OK, Boomer here, with a somewhat potted history of the world.
I was just eight when JFK was killed and nine when the Civil Rights Act was passed and I had the sense, growing up, that of course everybody would come together in a time of tragedy and danger, except for the fossilized Southern racists, and obviously they were on the way out (…
OK, Boomer here, with a somewhat potted history of the world.
I was just eight when JFK was killed and nine when the Civil Rights Act was passed and I had the sense, growing up, that of course everybody would come together in a time of tragedy and danger, except for the fossilized Southern racists, and obviously they were on the way out (look what happened to Goldwater!) And I would have probably granted even them a basic concern for the public good, misguided though they were. Of course liberalism and progress were the inevitable long-term outcome of history, maybe with a few bumps along the way.
Then came Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate. But even during Nixon's administration, the liberal consensus was still going strong in many ways; think of the creation of the EPA, the investigations of the CIA, etc. I think what happened next, which really turned things around, happened under Carter: the Empire, or at least the chamber of commerce, struck back. Every paper you read would have ads from Mobil talking about the glory of Freemarket and the menace of Socialism. "Centrist" columnists for "liberal" papers followed suit, worrying furiously about whether we had gone too far in pursuit of equality. It turned out that the liberal consensus was like the little bear muzzle in that Far Side cartoon, and the bear had only to discover "What the hell, these things come right off!"
So we went from a kind of Adam Smith revival, in which we were allowed to feel distrust or even loathing for the malefactors of great wealth, so long as we recognized that the worst things they might want to do would be prevented by their own self-interest in not being seen as Scrooges to their workers, to gradually (or not so gradually) being told (as you note) that Scrooge was the hero, and fuck that moocher Bob Cratchit and his parasite spawn with him. And after that, it became not just "Scrooge has, and should have, the law on his side when he locks the workers to their desks and lets them die in a fire," but "thank God we have men like Scrooge to keep The Economy going," and even if The Economy isn't going all that hot by any humanly recognizable standard, thank God for him anyway, because he's showing us the difference between Makers and Takers.
And the old me would say, "it's just a temporary blip, we'll resume our upward climb, even if it takes another depression and a new FDR to get us there," but new -- that is, older -- me is inclined to worry that today's Morgans and Rockefellers have learned how to outmaneuver any would-be FDR. Our best hope remains that, as the saying goes, these aren't very smart guys, and they'll find themselves in over their heads, or (a guy can hope) deprived of their heads.
"So we went from a kind of Adam Smith revival, in which we were allowed to feel distrust or even loathing for the malefactors of great wealth, so long as we recognized that the worst things they might want to do would be prevented by their own self-interest in not being seen as Scrooges to their workers, to gradually (or not so gradually) being told (as you note) that Scrooge was the hero, and fuck that moocher Bob Cratchit and his parasite spawn with him." Powell Memorandum, anyone?
Not to go full tinfoil hat here, BUT recently I was thinking (as I periodically do) about a mid-70s TV series about disasters. Its horrifying imagery was cut into my brain with a blowtorch such that I still resee specific car crashes, lava flows, and bridge collapses. But I was a wee tyke so the only other thing I remembered was that it was sponsored by Mobil -- using a nifty memorable logo, where gasoline sloshed around inside the "o." And last week, working from home, I got to googling "Mobil disaster show 1970s" and I flipping FOUND IT: it was called "When Havoc Struck," it begins each episode with Beethoven's Fifth (hi, Clockwork Orange), and it is narrated by Glenn Ford. In 1978. So! Learning from your comment that at that time, Mobil was paying good money to steer newspapers toward "liberalism goes too far!" I gotta notice -- a show about disasters jives with that program reeeaaalll well. You want people to get conservative? Craaazy conservative, to the point of advocating a return to feudalism? Well shit! Make em scared! Make everything about the world so damn scary they never want to leave home. Make nature scary, cars, blimps, make their own shadows a fucking source of terror, and they will run right to daddy. It is the Fox News playbook, in 1978, just without the clown makeup yet. Our nation's assholes play a long and insidious game.
Anyway here's the show, and if you want to see the car crash that I have seen repeatedly in my head since age six, it starts at 12:10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmxS1H5Fdw8
I'm undecided here; I don't know if Mobil was interested so much in creating a Strong Daddy state as they were in abolishing the (mostly imaginary, of course) Giving Mommy state. The constant message of those op-eds was (sometimes literally) "the regulatory state is killing the goose that laid the golden eggs!" But there might have been some recognition that politicians who were friendly to that goal would also generally be helped by a public who was afraid of (at the time) crime and communism. And that maybe a generalized fear of Terrible Things about to happen could play into that, and a disaster show could nudge things that way... And obviously general trends don't always need explicit, top-down commands with a precise long-term goal in mind.
