Well, this excellent. One of those one's I hesitate to comment on because it's perhaps a bit out of my league and my coment may sound dull. Ill-informed.
I copied this to the clipboard.
" -claimed Kennedyism for themselves in their rhetoric and personal grooming. "
Really interesting, thanks Roy. I can confirm that growing up working class in the Bronx in the late 60’s-70’s and living in an extended family situation, in our kitchen we had framed photos of the Pope, JFK, and more atypically, Walter Reuther (the UAW President) with MLK, Jr. – my father and grandfather were both UAW men and my grandfather was quite the socialist/commie type.
In talking about cults of personality, I can understand JFK and even, although I disagreed with his politics, Reagan being cult figures. But seven years later it still boggles my mind how Trump attained that status. Truly, we are in Idiocracy.
Absolutely zero interest in Maggie Haberman's new book about Trump, because the man himself holds no interest, he's a psychopath and narcissist, who needs a whole book about that?
But the millions of people who chose to follow and worship him hold a strange fascination for me, what the hell were/are they thinking? I ask, over and over and over again.
Same with any cult, Jim Jones himself probably isn't that interesting, but the question of why all those other people drank the Kool-Aid is something I can't get out of my mind.
Absolutely agree on the Haberman book. Ethically, she sacrificed journalism/duty to inform the public in favor of “access.” And in terms of actual interest, her pitch boils down to “here are some more examples of a criminal psychopath behaving like a criminal psychopath for your reading enjoyment.” Sweetie, we don’t need further convincing, and additional examples are just depressing.
Just imagine, you can hear audio of Trump blathering and Maggie in the background, saying "uh huh, uh huh..." how can you pass on that, it's like you're right there in the room with them! [shudder]
I am fascinated too. But as for the Jonestown people, the question for me is not so much why they drank the Flavor-Aid as why they followed him to distant Guyana to begin with. Once they were there, they became fully terrorized and had very little chance of escape. As for why they went, maybe there is leftover Kennedyism there, too. Jim Jones preached racial equality, social progress, a better world. It was all in service to his psychotic delusions, but at the beginning, it may have seemed hopeful.
And Jones was well respected among lots of folks in northern California even after decamping. Took quite awhile before Rep. Leo J. Ryan and aide Jackie Speier made their trip.
I had to walk past the bronze bust of Ryan every time I went to meetings at the county building. Horrible sculpture but it always got to me. And Speier, who got on the wrong side of lots of people was hard as nails and a pretty good representative herself. I once watched her take down a couple of tea party hecklers at some meeting – she was firm, direct and devastating. They were out of their league...
The mostly Black women who were the main inhabitants of Jonestown were largely forced at the point of machine guns to drink the Kool Aid. Few drank freely.
Like JFK & "Camelot" [hack!], Jonestown in the modern mythological mind is warped beyond actual fact.
Good point, I'll admit I don't know much about Jonestown and just picked "random cult" out of a bag. Still, it seems the stories of the cult members are more interesting and complex than the story of the narcissist who started the whole thing.
Man, this triggered a shit storm of pessimism and cynicism -- as y’all can imagine. And imagine if you want because I’m too tired to detail.
But maybe I’ll leave it at this: we got the society the powers that be want: depressed, incapable or opposed to action, compliant because the alternative is unaffordable.
BTW: How much the Dems lost the white working class is subject to debate, obfuscated by the MSM.
I'll have to revisit the numbers. Today it seems white male voters prefer the GOP, but maybe that's mostly among those who are no longer functionally working-class, since the component of white men that are essentially rentiers who occasionally visit the office has risen.
To be clear, I don’t doubt there’s a loss (duh), but how whether it’s significantly large is what I wonder about. And whatever the size or scope are, they’re disproportionately empowered by gerrymandering which might be the bigger problem.
I'm impressed with how the Republicans have become an All-Purpose Anger Repository. Whatever you're mad about, just fill in the circle next to the (R) and you'll feel better momentarily, it seems to be the only thing they promise any more. You weren't seriously thinking we'd DO something about anything, did you?
