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Title: Old America versus the rotten new
Source:
Lew Rockwell
URL Source: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/07/paul-craig-roberts/old-america/
Published: Jul 14, 2017
Author: Paul Craig Roberts
Post Date: 2017-07-14 08:57:55 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 20048
Comments: 64
He had lugged the 50 lb. bag of Milorganite into the garden in order to discover, as on many prior occasions, that he had nothing with which to open it. He blamed this on the war on terror and the TSA. As a youth he, as did every boy, had a pocket knife. Always. It was expected. There was no school rule against pocket knives. Once for a period they even all had switchblades. You could get them for 99 cents, a large amount in those days, enough to buy a case of 24 Coca-Colas. The switchblades met with school and parental disapproval as they smacked of New York gangs. But before teachers and parents came up with a policy, the boys had abandoned the switchblades. The knives had weak springs. Fascinated with the speed with which the knives opened with a satisfying click and locked the blade into place, the boys quickly wore out the springs on their switchblades. Unlike their trusty pocket knives, the switchblades quickly became useless. He no longer carried a pocket knife. He had learned long ago that things that go into pockets become habitual. He would forget to take the knife out when he rushed to catch his flight, just as he always forgot to put the knife in his pocket when he went to work in the garden. There would be a scene at the airport, confiscation of the knife, which had been his grandfather’s, and TSA questioning. They might want him to be strip searched. He could miss his flight. Such a large expensive organization as TSA needs justification, and so whereas the TSA officers might be reasonable, he could not count on it. Under the law, he could be accused and prosecuted. One never knew. He could remember the air shuttle between Washington and New York. The planes flew on the hour. You could show up 10 minutes before takeoff and be seated. If one airplane wasn’t enough, they would provide a second. There was no security, no delays. He didn’t like being drawn back into memories of the past. It made him acutely aware how difficult just simple things had become over the course of his life, like carrying a pocket knife. A couple of weeks ago he had been on vacation at a gated mountain resort. He enjoyed hiking along the streams and visiting the waterfalls. He had managed to rent at the airport a sports sedan and was looking forward to a morning workout at the exercise center and then a semi-spirited drive along mountain roads outside the resort. As he was changing into his workout clothes, the telephone rang. As he rushed to stay on schedule his billfold with driving license did not make the clothes change. He discovered this at the exercise center. It was 10 minutes back to his cabin and then 10 minutes back in the direction of the exit gate. Why had he agreed to a telephone interview? If he went back for his license, his drive would be rushed and not enjoyable. He could go without his license, but suppose something happened, such as a collision with a deer. Would the police accept a reasonable story and the car rental papers for ID, or would he be hauled to jail, a long flight away from his lawyer? The days of reasonable police, he thought, were bygone days. The morning was shot. The only thing to do was to vent his frustration in exercise and return to his cabin for the telephone interview. Even the innocence of words had been lost. There were many words that could no longer be used. They had been banished down the memory hole. A professor friend had told him that he was subjected to a dressing down by a dean because he had used the word “girl” in class. “Girl” is now considered offensive to women. In restaurants in the South, waitresses called the men “honey.” “What will it be, honey?” The men called the waitresses “darling.” He wondered about that today. Perhaps in small towns. Since the advent of interstate highways, small towns had passed out of his experience. He wondered if they still had restaurants or just fast food franchises. It got worse. The floodgates of memory had opened. He was given his first firearm at age 10. It was a single barrel .410 shotgun. When he was 12 he was given a .22 pistol. Many of his friends had guns. The countryside was nearby and many urban families had farm relatives. He remembered, too, that all the kids were subjected to corporal punishment. Today a parent who spanked a kid or provided one with a firearm would be arrested, likely prosecuted, and the kid put into foster care where there was a risk of being leased out to a pedophile group. He could remember riding his horse into the town three miles from his grandparents’ farm with a real pistol strapped to his side and a rifle in the scabbard when he was 12 or 13. No one said a thing. Today a SWAT team would be on the scene. He would be lucky not to be shot dead and never know the fate of his grandparents, who would be guilty of all sorts of offenses, including failure to supervise a minor. That reminded him of what he had recently read in a newspaper. On a cul-de-sac devoid of car traffic a mother sat in a chair outside the house while her child played in the front lawn. A busybody neighbor, trained