Phan In Phlorida wrote:No great society/civilization/empire lasts forever. They rise, peak, plateau for a bit, then eventually fall. History is marked with such patterns of growth and decline. Sometimes the decline is gradual, other times rapid. Whether rapid or gradual, all great societies/civilizations/empires eventually fall.

Phan In Phlorida wrote:No great society/civilization/empire lasts forever. They rise, peak, plateau for a bit, then eventually fall. History is marked with such patterns of growth and decline. Sometimes the decline is gradual, other times rapid. Whether rapid or gradual, all great societies/civilizations/empires eventually fall.

5th Round Pick wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:So a bunch of people of questionable mental health decided that Pawlenty was their third choice, and he though that was reason enough to drop out of the Presidential race.

Soon enough the gutted buildings will be demolished and the 24-hour courts will wind down, and we will try to pretend we didn't let our hoods slip, revealing how frightened of each other we are. Once, a powerful woman told us there was no such thing as society and set about engineering our country to fit her theory. Well, she got her way. This is where we live now, and if we don't like it, we ought to make a change.

If preventing further looting is our aim, then as well as addressing the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, I'd take a long hard look at MTV Cribs and similar TV shows that routinely confuse human achievement with the mindless acquisition of gaudy bling bullshit. The media heaves with propaganda promoting sensation and consumption above all else.

Back in the 80s the pioneering aspirational soap opera Dallas dangled an unattainable billionaire lifestyle in front of millions, but at least had the nous to make the Ewing family miserable and consumed with self-loathing. At the same time, shows aimed at kids were full of presenters cheerfully making puppets out of old yoghurt pots, while shows aimed at teens largely depicted cheeky urchins copping off with each other in the dole queue. Today, whenever my world-weary eyes alight on a "youth show" it merely resembles a glossily edited advert for celebrity lifestyles, co-starring a jet-ski and a tower of gold. And regardless of the time slot, every other commercial shrieks that I deserve the best of everything. I and I alone. I'd gladly introduce a law requiring broadcasters to show five minutes of footage of a rich man dying alone for every 10 minutes of fevered avarice. It'd be worth it just to see them introduce it on T4.

If we were to delete all aspirational programming altogether, the schedules might feel a bit empty, so I'd fill the void with footage of a well-stocked Foot Locker window, thereby tricking any idiots tuning in on a recently looted television into smashing the screen in an attempt to grab the coveted trainers within.

dajafi wrote:

Phan In Phlorida wrote:No great society/civilization/empire lasts forever. They rise, peak, plateau for a bit, then eventually fall. History is marked with such patterns of growth and decline. Sometimes the decline is gradual, other times rapid. Whether rapid or gradual, all great societies/civilizations/empires eventually fall.

A few things about this--from, I should note, a fairly committed "declinist."

The decline of the U.S. has been diagnosed since literally the 1790s. We always oversell the past and undersell the present. Grim as things look right now, (even) I have trouble believing we're really in worse shape, objectively speaking, than was true in 1862, or 1931. The problems we have are so clearly fixable.

But what's cause for despair is that we, or at least our elected officials, disagree so profoundly about the causes of those problems that we're unable to address them. And our political system, the vehicle for common action, has mutated in such ways that the disagreements just keep getting deeper. Right now, just about every incentive in terms of career advancement is toward greater intransigence.

I think allentown's diagnosis is pretty much dead on: the combination of our own built-in advantages in terms of resources, our solid industrial relationships and governance structures, policies that continued to grow our human capital more rapidly than anyone else's, and the historical fluke that the rest of the world was basically leveled gave us an enormous competitive advantage in the quarter-century after WWII. As the rest of the world started to catch up, we used some tricks to sustain things... and then we started to forget that they were tricks. The end-stage of magical thinking is when you totally lose sight of the fact that magical thinking is what you're indulging in. Cargo cultists don't recognize what they're doing--so you have eight Republican presidential aspirants all promising not to accept a country-saving debt deal that has one dollar of tax increases, presumably targeted where they'd do close to zero economic harm, for ten in spending cuts!

How we fix it, realistically, I have no idea. Certainly I think the role of money in politics and the fact that large swaths of the public are consistently misinformed are huge problems. That elections are structured to be less rather than more competitive--that in many if not most congressional districts the candidate farther in terms of ideology from the median national voter gets elected--is a huge problem.

A lot of it is cultural too. Daniel Patrick Moynihan had a great quote about the relationship of politics to culture: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." He felt that the interaction of these "truths" worked to strengthen American society and move us closer toward our founding ideals. I wonder if he'd still feel that way. What I see is a profoundly selfish culture that has stained our politics, which in turn reinforce the trend toward self-glorification.

pacino wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:So a bunch of people of questionable mental health decided that Pawlenty was their third choice, and he though that was reason enough to drop out of the Presidential race.

i read a comment on another thread from a pawlenty supporter who was saying that straw poll meant nothing because it's just a 'popularity contest'.

uhm, yeah?