Men generally having more issues with anger and its management, it seems natural they'd bend in that direction.
It's been the party of the angry since Nixon. He reconstituted the GOP as being built on resentment and anger. GOP rhetoric since then has been full of anger.
What's new now are the volume and insanity both in rhetoric and policies.
As for men and Man, there's this:
"This is what Brooks gets right:
"'I come away with the impression that many men are like what Dean Acheson said about Britain after World War II. They have lost an empire but not yet found a role.'"
All of masculinity has rotted. Men by and by have lost their agency; Jefferson's yeomen have been a long-dying breed. You know, the parasitism of capitalism hasn't be good or healthy for men so anger, deaths of despair, etc., etc., etc. -- everything but resisting. Instead, they're receptive to the rhetoric of their abusers, and that's what they elect if they even bother to vote. It's the way things have tended to be forever.
I wonder when it all started. You had the anti-immigrant hatred of the 20's, the anti-communist hatred of the 30's briefly interrupted by the war and then resuming with a vengeance in the 50's. If I went back farther, could I find more?
My pet theory, which I have been pimping to the point of being tiresome, is the root cause is conservatism, Thou Shall Not Want Anything From the Government, and then what is politics good for except to hate someone? It certainly can't be for some positive purpose.
Go back far enough and you can find periods when both parties were primarily motivated by hatred (you can't get more hate-filled than the post-civil-war Southern Democrats) but that was a time when both parties were conservative, before Franklin Roosevelt came along.
Anti-immigrant hatred goes back to at least the 1880s with the Chinese Exclusion Acts. The first election where both sides hated each other was probably the Adams-Jefferson election of 1800. Read the book American Aurora about the battles in the papers then. It was at least as nasty a now.
This idea of a society pushing resentiment over some collapsing ideal of masculinity need look no further than Tactius' infamous Germania (98 CE), which could be seen in many ways as a pointed critique of Imperial Roman mores and nothing more (since almost all of it is thirdhand information). That book gets used even today to castigate "effête" modern manhood. Schmatzis love it!
I had to Google "Schmatzis", the results weren't entirely satisfactory. Assuming it's not a reference to a fast-growing German beer restaurant chain in Japan?
that fucking idiot ignores the fact that about 80% of those MANLY truck beds have never once felt a load heavier than a week's groceries, or a couple of fat asses sitting on the tailgate.
man, the anger depository is right on. I remember commenting back in the 90s about the right wing. 'don't you hate something? c'mon down and join us!' it's been a cult of haters since (probably) before I was born, and that was in the first half of the 20th century. (gawd)
"The “death of the Sixties” wasn’t just about politics; its major social effect was to replace optimism with paranoia, which is Kryptonite to Kennedyism."
Maybe it's just too much to ask an entire nation to sustain a mood of optimism for any extended period of time? Has long-lasting optimism at the national level ever happened before in human history? (Personally, I find it a challenge to hold on to optimism for more than five minutes at a time.)
Kennedy may have been coached or scripted, but his oratory and rhetoric were truly a projection of America at its best. An America that, at least on the surface, was engaged in uplifting the world.
Contrast any Kennedy speech with anything uttered by, say, Dubya. Trump, of course, is an incoherent imbecile. Even Biden's speeches are not even pale comparisons to even the most banal Kennedy speech. (Of course, it didn't hurt that Kennedy was also quite witty and quick on his feet. The classic being when he presented Alan Shepard with a medal and he dropped the medal before giving it to Shepard. " . . . and this decoration, which is going from the ground up.")
Imagine that moment in the present day, with Biden. It would be a Fox News shitstorm, with the act of dropping the medal simultaneously (a) proof of his thorough dementia, and (b) a dastardly and deliberate deed insulting the nation's heroes.