to report parental malfeasance, whose view of the mother was blocked by shrubbery, saw an unsupervised child at play and called the police. When the police arrived, they arrested the mother on the basis of the unverified report from the neighbor. The mother was taken to jail. The newspaper did not say what had happened to the child, whether the kid was taken to foster care and whether the husband had to rush home from his job and ply lawyers with money to help put his family back together. These kinds of horrors inflicted on families by public authorities often have worst consequences than the predations of criminals. He wondered if parents and children would be safer if the police were disbanded and outlawed. Yet, society had accepted these abuses as justified. What, he thought, would have been the public reaction when he was a kid? The policemen would have been fired, the chief disciplined, and the mayor would have lost the next election. It would not have been possible for them to become heroes by destroying a family. The busybody neighbor would have become a pariah in the community. Just the other day he had seen a grandmother at the supermarket with tattoos and face piercings. A grandmother? How had this come about? At the mountain resort pool and exercise center it wasn’t just the men. He had seen young women who were covered in tattoos. A friend told him that some women not only had face and tongue piercings, but also navel, labia, and clitoris piercings. Piercings were what he remembered from boyhood days of looking through stacks of National Geographic magazines from the 1940s and 1950s. Articles explained with words and photographs facial piercing practices by tribes in “darkest Africa.” Now they were the practices of upper-class women who played in resorts. He recalled his father’s first rule of business: “Never hire anyone with a tattoo.” Tattoos were what sailors did who got drunk in Asian ports. They demonstrated poor judgment and a lack of self-restraint. If anyone sober got a tattoo, it indicated a lack of self-respect. If an employee did not respect himself, he would not respect the job. His father would have a hard time assembling a workforce today. A couple of years ago a college classmate told him that their noble old fraternity had been suspended by the college president. A black female student claimed that racial slurs had been shouted at her from an open window. The fraternity was able to show that all the windows had been painted shut for years, probably dating back to when the house was air conditioned. But the college president wasn’t going to dispute a black female’s word on the basis of evidence. It could mean protests, charges of racism, broken windows, newspaper and trustee inquiries. Bad PR for the college. It was safer to hand the fraternity a bit of injustice. Recently, he had arrived at the supermarket in a cloudburst. There were a dozen parking spaces by the entrance, but they were marked “Handicapped Parking $500 Fine.” He remembered when the handicapped said that they wanted to be treated like everyone else. Now they had privileges. He wondered about those signs. Did they give offense? “Handicapped” was one of those discarded words. They hadn’t got around to replacing the signs. He remembered, too, when males did not use four-letter words in front of parents or females. Now the young woman could out-cuss his male generation. More memories. If you scraped a car while street parking, you were expected to leave a note with the name and telephone number and expect to pay for the repair. He had once told some young people this and they laughed at the joke. Something had happened. He had been brought up to be a citizen in a world that no longer existed. At least there still were gardens. He put away his thoughts and went to get his knife.
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 20.
#6. To: Deckard, rlk, Mudboy Slim, Jersey Guys, REAL Americans (#0)
(Edited)
Awesome bitter-sweet ode to 'Old America, Past'. A KEEPER. Yes, of course there were still bad things happening as well as bad people still doing evil things. HOWEVER, no one was making excuses for it OR celebrating depravity and anarchy. Oh, to be "brought up to be a citizen in a world that no longer exists." What a blessing. Though Rockwell includes the 1940s, my early childhood era (spent in a New jersey burb on the edge of Newark from the late 1950s though early-mid 60s era) was as close to bliss as life would ever get. As a 7 year old, I could walk through the center of town ALONE, without a concern in the world. (And I'm talking about a town of 50,000 -- Bloomfield, NJ). It boasted two movie theaters, a Kresge's, Grant's, and Woolworths -- an idyllic American burb. https://www.pinterest.com/rjakubik53/memories-of-bloomfieldnj/ ANYHOO...back then, Fatherly Wisdom (aka common sense) was universal. And it not necessarily come from your father; it could come from a *friend's* father, a mother, an uncle, a teacher, an elderly or young neighbor, a baseball coach, the guy who ran the corner "Sweet Shop," an older kid, etal. There was no Liberal or Conservative or Democrat or Republican or White or Black "wisdom"; God was still feared and revered, and the President was still a man to be looked up to. Call those days, 'The Leave It To Beaver Years'. And be proud that you lived it, admired it, OR refer to it as "THE pinnacle of American Identity." I'm not making