(And if one wanted to dismiss these thoughts, one could point to the old, old pedigree of horror in popular culture, or even "high culture." It was the very radical [for her time] Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley who wrote "Frankenstein," after all.)
Yes and, Stephen King is famously liberal. But horror in the arts aims for a laugh, ultimately -- the shudder followed by "Ha! Damn thing got me good!" In other words, no one loves Lovecraft because Cthulhu might be real -- they love him for making it so easy to pretend for 10 pages. Whereas the Havoc show builds horror by showing real fatalities, and though there might be high comedy in its posing as "educational," Havoc is not really funny like, say, Rosemary's Baby, or sexy like Carmilla, or thinky like Frankenstein. It presents death, but doesn't really synthesize that into catharsis. I feel like I am tenting my fingers now I'll shut the fuck up.
1978, when borrowing money could cost you 22% interest, and everyone could still remember Nixon's wage and price controls. When the EPA and the Clean Water/Air Acts were shiny and new, and after the oil shock delivered by OPEC there was serious discussion of nationalizing a couple oil companies.
Not gonna claim Mobil was right, but they did have their reasons.
True, but what struck me was how quickly and easily "We've gone too far regulating our corporations, it's time for the pendulum to swing back" became the new conventional wisdom. I remember that case being made, for example, by Max Lerner, probably the most liberal columnist in the very liberal New York Post. (Not a typo; there must be somebody else who's old enough to remember when the Post editorial page was maybe the left-most in the nation.)
Those reasons are pretty much related to not making as much money as they could and that their only responsibility was to deliver shareholder value -- a primary idea of the idiot Milton Friedman
OK, Boomer here, with a somewhat potted history of the world.
I was just eight when JFK was killed and nine when the Civil Rights Act was passed and I had the sense, growing up, that of course everybody would come together in a time of tragedy and danger, except for the fossilized Southern racists, and obviously they were on the way out (look what happened to Goldwater!) And I would have probably granted even them a basic concern for the public good, misguided though they were. Of course liberalism and progress were the inevitable long-term outcome of history, maybe with a few bumps along the way.
Then came Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate. But even during Nixon's administration, the liberal consensus was still going strong in many ways; think of the creation of the EPA, the investigations of the CIA, etc. I think what happened next, which really turned things around, happened under Carter: the Empire, or at least the chamber of commerce, struck back. Every paper you read would have ads from Mobil talking about the glory of Freemarket and the menace of Socialism. "Centrist" columnists for "liberal" papers followed suit, worrying furiously about whether we had gone too far in pursuit of equality. It turned out that the liberal consensus was like the little bear muzzle in that Far Side cartoon, and the bear had only to discover "What the hell, these things come right off!"
So we went from a kind of Adam Smith revival, in which we were allowed to feel distrust or even loathing for the malefactors of great wealth, so long as we recognized that the worst things they might want to do would be prevented by their own self-interest in not being seen as Scrooges to their workers, to gradually (or not so gradually) being told (as you note) that Scrooge was the hero, and fuck that moocher Bob Cratchit and his parasite spawn with him. And after that, it became not just "Scrooge has, and should have, the law on his side when he locks the workers to their desks and lets them die in a fire," but "thank God we have men like Scrooge to keep The Economy going," and even if The Economy isn't going all that hot by any humanly recognizable standard, thank God for him anyway, because he's showing us the difference between Makers and Takers.
And the old me would say, "it's just a temporary blip, we'll resume our upward climb, even if it takes another depression and a new FDR to get us there," but new -- that is, older -- me is inclined to worry that today's Morgans and Rockefellers have learned how to outmaneuver any would-be FDR. Our best hope remains that, as the saying goes, these aren't very smart guys, and they'll find themselves in over their heads, or (a guy can hope) deprived of their heads.
"So we went from a kind of Adam Smith revival, in which we were allowed to feel distrust or even loathing for the malefactors of great wealth, so long as we recognized that the worst things they might want to do would be prevented by their own self-interest in not being seen as Scrooges to their workers, to gradually (or not so gradually) being told (as you note) that Scrooge was the hero, and fuck that moocher Bob Cratchit and his parasite spawn with him." Powell Memorandum, anyone?