All excellent points, Roy. The phenomenon of Kennedyism deserves better analysis by future historians who struggle, amid the ruins of American democracy, to understand how it all went to shit. One additional observation: the reaction to Kennedy’s assassination devolved into the conspiracy-laden, anti-factual paranoia that now characterizes right-wing reaction to any disturbing threat.
I see the other side of Kennedyism as Nixon. Nixon (groomed by fascist California power brokers that owned most of its press) was a grievance driven, purely political animal. Power was to be used only to reward friends and punish enemies. (Reagan, groomed by the same people for the same purposes, was a happier shinier version.) Therefore from Nixon there was to be no art, no music, no aesthetics. Most of what we react to about Kennedyism is, whether we realize it or not, via Nixon.
Growing up, we had a small bust of JFK on the living room coffee table. Definitely purchased by my mother, who fell under the spell of Camelot. Must've been one of her last acts of rebellion somehow allowed by my father, who worked enthusiastically for the Goldwater, then Nixon campaigns. (And in his later years, after these two NYC-born children of immigrants had moved to Texas, he stuffed envelopes for his Representative and personal hero, Tom Delay). Alas, Fox News claimed my mom sometime in the 90s or early aughts. Now if you mention Kennedy, you'll get an earful about Mary Jo Kopechne.
I'd wonder if we were sisters except my mom never had her Camelot moment. (My grandma did, but she was outnumbered.) Both of my parents were Goldwater enthusiasts who hated all of the Kennedys. There was a vein of anti-Catholic, anti-"Irish goblin" prejudice too. We were really out of step with most people in our little factory suburb downriver from Detroit. (I found my way out of Republicanism by 1968.)
My dad's Norwegian bachelor uncle lived with us for the last couple years of his life. He was droll, impish and cheerful, and he loved Jack. I don't really know why, but it was genuine adoration. He had all the books (other than the murder-specific ones).
Yes, it’s quaint the old concern about Catholics being ineligible for higher office because they would be controlled by the pope considering that Republicans just pushed through an actual cult member for the Supreme Court who has vowed obedience to a charismatic cult leader.
God, to have an eloquent president. I love Joe and I think Obama was a good speaker but not in the same vein. My mother had the inaugural speech in a frame on the wall.
My first memory of presidential politics was the Kennedy-Nixon race (i was a Catholic, half-Irish kid, so guess who my parents were for, and so, then, was I). My adult disilluminationment came with learning more, and yes, Chappaquiddick contributed.
I recall reading a similar account of the 1960 election a few years ago, from a former Irish Catholic schoolboy in Boston. It went something like “We were over the moon! My parents, my classmates, the nuns—one of us was finally the president! Now I realize that Trump’s election must feel like that, only to assholes rather than Catholics.”
“respect and hunger for education had (briefly, alas) pushed a little ahead of anti-intellectualism in the American psyche.”
A decade ago I jotted down some thoughts on that facet of the era. Excerpt:
****
…I do miss the cultural polity that was a model for the striving US middle class in the calm and complacent fifties and sixties. Complacent? There were, to be sure, nerve-racking episodes like the Cuban Missile Crisis of half a century ago, but with the admittedly conspicuous exception of the fear of being blown to isotopes, there was a certain security in believing that rational men [𝘮𝘦𝘯, 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦] were seeing to the affairs of the country. The American middle class of the day was largely optimistic and hence progressive: if upward mobility was a condition of civic and economic life, who would not look forward to the future? But this model of economic advancement had its counterpart in the intellectual realm: the suburbs, seeded with college grads who’d made it that far on the strength of the GI Bill, would breed a brighter new generation for a confident country at the top of its game. I'm thinking particularly of what has lately been called the “Mad Men” era, from the late Eisenhower years through the abrupt end of Kennedy’s Camelot, with that forward momentum of idealism and optimism carrying the culture into mid-decade, when those characteristics began rapidly to transmogrify into something rich and strange and still quarreled over as the so-called “Sixties.”