that America into some kind of Utopia -- no, it wasn't perfect. BUT THERE WAS A social UNIVERSAL STANDARD, (was there not?) It was a kinder, polite, simpler, America for those fortunate to have lived it; even at that, one must *remember* those days actually existed. Lew Rockwell captured succinctly the social dichotomy of a seemingly overnight transformation of "America" especially well. For SOME reason, RAW, EDGY, RAUNCHY, CONFRONTATIONAL *everything* seemingly suddenly became the requisite mind-set soon after Lenny Bruce left his mark on "comedy," the JFK assassination -- as well as the wake of Beatle-Mania. Wasn't it through the "entertainment" medium that America's cultural and political well across the board became poisoned as narcissism, rebellion, rude & crude became "cool"? Seemingly overnight, every*one* AND every*thing* that all else preceding those early 1960s events were re-portrayed as counterfeit, naive, old-fashioned, silly, and...especially *unsophisticated.* If I could pinpoint the cultural hijacking, I'd say between 1967-1972 TV and Movie themes became decidedly subversive and mainstream. For example, as purely a matter of advancing a social agenda, CBS execs even purged highly rated rural-setting TV shows (Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Bonanza, etc.) Flicks -- though arguably entertaining -- *also* conveyed and promoted subversive, rebellious themes as Movie Ratings were changed to become more suggestive: 'The Graduate,' 'Easy Rider,' A Clockwork Orange, etc. As usual, I would attribute the sudden change to a massive despoiling of the human spirit.... At its epicenter we'll find THE PSYCHIATRIC "profession," which was given license by the shadowy "PTB" to redefine "good and evil" as well as advancing and promoting Moral Relativism and eventual PC, aka Fascism. Arguably, "America's Religion" since the end of "Ronald Reagan's America," has become, Secular Humanism.
AoS had their morning thread today, just re-posting a single comment made by user grizzledcoastie on another thread: I never really watched a lot of TV and never had a reason to do so. I did chores, such as clipping the beautiful hedges that surrounded our parcel like a living fence and mowing the grass under our giant live oak tree with an old push mower. I started mowing the grass when I was 8 and I got an allowance My parents had a big, screened in porch that overlooked the bayou and we'd have sleepouts on it. We'd sneak outside and look at the massive amount stars overhead. We'd walk alone to the gas station on the corner and spend some of our allowances on classic candy and Barq's or Cokes in a glass bottle. The summers on the Gulf Coast were hot as hell, but it wasn't because of "global warming/climate change/whatever they'll call it tomorrow." It's the South. It's hot in the summer. Either you deal with it or you don't. We'd flirt with the neighborhood girls and steal kisses and have little relationships. That's how I met my wife for the first time and we started dating in high school. The only rules were you had to come inside for lunch and supper and playtime ended when the sun went down. If someone got hurt, we got an adult. It was no big deal. One time, a friend of mine broke his arm and his Dad took him to the hospital, which was 24 miles away in the city. There was no nanny state going after him for "abuse." His attitude, like all of our parents, were "boys will be boys." Vietnam was raging, but it was so distant. It wasn't until a boy from up the street died that it became a real thing for me. There were very few black kids in our town, so civil rights was also a distant thing for me. I sold that house after my parents passed on and I do tear up when I think of it. My Dad never spoke of his time in Korea and not that I blamed him. All I knew was he had a Bronze Star that I happened on one day. I showed it to him and he gently said to put that away and never speak of it ever again. When I read the award after his death, I never realized that my Dad had the courage of a lion. Now kids can't be kids. They have live in hermetically sealed bubbles. We wonder why there is a childhood obesity epidemic (everything to the nanny staters is an "epidemic") when we won't let kids have their independence and play as kids were meant to do. We don't let "boys be boys." We have to drug them with Ritalin so they won't leave their seats and be active. I was busy as a child, but my teachers accepted that as part of "boys being boys." You want to know why we have man buns and skinny, feminized hipsters and there's your answer right there. We don't let them learn at their pace and by methods guaranteed to help them. And we wonder why more women are attending college, not that is a good thing since they come out propagandized by the feminist movement into hating men and delaying childbirth or not even having kids. Our elites denigrate flyover country and blue collar workers, at least until they need a plumber to unclog their pipes or a roofer to plug holes in their leaking roof. I'm sorry about rambling here, but there's so much in this society that makes me so depressed for the world I hand over to my children and now my grandchild. We need to continue to belittle this bunk from these perennial, freedom-hating busybodies and give our children a chance to have the rich childhoods that ultimately prepare them to be the great future citizens our nation needs them to be.
