Brave New Generation

I remember where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated. I remember his idealism, and then our eager long haired years when we said “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” We, and those coming after us, intended to keep our idealism for good citizenship as we all aged… striving, seeking and never yielding. The world was going to be “new and improved.”

Mark Manson, successful blogger, is 36. This morning, (Monday June 1) I received my usual Monday morning e-mail from him. (footnote) At the risk of thereby misquoting or misrepresenting him, please let me present one great paragraph out of what he sent. I have broken it up into smaller paragraphs, for cosmetic reasons, all the better fit computer screens. His swear words are idealistically chosen for effect. 

QUOTE

I am thirty-six years old. Despite crippling problems with health care, education, gun violence, immigration, climate change, stagnant wages, income inequality, and racial inequality persisting for my entire adult life, I have never once seen my government help with or resolve any of these issues. 

For as long as I can remember, it has been: tax cuts, war, tax cuts, bailouts, tax cuts, bailouts. 

I have never seen things get better in this country. Only worse. I have never seen anything substantive from my leaders, Democrat or Republican, that makes me proud of voting for them. I wasn’t alive for the moon landing. I am too young to remember the Berlin Wall falling. I don’t give a flying fuck about Saddam Hussein. 

My introduction to my nation was 9/11, followed by hearing about friends and classmates being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by graduating into the worst economic collapse in 86 years, followed by thirteen more years of absolutely fucking nothing changing. 

Forty-five years of no real wage growth for the middle and lower classes? Nothing. Kindergarteners being shot at school with assault rifles? Nothing. Eleven million bankruptcies due to a corrupt and dysfunctional health care system? Nothing. Black people being repeatedly murdered by police, live, on camera? An entire generation of young people saddled with over a trillion dollars of debt just to go to school and then told to stay home and not work as soon as they get out? 

UNQUOTE

As Manson credibly related the ongoing frustration of his peers to the current protests and riots... something occurred to me: At age 36, Manson has never known a world without Reaganomics. 

It is instructive to compare the 40 years between the war and President Reagan’s changes, with the 40 years until today. In this comparison, reagonomics loses out.

While Mark and his friends take it for granted that a federal government should be mainly concerned with stockholders, and a business solely concerned with stockholders, that was not the case when I was young. In my day, every successful businessman knew there were other valid concerns beyond stockholders.

Some wise guy: “Ya, but the money will trickle down!”

Me: “Really? How’s that working out for you?”

For you Canadians, I suppose this doesn’t apply, except, after the international border reopens, if, say, a U.S. citizen is sincerely asking you why all the other developed nations believe in socialized medicine, and why they nearly all, including Canada, declined to participate in the invasion of Iraq, and then declined to join the occupation “to instil democracy”… 

After you heave a sigh and say, “It’s not coincidence,” you could suggest your American friends might just possibly, maybe, perhaps, debrief on how reaganomics has worked out. I tell you, the previous economic model was good enough for my grandfather, my father and I.

And for my final angry word (And Lord, how I want to swear!) 

In war time? A tax cut in war time? Only under something as ugly as reagonomics, back when America was supposedly needing all available money and troops for the war—desperate for troops— “all of us in this together,” when all of us were supporting some of us to fight overseas, could there ever be a tax cut… which the servicemen and their families would never see.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

June 2

2020

Footnotes:

For Mark Manson’s June 1st letter: 

View in browser

Promoting Mark’s regular Monday letter:

(Note: If you like these emails and know someone who would enjoy them, please consider forwarding this to them. If you are receiving this for the first time, you can sign up here to receive this newsletter every Monday.)

The Uptight Aftermath

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got emotional suppression?

How do individuals, and communities too, become normal after things like an abuse or the loss of a town factory? I don’t know; I can only grasp parts of the truth.

