Carlos Sayadyan - Famine / wikimedia commons - flickr

We like to compare ourselves to Europe and the rest of the world  a lot. Our economists do it, educators do it, health professionals do it even some politicians do it. In nearly every subject imaginable.

Those that like to extort what they call American exceptionalism and those that like to show how out of touch and behind we actually are.

Where here is one subject where most of the world has beat us from the time people originally settled here.

Famines.

Yep…and they have had a bunch of them. Sometimes killing a million or more people from starvation and/or disease and plagues. We think of these as something that happens only in third world underdeveloped countries. Not so.

The closest we have come to the kind of famines that the rest of the world endured was Year Without a Summer where there were massive crop failures in the eastern part of the country.   Even then farmers could pack up and leave and move west, which many did.

Those even in Europe did not always have that option and actually could not except to immigrate here. This was not an easy task and for most far to expensive.  A good number of these famines were responsible for the immigration to this country. Like the Great Irish Famine in which up to 1,500,000 people immigrated

While the famine was responsible for a significant increase in emigration from Ireland, of anywhere from 45% to nearly 85% depending on the year and the county, it was not the sole cause. Nor was it even the era when mass emigration from Ireland commenced. That can be traced to the middle of the 18th century, when some 250,000 people left Ireland to settle in the New World alone, over a period of some 50 years. From the defeat of Napoleon to the beginning of the famine, a period of 30 years, “at least 1,000,000 and possibly 1,500,000 emigrated”.^[89] However, during the worst of the famine, emigration reached somewhere around 250,000 in one year alone, with far more emigrants leaving from western Ireland than any other part.^[90]

A large number of which immigrated to this country.

The classic image of an Irish immigrant is led to a certain extent by racist and anti-Catholic stereotypes. In modern times, in the United States, the Irish are largely perceived as hard workers. Most notably they are associated with the positions of police officer, firefighter, Roman Catholic Church leaders and politicians in the larger Eastern Seaboard metropolitan areas.Irish Americans number over 35 million, making them the second largest reported ethnic group in the country, after German Americans. Historically, large Irish American communities have been found in Philadelphia; Chicago; Boston; New York City; Detroit; New England; Baltimore; Pittsburgh; St. Paul, Minnesota; Buffalo; Broome County; Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Bay Area. Many cities across the country have annual St Patrick’s Day parades;The nation’s largest is in New York City — one of the world’s largest parades. The parade in Boston is closely associated with Evacuation Day, when the British left Boston in 1776 during the American War of Independence. Not to be forgotten are the 56% of the people who claim Irish ancestry who are Protestant and populate large areas along the Appalachian Mountains and the southeastern United States, especially in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Arkansas and Virginia

Before the Great Hunger (“Irish Potato Famine“), in which over a million died and more emigrated,^[51] there had been the Penal Laws which had already resulted in significant emigration from Ireland.^{[citation needed]}

According to the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, in 1790 there were 400,000 Americans of Irish birth or ancestry out of a total white population of 3,100,000. Half of these Irish Americans were descended from Ulster people, and half were descended from the people of Connaught, Leinster and Munster.

According to U.S. Census figures from 2000, 41,000,000 Americans claim to be wholly or partly of Irish ancestry, a group that represents more than one in five white Americans.

Not only immigration but social, political and economic upheaval can be traced to famines. Most notably the French and Russian revolutions.

A history of not having enough to eat also influences the way one eats.  Unlike here where we are used to putting whatever we can grab into our mouths and fast as possible,  in Europe – and especially in France – meals are social occasions where one takes time to savor each part of each course. And when you don’t have much of any one item, you have as many items as you can. Hence the tradition of having multi course meals.  Each served separately and prepared separately – since refrigeration came much, much later and each item had to be fresh.

These social occasions were where you talked over your day and what not.

Food wise this country has never really had it as bad as a lot of the rest of the world. Even during the depression of the 1930s, we did not ever have a situation where 100s of thousands of people died of starvation.

At least not yet………………

US vs THEM

That is how it was put by Romney and his group in the last election, as Richard Wolff reminds us in his presentations. Such as this one.  An economic Us vs Them but not entirely.   This country is and has been unique in that it is one of the few countries that is not  made up of a majority of people from the same racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds.  So there has been at least an undercurrent of racial/ethnic/religious animosity from the get go.