I’ll pause here to make the standard and obligatory stipulation (obligatory, that is, for those of us outside the fevered fantasies of the nascent* brownshirt movement that afflicts our public life today) that the era under consideration is not universally remembered as a vanished golden age by sundry classes of then politically, economically, culturally or sexually disenfranchised Americans. You may imagine this disclaimer to be as eloquent and as detailed as you like, and I will sign it…
I sometimes wonder how all the blame for Vietnam got attached to Johnson, and none to Kennedy.
Vietnam was another example of Kennedy's optimism, OF COURSE the United States of America would go in and wrap up that little insurgent problem they had in short order and then lead the grateful people of Vietnam to peace and prosperity.
I suppose you could say Truman started it with the decision to hand the country back to the French at the end of WWII, but after the French defeat, it was an American war and it was Kennedy who decided to make it an American war, with a greatly expanded number of American military "advisors" to the S. Vietnamese government.
Well, this excellent. One of those one's I hesitate to comment on because it's perhaps a bit out of my league and my coment may sound dull. Ill-informed.
I copied this to the clipboard.
" -claimed Kennedyism for themselves in their rhetoric and personal grooming. "
What a fine phrase!
Thanks.
Oh, Jack Kemp... lollll
Really interesting, thanks Roy. I can confirm that growing up working class in the Bronx in the late 60’s-70’s and living in an extended family situation, in our kitchen we had framed photos of the Pope, JFK, and more atypically, Walter Reuther (the UAW President) with MLK, Jr. – my father and grandfather were both UAW men and my grandfather was quite the socialist/commie type.
In talking about cults of personality, I can understand JFK and even, although I disagreed with his politics, Reagan being cult figures. But seven years later it still boggles my mind how Trump attained that status. Truly, we are in Idiocracy.
Absolutely zero interest in Maggie Haberman's new book about Trump, because the man himself holds no interest, he's a psychopath and narcissist, who needs a whole book about that?
But the millions of people who chose to follow and worship him hold a strange fascination for me, what the hell were/are they thinking? I ask, over and over and over again.
Same with any cult, Jim Jones himself probably isn't that interesting, but the question of why all those other people drank the Kool-Aid is something I can't get out of my mind.
Absolutely agree on the Haberman book. Ethically, she sacrificed journalism/duty to inform the public in favor of “access.” And in terms of actual interest, her pitch boils down to “here are some more examples of a criminal psychopath behaving like a criminal psychopath for your reading enjoyment.” Sweetie, we don’t need further convincing, and additional examples are just depressing.
From today's NYT:
"Donald Trump often utters falsehoods, but his speech is strategic. Listen to clips from interviews with Maggie Haberman"
LOL NO
Ugh
Just imagine, you can hear audio of Trump blathering and Maggie in the background, saying "uh huh, uh huh..." how can you pass on that, it's like you're right there in the room with them! [shudder]
I am fascinated too. But as for the Jonestown people, the question for me is not so much why they drank the Flavor-Aid as why they followed him to distant Guyana to begin with. Once they were there, they became fully terrorized and had very little chance of escape. As for why they went, maybe there is leftover Kennedyism there, too. Jim Jones preached racial equality, social progress, a better world. It was all in service to his psychotic delusions, but at the beginning, it may have seemed hopeful.
Well, for one thing, the People's Temple was an alternative to society, not an invitation to reform it.
And Jones was well respected among lots of folks in northern California even after decamping. Took quite awhile before Rep. Leo J. Ryan and aide Jackie Speier made their trip.
I had to walk past the bronze bust of Ryan every time I went to meetings at the county building. Horrible sculpture but it always got to me. And Speier, who got on the wrong side of lots of people was hard as nails and a pretty good representative herself. I once watched her take down a couple of tea party hecklers at some meeting – she was firm, direct and devastating. They were out of their league...
The mostly Black women who were the main inhabitants of Jonestown were largely forced at the point of machine guns to drink the Kool Aid. Few drank freely.