To me it’s normal to be uptight and to insulate one’s emotions, for however long it takes to process healing inside… and of course to also change circumstances outside…

I can imagine someone processing things at one level while playing with his grownup toys and gifts. In my family when I was a boy any Christmas gifts with store-bought gift wrapping would be from the Legion or father’s workplace. Relatives used newspaper. In today’s War of the Worlds poem, I imagine all the fancy electronic toys have been rendered inert by a Martian magnetic pulse, and the economy shattered, worse than when Sherman marched through Georgia.

All my future poems to be posted here, of heroic survivors, will be from my last manuscript section, called After the Martians.

Uptight Man

In a boy’s mechano set

screws and nuts extend steel plates and girders.

After every Gameboy got pulsed out,

the kids enjoyed their flat black mechano engine.

Hook it in and wind it tight

to have a mechano moving truck.

Just swivel the black lever,

release the hidden spring—whir-r-r-r-r.

Maybe I grieve for lost dogs, and birdsong,

and Mother Nature, so bent over her walking stick.

She’s not the upright girl in the smooth green dress 

she used to be.

I grieve for gentle Uncle Jack. 

Maybe I miss my mum and dad,

and childhood,

and I don’t even know what I’m so sad about,

but I know I’ve lost something.

In my grief I am a mechano man,

wound up tight, unable to whirrr.

I still walk and talk like a man,

tough like the other guys,

to hide my flat spring heart.

Beneath the open ribs of a church,

with sagging stained-glass windows,

I tightly curve over my prayer book,

in a silent congregation of strangers.

Can a single blade of grass, poke through a wasteland?

Will a warm church of fellowship, ever form here?

I swivel my jaw, “Amen.”

A tear falls to the page.

Splat!

Everyone can hear it.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

March

2020

Two Footnotes: 

A book I regret not buying:

In a London library, I found a collection of pre-television children’s games, many more than I ever played. It was being discarded for a (dollar) pound but I had too many books at home, or so I thought at the time. Too bad, for I could have taken it from the shelf anytime the world was getting me down, the nerd reader’s way of having a playground in my mind. You know, like in the 1972 hit song. (link)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFONCfjewgM

A question posed by our principal which no child in my elementary school class could answer:

Where does nylon come from?

SIDEBAR ON TOYS

In place of big leggo, we had small red blocks like bricks that snapped together along the tops. The blocks came with a cardboard green roof you could cut to shape. 

The counters in the monopoly set were carved round wooden abstracts; the most “real” was a “milk bottle,” the houses and hotels were wooden too. In the affluent 1960’s there came along plastic toys, including a plastic cannon that did everything, including having a flip up grenade launcher. (like a fancy vacuum with attachments) That was the “Mighty Moe,” hence the song kids still sing today:

Jingle bells, 

Christmas smells, 

Santa Claus is dead,

Someone took a Mighty Moe 

and shot him in the head.

Plastic swept in during the 1950’s, and was still rolling along at the time of The Graduate. But the age of cheap plastic only lasted a few decades. Now toy soldiers are tiny, cheap and squished, and you just cannot collect figures in the cereal boxes anymore, not since the Arabs raised the price of oil.  

…Economic Interlude…

—Oh, if only the U.S. economists, capitalists and the public had WAITED, knowing from Pareto’s law that cartels don’t last more than a few years—I suspect the former two did know, as it would be business school 101, but didn’t tell the public— 

Instead of waiting, capitalists invested in big oil wells, the Arab cartel predictably broke up, and then the Americans needed to keep the price of oil HIGH so big capitalists could get their investment back—I suspect Americans then purposely inflated their money supply, without telling the U.S. public about the “mysterious new inflation,” to help with their balance of payments to the Arabs… 

(Of course, this all makes me sound like a conspiracy nut, I mean, surely someone else would have noticed while inflation was screwing with us. And raised the public’s ire. So you are welcome to check into my suspicions yourself) 

My favorite essay to leisurely “sneak up rather than throw truth in your face like a wet dishrag” is called Conspiracies and Inflation, mostly about inflation, not climate-gate, archived November 2013. https://essaysbysean.blogspot.com/2013/11/conspiracies-and-inflation.html

…End of Economic Interlude…

The pre-sweetened cereals never had the toys because those junk cereals could already count on kids to want them. I collected sports figures, Robin Hood’s merry men, the jungle book animals, Eskimos and even “computers wearing tennis shoes.” Never any wee dinosaurs or soldiers in the cereal, though. Those I had to buy as tiny critters in a store-bought package. But hurray—Now that I’m an adult, I can buy big dinos! 

