course, I have no way of actually knowing but let’s play the game and throw out some ideas and see if it leads us somewhere.

First off, I think it’s important to say what it won’t look like.  It’s not going to look like America in the 1950s or even the 1980s or 1990s.  The adults and children today; the millennials and the zoomers are very different from my parents’ generation and mine.  They’ve been propagandized in school and through social media to despise the world from those olden times.  They’re ashamed of their parents and grandparents and want to conform to the norms they’ve been taught.

Some of this can be seen in the situation playing out in New York City’s mayoral race.  The last two mayors have been liberal Democrats and under their administrations all the improvements in quality of life and safety gained during Republican mayors have been lost and the city is on the verge of collapsing into chaos.  So, what do the people there want in the next mayor?  A communist!  Now this is just an example.  There are others.  A similar radical is running for mayor of Minneapolis.  So, there is no lack of evidence that the millennials believe insane things.  Now it is true that there is precedent for people who believe these things being gob-smacked by reality and changing their minds.  Maybe that’s what we’re going to see.  It happened to the baby boomers in the nineteen seventies and eighties.  Maybe it’ll happen again.

But regardless, things will be very different.  I believe there has been a breach between the older America and what will follow.  It will not be the monolithic culture.  It will be several, or possibly many separate cultures.  Identity groups have been spawned and they will not disappear.  Ethnic and locality identities will develop and they will complicate social cohesion.  Hollywood and other purveyors of cultural content won’t be able to put out one product that resonates with everyone.  We already see that.  The multicultural experiment with superhero movies and other content have fizzled because people recognize they’re being handed a narrative to cheer for someone else’s team.  How many teenage boys want a female superhero beating up on much larger men as the template for the movies they are being handed.  They just stay home and play video games that allow them to control the narrative.

So, America might recover and even thrive.  But it will take generations for it to coalesce into a common identity.  In the meantime, we and our descendants will have to look out for our own interests, forming alliances and voting blocks where advantage exists.  There may even be a shining city on a hill.  But on the next hill may be a hellhole.  And that’s just the way it’ll have to be.

Back When Darren Stevens Was Still on Madison Avenue

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Even the commercials were better back in the old days when we were allowed to be happy.  The guys writing the commercials could write clever lyrics and even add a spritely tune for good measure.  Now?  Not so much.

Maybe President Trump can make MAGA also mean “Make Ads Great Again.”

 

 

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 28JAN2025 – You Can’t Go Home

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war pig

You really can’t go home again. The memories remain but the scene has changed.

Virginia Beach in the late 60s and early 70s was fun. A boardwalk, a pally where they had rollerskating one night and a dance another night. On the boardwalk were carnival games. I was banned from the rifle arcade shoot for winning too many prizes. South of town along the coast were beaches and especially dunes. We’d go down at night, dig a pit in the sand, gather driftwood and cook hot dogs and brats over the fire, followed by roasting marshmallows and some made s’mores. We drank beer and wine and watched the lights of the ships out on Chesapeake Bay. We’d skinny dip in the surf and make love among the dunes. A few were in committed relationships but most were lovers of convenience. The gals chose their partners for the night. Sort of like Kid Rock’s song “All Summer Long”. There was one girl who favored me but after she went back to college I never saw her again.

Now the dunes are replaced by cookie cutter condos. There had to be a law passed to mandate public access to the beach and now there are bar steel armored tunnels every so many buildings to allow the public to use the beach. Where there once was the boardwalk, arcade and pally, are hotels so tall that you have to look between them to see the beach from the strip.

The memories are still alive in my mind, but the X, Y, and Z are gone. Just the T remains.

Tom’s World – 29DEC2024 – Sandy Springs

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TomD

Speaking of homogeneous ethnic enclaves, I grew up in Sandy Springs in the 50’s and 60’s, a North Atlanta suburb populated almost exclusively by what were known as WASPS. As far as we were aware, there was no crime at all until drugs started to come into the scene, which would have been the latter half of the 60’s. But, even then, there was no evident violent crime.

I assume that this idyllic period during my formative years is behind my conviction that the present world should somehow achieve that status.

But even Sandy Springs doesn’t exist any more except in name. The monster that metro Atlanta has become ate it decades ago. The woods behind the neighborhood containing the abandoned POW camp have been replaced by high rise offices; the quarry with the lake at the bottom where we kids used to take our .22’s to shoot water snakes is long ago filled in..

And I’m of an age where I won’t exist a lot longer either but that’s okay. It seems that my world is gone and some nightmarish creation taken its’ place.

Colorado Wake Up Call

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If anyone, not on the Left, needed any further proof of the lack of political freedom in this country, the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court has hopefully provided it.  Bottom line; the powers that be will decide which candidates you are allowed to choose between.  Maybe it would be more efficient if on January 1st the Department of Truth just tells us in advance who will win the November election and saved us all that time and expense.  Maybe it’s Nikki Haley’s turn.  After all she’s slightly smarter than Kamala Harris, better looking and she will have the same policies as Joe and Kamala.  And she has the added bonus that she can drag along another ten percent of the electorate who call themselves compassionate conservatives, whatever that means.