Like JFK & "Camelot" [hack!], Jonestown in the modern mythological mind is warped beyond actual fact.
Good point, I'll admit I don't know much about Jonestown and just picked "random cult" out of a bag. Still, it seems the stories of the cult members are more interesting and complex than the story of the narcissist who started the whole thing.
Mass murder. Not mass suicide.
Man, this triggered a shit storm of pessimism and cynicism -- as y’all can imagine. And imagine if you want because I’m too tired to detail.
But maybe I’ll leave it at this: we got the society the powers that be want: depressed, incapable or opposed to action, compliant because the alternative is unaffordable.
BTW: How much the Dems lost the white working class is subject to debate, obfuscated by the MSM.
I'll have to revisit the numbers. Today it seems white male voters prefer the GOP, but maybe that's mostly among those who are no longer functionally working-class, since the component of white men that are essentially rentiers who occasionally visit the office has risen.
To be clear, I don’t doubt there’s a loss (duh), but how whether it’s significantly large is what I wonder about. And whatever the size or scope are, they’re disproportionately empowered by gerrymandering which might be the bigger problem.
I'm impressed with how the Republicans have become an All-Purpose Anger Repository. Whatever you're mad about, just fill in the circle next to the (R) and you'll feel better momentarily, it seems to be the only thing they promise any more. You weren't seriously thinking we'd DO something about anything, did you?
Men generally having more issues with anger and its management, it seems natural they'd bend in that direction.
It's been the party of the angry since Nixon. He reconstituted the GOP as being built on resentment and anger. GOP rhetoric since then has been full of anger.
What's new now are the volume and insanity both in rhetoric and policies.
As for men and Man, there's this:
"This is what Brooks gets right:
"'I come away with the impression that many men are like what Dean Acheson said about Britain after World War II. They have lost an empire but not yet found a role.'"
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/10/david-brooks-gets-something-right
All of masculinity has rotted. Men by and by have lost their agency; Jefferson's yeomen have been a long-dying breed. You know, the parasitism of capitalism hasn't be good or healthy for men so anger, deaths of despair, etc., etc., etc. -- everything but resisting. Instead, they're receptive to the rhetoric of their abusers, and that's what they elect if they even bother to vote. It's the way things have tended to be forever.
But here's a little hopeful stuff:
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fcommentisfree%2F2022%2Fsep%2F14%2Fwe-need-to-celebrate-incremental-change
Can't dis it because it was written by Rebecca Solnit who is always correct about everything.
I wonder when it all started. You had the anti-immigrant hatred of the 20's, the anti-communist hatred of the 30's briefly interrupted by the war and then resuming with a vengeance in the 50's. If I went back farther, could I find more?
My pet theory, which I have been pimping to the point of being tiresome, is the root cause is conservatism, Thou Shall Not Want Anything From the Government, and then what is politics good for except to hate someone? It certainly can't be for some positive purpose.
Go back far enough and you can find periods when both parties were primarily motivated by hatred (you can't get more hate-filled than the post-civil-war Southern Democrats) but that was a time when both parties were conservative, before Franklin Roosevelt came along.
Anti-immigrant hatred goes back to at least the 1880s with the Chinese Exclusion Acts. The first election where both sides hated each other was probably the Adams-Jefferson election of 1800. Read the book American Aurora about the battles in the papers then. It was at least as nasty a now.
This idea of a society pushing resentiment over some collapsing ideal of masculinity need look no further than Tactius' infamous Germania (98 CE), which could be seen in many ways as a pointed critique of Imperial Roman mores and nothing more (since almost all of it is thirdhand information). That book gets used even today to castigate "effête" modern manhood. Schmatzis love it!
Tell me more!
Meanwhile, what’s going on is not so much mores but the result of economic shifts. I’d think that’d be significant but you tell me 😉
I had to Google "Schmatzis", the results weren't entirely satisfactory. Assuming it's not a reference to a fast-growing German beer restaurant chain in Japan?