(For a while I had a big Dino with a leg hooked over my flat screen to help me see if I had the wrong picture size) 

Many of the toys of the sixties were silly novelties, sold through silly TV commercials showing pretty people smiling too hard for real life, made for affluent families with too much money on their hands. For example, a collection of beetles that would flip through the air, using the principle of squeezing soap, if you hit them with the plastic bat. The target was a big frog. 

Bop, bop, 

bop the beetle;

hit, hit, 

hit it right.

When you hit the frog,

It’s mouth, 

Shuts tight.

Star Trek Silly Season

Hello Reader,

Remember the 1960’s?

It’s “the silly season,” as news reporter call it. Parliament is in recess, nothing’s happening, and journalists are resorting to stories about the Loch Ness monster, and nostalgia for Star Trek. Me too. 

Now, some of my very best writing is not my essays, but my comments on other people’s blogs. That said, not so “best” were the comments of me and others on the blog of Scott Berkun, gentleman and scholar, when he answered a reader’s question by posting Star Trek and the ideas we must reject in order to save our future. (See footnote) He received 22 comments, some of them quite lengthy.

In the spirit of the silly season, here are my comments for Scott’s post.

The first came after a commenter, believe it or not, “dissed” Star Trek! I was shocked, shocked I say! So I commented too:

Call me a computer nerd, but:

Lisa, above, is confusing the later Star Trek universe, made during grim Reagonomics and so forth, with STOS (Star Trek the original series) made during the cresting wave of the age of Aquarius. This original series remains ever a cultural icon.

Remember? Starships could “destroy an entire planet” but didn’t, and phallic weapons were never carried in visible holsters,

(unlike on Wagon Train, the show’s touchstone for having guest stars who had been in the train/crew all along)

but tucked beneath one’s shirt.

The median year for African countries getting independence, (by my count) was 1960, only six years before the show. So the anti-imperialist Prime Directive was a welcome shock.

The Klingons were Bad Guys who, as someone (David Gerrold?) joked, had no bathtubs on their ships, but hey, you would never see one unless you went out into space.

Then I had to correct my “oopsy,” also known as a factual error:

Oops. I should have written “mode year” not “median year.”

Details: Mode means the year (number) repeated the most. Median would be the number in the middle, like a dotted road median. “Mean” would be the number that is conventionally “average.”

Well, it’s been literally decades since I took any statistics. (Strange, at my age, to measure lots of things now in decades instead of years)

We commenters had fun: 

Call me old, but I enjoy my memories:

For Star Trek, I never got used to the velcro thingy, too futuristic-silly for me, because in one of the first episodes to air, Kirk has a leather-looking holster thingy you can see for a second as he pulls his shirt down, getting ready to beam to the planet. It looked yellow, but our TV set was black and white, so I don’t know.

The brand new department store was two miles away (walking right angles) and I remember when the salesmen still couldn’t get the three colour knobs right (Jeanie had green skin) so there would be a wall of televisions with all different colour settings. I went home and reported what color the ST uniforms were.

Star Trek, airing in 1966, just barely caught the change to color TV. Lost in Space, as I know from re-runs, had their first season in black and white.

I have read they didn’t make Spock have green skin, because the make up would look bad on b&w TVs.