Hell, I wasn't even aware of that.
Not to go full tinfoil hat here, BUT recently I was thinking (as I periodically do) about a mid-70s TV series about disasters. Its horrifying imagery was cut into my brain with a blowtorch such that I still resee specific car crashes, lava flows, and bridge collapses. But I was a wee tyke so the only other thing I remembered was that it was sponsored by Mobil -- using a nifty memorable logo, where gasoline sloshed around inside the "o." And last week, working from home, I got to googling "Mobil disaster show 1970s" and I flipping FOUND IT: it was called "When Havoc Struck," it begins each episode with Beethoven's Fifth (hi, Clockwork Orange), and it is narrated by Glenn Ford. In 1978. So! Learning from your comment that at that time, Mobil was paying good money to steer newspapers toward "liberalism goes too far!" I gotta notice -- a show about disasters jives with that program reeeaaalll well. You want people to get conservative? Craaazy conservative, to the point of advocating a return to feudalism? Well shit! Make em scared! Make everything about the world so damn scary they never want to leave home. Make nature scary, cars, blimps, make their own shadows a fucking source of terror, and they will run right to daddy. It is the Fox News playbook, in 1978, just without the clown makeup yet. Our nation's assholes play a long and insidious game.
Anyway here's the show, and if you want to see the car crash that I have seen repeatedly in my head since age six, it starts at 12:10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmxS1H5Fdw8
As Billy Sol Hurok would say, "That car blew up REAL good."
I'm undecided here; I don't know if Mobil was interested so much in creating a Strong Daddy state as they were in abolishing the (mostly imaginary, of course) Giving Mommy state. The constant message of those op-eds was (sometimes literally) "the regulatory state is killing the goose that laid the golden eggs!" But there might have been some recognition that politicians who were friendly to that goal would also generally be helped by a public who was afraid of (at the time) crime and communism. And that maybe a generalized fear of Terrible Things about to happen could play into that, and a disaster show could nudge things that way... And obviously general trends don't always need explicit, top-down commands with a precise long-term goal in mind.
(And if one wanted to dismiss these thoughts, one could point to the old, old pedigree of horror in popular culture, or even "high culture." It was the very radical [for her time] Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley who wrote "Frankenstein," after all.)
Yes and, Stephen King is famously liberal. But horror in the arts aims for a laugh, ultimately -- the shudder followed by "Ha! Damn thing got me good!" In other words, no one loves Lovecraft because Cthulhu might be real -- they love him for making it so easy to pretend for 10 pages. Whereas the Havoc show builds horror by showing real fatalities, and though there might be high comedy in its posing as "educational," Havoc is not really funny like, say, Rosemary's Baby, or sexy like Carmilla, or thinky like Frankenstein. It presents death, but doesn't really synthesize that into catharsis. I feel like I am tenting my fingers now I'll shut the fuck up.
1978, when borrowing money could cost you 22% interest, and everyone could still remember Nixon's wage and price controls. When the EPA and the Clean Water/Air Acts were shiny and new, and after the oil shock delivered by OPEC there was serious discussion of nationalizing a couple oil companies.
Not gonna claim Mobil was right, but they did have their reasons.
True, but what struck me was how quickly and easily "We've gone too far regulating our corporations, it's time for the pendulum to swing back" became the new conventional wisdom. I remember that case being made, for example, by Max Lerner, probably the most liberal columnist in the very liberal New York Post. (Not a typo; there must be somebody else who's old enough to remember when the Post editorial page was maybe the left-most in the nation.)
(Outside of The Village Voice; sorry, Roy.)
Ah yes, the Dorothy Shiff era. BTW, "conventional wisdom" seems to have turned into "eternal wisdom" in their copybooks.
Those reasons are pretty much related to not making as much money as they could and that their only responsibility was to deliver shareholder value -- a primary idea of the idiot Milton Friedman
No time to look now but what you say makes sense.
I think what happened next, which really turned things around, happened under Carter: the Empire, or at least the chamber of commerce, struck back.
This was probably a result of the Powell Memo
https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
Elon below also brought that up. I'd think the Powell Memo deserves at least as large a place in American History classes as the Zimmerman Telegram.
Especially as Lewis Powell went on to be a SCOTUS justice
All the shit the big boys did to get Reagan in should be taught, too: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/29/world/middleeast/shah-iran-chase-papers.html