Also, speaking of manliness and its symbology, National Review wants you to know that electric trucks are NOT trucks:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ev-trucks-are-not-trucks/
that fucking idiot ignores the fact that about 80% of those MANLY truck beds have never once felt a load heavier than a week's groceries, or a couple of fat asses sitting on the tailgate.
man, the anger depository is right on. I remember commenting back in the 90s about the right wing. 'don't you hate something? c'mon down and join us!' it's been a cult of haters since (probably) before I was born, and that was in the first half of the 20th century. (gawd)
I am deeply embedded in the working class and I’d estimate that of those few who bother to vote, somewhere pushing 90 percent vote Republican.
It seems that the parts of the working class the Dems lost are white, maybe some Hispanic. Is that correct? And what are you embedded in?
"The “death of the Sixties” wasn’t just about politics; its major social effect was to replace optimism with paranoia, which is Kryptonite to Kennedyism."
Alas.
Maybe it's just too much to ask an entire nation to sustain a mood of optimism for any extended period of time? Has long-lasting optimism at the national level ever happened before in human history? (Personally, I find it a challenge to hold on to optimism for more than five minutes at a time.)
All the sadder with the Heir, JFK Jr., out there stanning for Trump (while looking, post-mortem, remarkably like Roberto Begnini).
The Roberto Benigni comparison is apt, considering how many people have been fooled into thinking it's all a game, and at the end they'll win a tank.
Kennedy may have been coached or scripted, but his oratory and rhetoric were truly a projection of America at its best. An America that, at least on the surface, was engaged in uplifting the world.
Contrast any Kennedy speech with anything uttered by, say, Dubya. Trump, of course, is an incoherent imbecile. Even Biden's speeches are not even pale comparisons to even the most banal Kennedy speech. (Of course, it didn't hurt that Kennedy was also quite witty and quick on his feet. The classic being when he presented Alan Shepard with a medal and he dropped the medal before giving it to Shepard. " . . . and this decoration, which is going from the ground up.")
Imagine that moment in the present day, with Biden. It would be a Fox News shitstorm, with the act of dropping the medal simultaneously (a) proof of his thorough dementia, and (b) a dastardly and deliberate deed insulting the nation's heroes.
Probably shown alternating with the clip Roy linked to, of Trump catching a rolled-up t-shirt sending his followers into paroxysms of joy.
Who do YOU want, t-shirt catcher or medal-dropper, huh?
All excellent points, Roy. The phenomenon of Kennedyism deserves better analysis by future historians who struggle, amid the ruins of American democracy, to understand how it all went to shit. One additional observation: the reaction to Kennedy’s assassination devolved into the conspiracy-laden, anti-factual paranoia that now characterizes right-wing reaction to any disturbing threat.
I see the other side of Kennedyism as Nixon. Nixon (groomed by fascist California power brokers that owned most of its press) was a grievance driven, purely political animal. Power was to be used only to reward friends and punish enemies. (Reagan, groomed by the same people for the same purposes, was a happier shinier version.) Therefore from Nixon there was to be no art, no music, no aesthetics. Most of what we react to about Kennedyism is, whether we realize it or not, via Nixon.
Growing up, we had a small bust of JFK on the living room coffee table. Definitely purchased by my mother, who fell under the spell of Camelot. Must've been one of her last acts of rebellion somehow allowed by my father, who worked enthusiastically for the Goldwater, then Nixon campaigns. (And in his later years, after these two NYC-born children of immigrants had moved to Texas, he stuffed envelopes for his Representative and personal hero, Tom Delay). Alas, Fox News claimed my mom sometime in the 90s or early aughts. Now if you mention Kennedy, you'll get an earful about Mary Jo Kopechne.
I'd wonder if we were sisters except my mom never had her Camelot moment. (My grandma did, but she was outnumbered.) Both of my parents were Goldwater enthusiasts who hated all of the Kennedys. There was a vein of anti-Catholic, anti-"Irish goblin" prejudice too. We were really out of step with most people in our little factory suburb downriver from Detroit. (I found my way out of Republicanism by 1968.)