Add to that the economic and social differences, it’s actually pretty amazing we have not been at each others throats all along.  There was great debate as to whether voting should be limited to only those who owned land or were bankers and merchants and yeoman farmers and on and on.

For a while Us was was limited to white anglo saxon men. And then divided up to men either those with money and prestige or those without IE workers and farmers etc. Depending on which group one belonged to. But it did not include and minorities or homosexuals. It included women but only as second class members with – for a while – no voting rights.

Racial bigotry wasn’t limited to blacks. There was Native Americans, Italians, Irish, Jews, Japanese, Chinese and even Germans.  Some of it outrageous and some of subtle. Stereotypes and caricatures  galore.

Social too. The Hillbilly and Farmers and Southerners and rednecks and city slickers etc.  In movies and comic books and on TV and radio…….

And all was fine as long as They kept their place and kept quiet.   The war or animosity between the business owners and the workers is nearly as long and in a way rather ironic and most of those who became business owners originally here, came from the working classes over there.   Both groups convinced that They are the ones who do the work and They are the ones who make the country great and They are the ones  who deserve respect. And that the Others should be grateful and are lazy and uncouth etc.

After WWII and the availability of higher education came another group of educated professionals that did not exist in such great numbers who also spit but this time along more ideological lines of US vs Them.   Neither one fully or actually identifying with either of the previous groups.  Since they were not part of the rich elites or the working classes.  A new bourgeoisie as it were or elites wannabee.   Wishing they were rich and quite often trying to live like such.

But then another group emerged. One I first had contact with in the late 1970s. Baby-boomers who rejected the college educated crowd and intellectuals. Who felt that they had been  somehow betrayed by them. Angry, disenchanted people who wanted to relate to the proletarians or working stiffs but were quite often well educated.   Distrustful of the educated liberals who they thought had betrayed their ideals but not really from the working classes either.    An Us vs Them that is not nearly as well defined.

So maybe when Richard Wolff and others ask how come We and not rising up against Them in outrage, it’s because We are not all that sure who We are.  Not nearly as clear now as it was in the past.

Schmorell grave - Jim Forest flickr

The vast majority of Americans support the extra judicial killings of people with drones.  This is not surprising at all since there was great support for going after protestors during the 1960s, Japanese internment during WWII, black segregation and slavery, Native American slaughter and relocation and on and on.

Just as there was great support for Japanese military atrocities in Japan and Nazi atrocities in Germany during Hitler’s time and Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain and Stalin in the USSR. Not just out of fear but also because people there were doing OK under these regimes.

And now the extreme right in Greece is becoming more and more popular and Stalin is gaining popularity again as a hero in Russia.

Germany has strict and harsh laws against denial  of the Holocaust and  tribute to Hitler but I wonder how long this would last should they find themselves in the same situation that led to his rise initially.  And how many would dare to speak out such as these young people did.

Liselotte Furst-Ramdohr, already a widow at the age of 29 following her husband’s death on the Russian front, was introduced to the White Rose group by her friend, Alexander Schmorell.

“I can still see Alex today as he told me about it,” says Furst-Ramdohr, now a spry 99-year-old. “He never said the word ‘resistance’, he just said that the war was dreadful, with the battles and so many people dying, and that Hitler was a megalomaniac, and so they had to do something.”

Schmorell and his friends Christoph Probst and Hans Scholl had started writing leaflets encouraging Germans to join them in resisting the Nazi regime.

With the help of a small group of collaborators, they distributed the leaflets to addresses selected at random from the phone book.

Furst-Ramdohr says the group couldn’t understand how the German people had been so easily led into supporting the Nazi Party and its ideology.

“They must have been able to tell how bad things were, it was ridiculous,” she says. – BBC Website

They distributed pamphlets all over the area including to the University of Munich.  Where they were spotted by a caretaker who call the Gestapo who came and took them away.

There was a trial with a quick verdict followed even quicker by an execution in the courtyard by guillotine. Now The White Rose are considered heroes and have a monument. But as Furst-Ramdohr says ….

Since the end of the war, the members of the White Rose have become celebrated figures, as German society has searched for positive role models from the Nazi period.