As for make up and fashions, on rare occasion I would see signs in the dirt sidewalk that the high school girls had worn high heels. I don’t know if any wore mini skirts. At our elementary school I think one girl did, I forget, (and all the boys in my grade—but not the younger grades—kept their hair short until junior high) but I dimly remember strangers my age from other schools wearing minis. 

I will tell you what a lot of elementary girls wore for our fashion show (fund raiser), which I haven’t seen since: Three piece bathing suits. Truly society was in transition.

Would I want my granddaughter wearing a miniskirt? As Spock would say in the episode with computer warfare: “I said I understand/have memories, I did not say I approve.”

You will recall that the first blogs were intended partly for community, with lots of intra-comments. So we communed:

Hi Scott, Lisa, Tony, everyone:

I guess it was Christmas of 1969 that we (a brother and I) got a model kit for Christmas, complete with room for a battery so (the front nacelles?) would light up. What I’m clear on is the box included a cheap booklet that included advice on how to write in to save the show, advising “don’t put Star Trek on the envelope” or it would be passed on to the actual show, not the network. It said the next season would start with the “never before seen” Turn About Intruder, and then re-runs, so save the show!

Also in the booklet you could send away for Spock’s pendant, brief celluloid film clips, and actual scripts. That was an eye opener, (either then or later) since it was super obvious the third season had all the bad episodes.

When I took Macbeth in high school I counted five episode titles.

Luckily for me, we lost our TV part way through the series, and so for years I could look forward to possibly seeing a new-to-me episode.

Since I left home in mid-1975, it would have been sometime in the first half of the decade that my brother perused the TV guide and pointed out there was an episode showing, on some channel or other, seven days a week. So the show was popular years before Star Wars encouraged a movie release with Star Wars style orchestra music, instead of futuristic space music.

(And hey, the above was probably before cable, let alone satellite) We all got on a roll, even unto non-Star Trek things. Of course you remember The Troubles With Tribbles episode!:

• Call me a fan, but I can’t resist sharing:
• Speaking of the tribbles script by David Gerrold, I put his Chtorr War series in the “about me” section on favorite books in my blog. The series has lots to say about integrity, responsibility and leadership. It’s told first person, like a detective story, as the hero learns about life and the alien Chtorr.
  
• The series starts with exposition about some serious plagues (only 76 congressmen survive) Now the survivors have to “step up to the plate” and not say, “Let George do it.”
  
• Everyone feels like an orphan in mourning, everyone therefore has a golden excuse to escape into alcoholism and drugs, but the good ones carry on. The hero starts out as a spoiled brat, but he learns better.
  
• The army is integrated, to the point where the young hero often forgets to mention the gender of a soldier in the background.
  The feminist in me laughs at how he gets a girl friend (husband and child deceased) who is older, more sexually and relationship-ly experienced, taller, smarter and of higher military rank.
  As you might guess, Gerrold is from wacky Southern California.

I guess we talked of how in the Star Trek future humans were all so affluent. No wonder we had less war in the future.

Lisa: Thank you.

Scott (and everybody): 

Regarding American society and affluence, I just tried a search engine. No luck.

But I’m sure that (probably in a coffee table patriotic picture book) John Steinbeck wrote something years ago which I’m still thinking about:

That Americans, after several generations of trying, had finally achieved affluence … and for the first time were at a loss as to what to do next.

I suppose we meant that United Statesians had lost one of their national dreams.

…Well dear reader, that’s enough silliness. 

For next week’s post, maybe I’ll blog deadly dull, and serious. But don’t worry, it will be posted near labour day, so I don’t suppose you will read it.

Sean Crawford

August

in a loft in Cochrane,

2018

Footnote: 

~Here’s the link to Berkun’s post. I am a fan of his web site.

~For more about TV history, of a more scholarly bent, see my essay Death of Buffy, archived January 2012. 

~For the death of Buffy’s friend, see Anya, Friend of Buffy, archived April 2017, regarding how at last I understand her phobia for bunny rabbits.