My dad's Norwegian bachelor uncle lived with us for the last couple years of his life. He was droll, impish and cheerful, and he loved Jack. I don't really know why, but it was genuine adoration. He had all the books (other than the murder-specific ones).
Yes, it’s quaint the old concern about Catholics being ineligible for higher office because they would be controlled by the pope considering that Republicans just pushed through an actual cult member for the Supreme Court who has vowed obedience to a charismatic cult leader.
God, to have an eloquent president. I love Joe and I think Obama was a good speaker but not in the same vein. My mother had the inaugural speech in a frame on the wall.
My first memory of presidential politics was the Kennedy-Nixon race (i was a Catholic, half-Irish kid, so guess who my parents were for, and so, then, was I). My adult disilluminationment came with learning more, and yes, Chappaquiddick contributed.
I recall reading a similar account of the 1960 election a few years ago, from a former Irish Catholic schoolboy in Boston. It went something like “We were over the moon! My parents, my classmates, the nuns—one of us was finally the president! Now I realize that Trump’s election must feel like that, only to assholes rather than Catholics.”
My BIL was still hanging on in the 70's. Nam vet, still holding onto the inspiration of fighting Commies
everywhere. Optimistic about America. Declaring William Devane the greatest living actor for his portrayal of JFK.
“respect and hunger for education had (briefly, alas) pushed a little ahead of anti-intellectualism in the American psyche.”
A decade ago I jotted down some thoughts on that facet of the era. Excerpt:
****
…I do miss the cultural polity that was a model for the striving US middle class in the calm and complacent fifties and sixties. Complacent? There were, to be sure, nerve-racking episodes like the Cuban Missile Crisis of half a century ago, but with the admittedly conspicuous exception of the fear of being blown to isotopes, there was a certain security in believing that rational men [𝘮𝘦𝘯, 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦] were seeing to the affairs of the country. The American middle class of the day was largely optimistic and hence progressive: if upward mobility was a condition of civic and economic life, who would not look forward to the future? But this model of economic advancement had its counterpart in the intellectual realm: the suburbs, seeded with college grads who’d made it that far on the strength of the GI Bill, would breed a brighter new generation for a confident country at the top of its game. I'm thinking particularly of what has lately been called the “Mad Men” era, from the late Eisenhower years through the abrupt end of Kennedy’s Camelot, with that forward momentum of idealism and optimism carrying the culture into mid-decade, when those characteristics began rapidly to transmogrify into something rich and strange and still quarreled over as the so-called “Sixties.”
I’ll pause here to make the standard and obligatory stipulation (obligatory, that is, for those of us outside the fevered fantasies of the nascent* brownshirt movement that afflicts our public life today) that the era under consideration is not universally remembered as a vanished golden age by sundry classes of then politically, economically, culturally or sexually disenfranchised Americans. You may imagine this disclaimer to be as eloquent and as detailed as you like, and I will sign it…
*“𝘕𝘢𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵” 𝘯𝘰 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳, 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦.
This is super extra good, Mr. Roso. Now I must look up which man said what about Pericles and this Phidias guy.
I sometimes wonder how all the blame for Vietnam got attached to Johnson, and none to Kennedy.
Vietnam was another example of Kennedy's optimism, OF COURSE the United States of America would go in and wrap up that little insurgent problem they had in short order and then lead the grateful people of Vietnam to peace and prosperity.
Didn't the war start under Truman? At least the intervention?
I suppose you could say Truman started it with the decision to hand the country back to the French at the end of WWII, but after the French defeat, it was an American war and it was Kennedy who decided to make it an American war, with a greatly expanded number of American military "advisors" to the S. Vietnamese government.
And then, shortly before Nov 22, he drafted the troop withdrawal memo and...
Actually, the thing I now like most about Jack is his pardon of Hampton Hawes in August of '63.