I’m reconciled with the Left keeping Donald Trump off the ballot.  People should know what’s what.  Enough making believe.  Look around you and understand how things get done.  If Trump wouldn’t play ball with the State Department and CIA over Ukraine then they stage a race war and then a pandemic.  And if he’s still too popular to beat in an election then just bring out the “vote harvesting” and manufacture a presidency.  If the Biden agenda bankrupts the nation and alienates 70% of the electorate, why simply manufacture an insurrection charge against Trump and presto-change-o, we get candidate Nikki Haley.

In effect that is what they mean by “our democracy.”  What they really mean is “their oligarchy.”

Well, there you go.  That’s what it is.  And unless someone really wants to go toe to toe with their mafia gang you live under that oligarchy.  What you don’t have to do is pretend it’s some sacred arrangement.  You have to pay the mafia shakedown guy.  You don’t have to pretend you like it.  And when the day comes that some other mafia gang comes along and tries to knock them off their pedestal it’s definitely not your job to take up arms for them.  Let them send their own sons off to die.  That’s the nature of a mob.  They’re killers and they better be the best at it or someone stronger or nastier will knock them over.

For us it’s a matter of surviving in an oligarchic tyranny.  There are all kinds of strategies and tactics.  Mostly find a spot outside of the epicenters of the regime and try to hold onto whatever prosperity they haven’t managed to extract from their slaves.  Find a spot where they haven’t managed to hem in their cattle in the tightest pen.

And maybe someday when the disastrous global policies of this regime lead to catastrophe, which becomes more likely every day, then there will be a strong enough reaction to pull down this regime and install more moderate maniacs who will confine themselves to simply stealing money and not killing off the majority of their citizens through nonsensical policies like green energy and de-industrialization.

But until then watch what happens.  If Trump stays on the ballots and wins the election then I have wildly overestimated the strength and arrogance of the regime.  If he ends up in jail then I’ve got it about right.

The Ghost of America Yet to Come – Part 2

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Yesterday in the first part of this exercise I extrapolated where all the awful policies and consequences of Democrat rule would lead.  It was pretty much the train wreck scenario for our progressive trajectory.  Is there any other path forward?  I’m not sure.

It would be highly unrealistic to imagine a version of the future where traditional values are easily restored to the country.  That would be ignoring reality because the majority of young people living in this country are leftists.  They believe in the woke orthodoxies and align with the agenda that the Democrats espouse.

But it is true that the Biden administration has made a hash of the economy.  Many of the young resent the lack of opportunities in this economy.  And the horrific crime surging around the cities has even begun to frighten urban leftists.  Especially since several of them have become high profile victims of random violence.  So, let’s see if we can spin a version of the future that doesn’t make me want to emigrate.

Here are the circumstances that would have to align to permit us to avoid the future I outlined in Part 1 of this thought experiment:

  1. Joe Biden will have to get his wish and remain the 2024 candidate despite his extreme unpopularity and obvious incompetence.
  2. Donald Trump will have to defy all odds and not get thrown off the ballot by the two major parties.
  3. Joe Biden’s America has to descend three more turns down into the maelstrom its’s currently circling. Maybe the price of food, fuel and housing will continue to spike and interest rates will make home ownership impossible for most people.  Maybe the mass layoffs at the banks and other corporations will start to cut into the Democrat support.  And maybe Joe’s transparent lies will just finally aggravate even the stupidest voters.
  4. And finally, it will require that the Republicans will actually try to restrain voter fraud in the swing states like Georgia and Arizona.

If all these things happen it would be possible for a Republican Congress and President to be installed in 2025.  And if all the promises and plans were put into effect, we could start to get the country back.  The idea of replacing the bulk of the Justice Department sounds like a dream but I’ve heard scenarios that might be workable.  And other worthwhile changes could be made if we could manage to have decent congressional leaders while a Republican president was in the White House.  Putting an end to the “green agenda” would drastically lower the cost of gasoline and heating oil.  It would also lower the cost for almost everything else.  Urban crime wouldn’t disappear overnight but the feds could crack down on DA’s that weren’t prosecuting criminals.  Many things could be turned around once the Democrats were out of the White House.

And now the splash of cold water to wake us up after that pipe dream.  What do I think are the odds that all those things will happen and we escape the Part 1 fate?  One in five?  One in ten?  Hard to say.  But one thing’s for sure.  If it doesn’t happen in 2024 it’s hard to imagine it will ever happen.  Stagflation finished off Jimmy Carter in 1980.  What we have going on right now is worse on every level and includes so many kinds of dysfunction that if it could be ignored during an election year then we would have to be dealing with an entirely different America from the one I grew up in.

So, there’s the happy version.  Let me know what odds you’d give for this version in the comments.  Ho, ho, ho.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 17NOV2023 – The Old Days

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I need to write up my memories of those times pre-insanity. Joined in 1998 and it was a whole different world in the military. I have a few sea stories on Substack but it’s hard to describe how different it was then. Think of Stranger Things ‘upside down’ world compared to ours. People were real, you didn’t hold back on opinion’s amongst one another. Conflict resolution included fan room conferences. ie two guys who have a problem are ordered to go in and either fuck or fight, but settle the differences and move forward. Diversity measures were in place, yet it was more subtle and not repeated like a cult mantra how it is today. One felt they were serving a country and not a faceless GAE blob. I could write all day on the differences. Men were men and acted accordingly for the most part. Masculinity was not a dirty word, nor being superior. One had pride and felt honor for serving. At least I did. It wasn’t as much of a babysitting/jobs program with social engineering being shoved down the throat daily as it is now.