Centennial Year

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Headnote: In 1967 there was a fad: a certain stuffed cartoonish arctic snowy owl called an Ookpik (Eskimo word) was selling everywhere; there was even an Ookpik (The owl’s name) comic strip in the newspaper. I’m sure the owls were sold as commonly at Expo 67 as are the stuffed Paddington Bears now selling in the stores near Paddington Station. My sister received one for Christmas holding onto a sign saying, “I hate men.” She said, “That’s what I say when coming home from a date on Friday nights.”

Hello Reader,

Got a favorite year?

This Saturday at Confederation Park, as part of Canada’s 150^th birthday, or “Canada 150,” a time capsule will be dug up. It has traveled through time, carrying to us the dreams of fellow Canadians of 1967. I wonder what they were eager to show us? Did they put Ookpik in the capsule? In ’67, as the original Star Trek showed an idealistic federation of peace and harmony, Canadians took pride in their confederation: con is Latin for coming together.

The most popular song that year went: “It’s the hundredth anniversary of… confederation! Every-body sing!” Another line went, “Frere Jacqua, frère Jacqua, merrily we roll along, together, all the way!”

Having a hundred years of continuous democracy was a big deal. The French were on their latest numbered republic, East Germany was still communist, Spain still fascist, and India hadn’t gotten democracy and statehood until the late 1940’s. By world standards, we were doing pretty well. The telephone book cover showed the horse and buggy days, captioned 1867-1967: as our hearts swelled with innocent pride.  

By the next year, innocence was waning, leading to a few years of monotonous bomb threats all across our land, while back east were a few French-speaking “Pure Wool” (white, not ethnic) terrorists, as movies seeped out of Hollywood with pointless violent endings, sexploitation and Blacksploitation.

But the previous year, still innocent, a syndicated newspaper magazine ran a narrative-style article on soldiers of the future, complete with their jet packs and infrared goggles. I think that year had a cover story about a “Top Gun,” a German submarine captain who sunk the most ships in the Saint Lawrence. Today I suspect magazine editors would not present such things, not because Canadians are too liberal, but too squeamish.

The successive year, less innocent, that magazine had a book review, with scary illustrations made for the article, of the novel Killing Ground about a future Canadian civil war. In January of 1968 Middle Americans were to hear Walter Cronkite, their most respected TV newscaster by far say, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war!” Innocence drained rapidly after the Tet Offensive.

But 1967 was golden.

That year people went to San Francisco with flowers in their hair, (link to song lyrics) while Canadians hitchhiked to see Canada’s world exposition, Expo 67. A man fixing my furnace once told me, “By the next year hippies were hitchhiking, and spoiled it.” In 1967 the Boy Scout magazine, Canadian Boy, did an innocent article about hitching across this land, called “Thumb-ting to Sing About.” The magazine also did an article on the wonders of Expo. Somehow, I doubt the later World Expo of 1986, in Vancouver, held the same cross-country pride and excitement.

As for this year of 2017, let me tell you, I am just not feeling anywhere near the same hoopla for “Canada 150.” Of course I’m older now, not in school, not watching TV as much, so maybe, although I listen to a lot of CBC radio, maybe I’ve somehow failed to notice any prevailing winds of excitement, but still … let me tell you how we celebrated back in my day, for our 100 year birthday.

In schools the children all got a centennial medal—I got heck for taking mine out of the plastic wrapper, as my parents thought it would tarnish. Servicemen in the armed forces all got a campaign medal to show they were in the service that year, while Girl Guides and Boy Scouts all got a special badge to sew on.

School kids in all grades did athletic testing (situps, runs and so forth) and then received a big centennial crest to put on, in gold, silver, or bronze. There was a smaller rectangular one in red to show participation. I don’t know if we would want our kids to be so visibly competitive today: This was before “losing” in Viet Nam led Terry Orlick to devise “cooperative games” such as children surrounding a parachute to bounce a ball with no score, no losers.