Thanks, TC, for sharing a great re-telling of this guy's memories. PRICELESS. His Part 2, where also compares, contrasts, and rues the ruination of Daze Past is especially well done -- again, Bitter-Sweet. Without the bad of our modern world, what *would* we compare our "good" to?? PERSPECTIVE. We all need it. Without the dark there is no light. If this were a New Outer Limits' episode, those golden memories would be stolen booty, "currency" extracted by a future evil science. In fact I do believe that IS one episode theme. (IF anyone hasn't watched the 'New Outer Limits' (1995-2002?), I highly recommend it. At te time I believe it was a 'Showtime' cable series. As I've watched many episodes, MANY of it's "future" themes are eerily coming to or have already come to fruition. Fwiw, I've recently watched on Hulu via Roku.) I like the idea of guys/gals like us at an LF, FR, or where ever (Aaah -- this is "Ace of Spades"?) sharing their own unique snapshot of memories -- be they a moment, a day, a week, summer -- era. You see? This guy obviously grew up in a very different environ than me, yet, I relate totally. It's 'Merica. Most of us -- because we shared pretty much the same "universal" American values and culture -- lived "together". Me in Joisey, this guy, grizzledcoastie. Great comments too... It was the summer of 1968... ....The only rules were you had to come inside for lunch and supper and playtime ended when the sun went down.... ...If someone got hurt, we got an adult. It was no big deal. Roger ALL that.
If you're old enough, it was almost a universal experience. Even in cities and populous states, much of it held true.
The lady across the street was the neighborhood watch. She had a house on the hill and could see all the kids playing. If we were up to no good, our parents would know when we all came in for dinner. Instead of "when the sun set" for us it was when the street lights came on.
Always one of those busy-body tattle-tale old broads seemingly back then. UNLESS you grew up on a farm (TC, was that where you grew up?) Heh -- defining, "Up to no good" BACK THEN?? Cocking our "halo" to the side ;-)...Basically uttering some "disrespectful" lip ("Aw, geez whiz, Mrs. Cleaver!! I didn't *think* I was being a little devil.")
You mean, like this archetype?
There are no replies to Comment # 20. End Trace Mode for Comment # 20.
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Here is/was Bloomfield's legendary landmark 'Short-Stop' diner: Manned by good-hearted, hard-working tough workers; its stools sat on by mutant customers-to-doctors, side-by-side. No one cared. All were well behaved. THE BEST grilled burgers and fries EVER till this day. Their $.45 cent burger: fresh chopped meat, grilled onions, pickles, and toasted bun were gold. Located right off the Garden State Parkway, Exit 148. Replace by a Dunkin' Donuts." :-(
#7. To: Liberator (#6)
Awesome bitter-sweet ode to 'Old America, Past'. A KEEPER.
When I was 8 during the summer back in the summer of 1968, we'd swim in the bayou, fish all day, live in the woods near my home playing guns (liberals of today would have kittens), football (no helmets or pads), basketball and baseball. We caught crawfish and our dads would boil them in a huge picnic with the corn and potatoes. We'd wave to the shrimp boats and the party boats headed to the Gulf and they'd blow their horns to us on the bank.
#9. To: Tooconservative, redleghunter, Vicomte13, Deckard, All Youse Guys (#7)
#10. To: Liberator (#9)
Roger ALL that.
#13. To: Tooconservative, Liberator (#10)
If you're old enough, it was almost a universal experience. Even in cities and populous states, much of it held true.
#17. To: redleghunter, Tooconservative (#13)
The lady across the street was the neighborhood watch. She had a house on the hill and could see all the kids playing. If we were up to no good, our parents would know when we all came in for dinner.
#20. To: Liberator (#17)
Always one of those busy-body tattle-tale old broads seemingly back then.
Replies to Comment # 20.
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