As I wrote earlier this month, the Ca-na-da song music video, of a pied piper leading singing children over a grassy field, caused the CBC phone to ring off the hook with requests for lyrics. Also on TV were exciting calls to “Plan your centennial project now.” The clip I still remember is of a few people in formal eveningwear on the top of a mountain playing their symphony instruments. Those TV ads were aimed at individuals.

While individuals “did their own thing,” at our community level we built the aforementioned Confederation Park, while down in Lethbridge volunteers go involved to spend 25 million in 1967 dollars on a real Japanese Garden. (No flowers) A contractor volunteered to work out a cost estimate—he was almost bang on. (Try doing that today) Japanese royalty attended the opening. Some of the emperor’s family will be back to experience the garden for the Canada 150.

Elementary school kids raised money for centennial projects. For example, Project 100—and there was a poster in the classroom showing forlorn children of color—was to raise a hundred dollars for children overseas. That year students created and staged many stage plays and such, while charging a few pennies—back when one cent bought a big candy. I remember a fashion show where many of the girls modeled three-piece bathing suits. The third piece, of course, was a snug strip across their middle. That was back when boys and men were wearing jockey style swimsuits. (non-speedo) There was cultural funding that year for young grownups to come in and do plays with audience involvement… part of why I still remember is that such things didn’t happen in succeeding years. We had just one kick at the can.

Until only a few years ago, downtown, on the sidewalk across from the Hudson’s Bay Company, by the church, stood a turquoise molded one-piece plastic bench. It had the centennial logo: a maple leaf made of triangles. Now, that’s the kind of humble centennial project that warms my heart. The Canada 150 logo is a leaf made of diamonds… I wonder, since our government on Parliament Hill today seems full of young whippersnappers, if anybody on the hill besides the artist noticed the similarity in the two leafs? The golden year of 1967 was so long ago.

My favorite year.

Sean Crawford

Late June

Calgary

2017

Footnotes:

~Some old memories only surfaced in the writing of this essay—how nice, while others I had been reviewing so as not to lose them for the last fifty years. “Reviews it or lose it.”

~For me, the Japanese garden (link to images) alone makes the drive to Lethbridge worth the trip.

~Following a reader’s outrageous suggestion, in 1967 Canadian Boy magazine ran a science fiction story, starring kids from a previous three-part story, called Who Stole Expo 2067? (The expo was orbiting as a space platform; the bad guys turned it invisible) Say, I wonder what the 2067 maple leaf logo will look like?

~I wrote about the centennial song (with links) being ignored by whippersnappers in my essay Sawhorses Blocking the Forum in June of this year. Once again, here is a link to some children singing the song at Expo 67.

~Terry Olick gets a broader mention in my essay-and-book-review of Backfire, about Vietnam, contrasting bureaucrats (civil and military) with citizens, archived September 2010. That essay is one of my top ten for reader stats.

~I so despised the contemptible, cowardly, costly, cover-your-ass paperwork of Vietnam, that one semester at university, without asking my professor first, I accepted a lower mark in university to go do one (of two) of my term papers on “red tape,” instead of on an a proper course related subject. I still passed.

There’s lots of research out there to show that, like cancer, red tape can be beaten. (Of course by “costly” I don’t mean in terms of money or man-hours—you know what I mean)

~As it happened, my course was on “social workers and the medical system.” About the time President Bill Clinton was trying and failing to bring in affordable healthcare, my professor had heard, at a U.S. university conference, a U.S. politician, a name you would recognize, lying through his teeth to his fellow Americans about Canadian medicare. It would seem poor Clinton was doomed before he even started. How President Obama ever managed to pull it off is a mystery to me.  

I sure hope the Yankees, by 2067, will have finally achieved world-class health care. I’m still chuckling at a recent Canadian editorial cartoon of an American health care “draft” manual, covered with shabby post-it notes on rumpled pages, next to a very tall stack of pristine manuals with the names of first world countries… Sometimes, being an arrogant American is its own punishment.