But Furst-Ramdohr doesn’t like it. “At the time, they’d have had us all executed,” she says of the majority of her compatriots. - BBC Website

Such as those who were killed here at Kent State or Jackson State are considered heroes…or were.

We haven’t had any execution here yet of protestors but the silence of those in LA concerning the LAPD, the attacks on OWS and the imprisonment of Bradly Manning  with very little outcry except some on the political left – leaves me to wonder.  As to why the German people of time supported Hitler and hist actions actively and even passively ? Here is one explanation.

A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a “feel good dictator,” a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.
To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also — in great contrast to World War I — particularly pampered soldiers and their families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a “warm-hearted” protector, says Aly, author of the new book “Hitler’s People’s State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism” [TC: I cannot find it on U.S. Amazon, try this German link] and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich’s unsavory, murderous side.
Financing such home front “happiness” was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says.

Sound familiar ?  Bread and Circuses works every time.  Which could explain why so many here are pretty OK with the status quo. As long as they themselves are well taken care of and are doing OK, that’s all that matters, regardless of how the rest are doing.

And as for those who are just waiting for the system to implode, you might want to remember The White Rose.

I came across the following video after searching a bit after reading this interview in Mother Jones.

“Deadbeat Nation” sounds like a great name for book. And as it turns out, it is a book. In A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters, William & Mary professor Scott Reynolds Nelson argues that American history consists of a never-ending string of defaults at the individual, municipal, and state levels. Credit bubbles alternately finance transformative policies like westward expansion and infrastructure improvements, and then remake the nation’s political landscape when they invariably pop. Economist Tyler Cowen, in a New York Times Magazinereview last July, needed just one sentence to summarize the book: “We have hardly ever had a well-functioning banking system.”

What this means is that from the very beginning the finances of this country were based on fraud. Watch the video here.

In this he shows how nearly all the financial disasters and crisis can be traced back to bank and financier investments that were dodgy at best and fraudulent at worst. What Nelson I think does not realize is that in this he also shows how capitalism itself is at it’s very core is based on fraud, swindling and corruption. And at the head are the bankers.

I have watched a number of these types of videos and read a number of articles and online books of this sort by various economic and financial historians etc. all with the stated or unstated premiss that there is nothing wrong with capitalism providing it is done honestly.

Then each one without exception goes on to show unequivocally that there is no such thing as honest capitalism.  There never has been and probably never will be.

Banksy Foreclosed Dreams - flickr/Finger food

One of the main topics these days has been about how to “save the system”. Meaning our current political and economic system here and maybe elsewhere. Or the eventual collapse of same regardless of what anyone does or attempts to do.

And one of the main aspects of this is then context in which this is being done. As if the time after WWII and the depression of the 1930s is the way things have always been and the attitudes there in were the way people always were. The problem here is that anyone who has read any history should know – this is false. But most of us still alive think this way. Those of us born after WWII. The so called Baby Boomers and their off spring.

Before WWII unless you were born into a “Middle Class” family – and I am using the wikipedia definition here, the college educated professional class – your life would be pretty rough. Either working a farm or on one or working in some factory in some metro area for horrible pay and lousy working conditions and lousy housing. And that is if you were white. If you were a minority, it was even rougher.

There were no suburbs or interstate highways or big box discount stores. Health care was minimal, if at all. And the depression made this all much worse. For farmers thing were already getting rough with droughts that precede the dust bowl and the depression. Not to mention that just prior to this in the late 1800s, grain prices had gone down a black hole do to over production caused by the mechanization of farming.

And unless you were born into a very well off family, higher education was pretty much out of the question. There were few state universities and the private ones were beyond all but the very fortunate.

Babe boomers however had it much much better. Our parents got to go to college thanks to Uncle Sam if they were in the service. State Universities were being built along with community colleges. The war and what followed created a huge demand for workers not know before hand. There was a major building boom do to the lack of housing and suburbs popped up like weeds. Unemployment was low and wages were going up. If you were white, during this period, you future was a hell of lot more rosy than you parents was. And most kids then were expected to go to college if they had anything on the ball at all. A major change from previous generations.

Now here is the problem. We were all told – on the radio, television, by our parents and in school – this is the way things are and the ways things will always be. Maybe not on those words, but that was the message. We were not told that this was primarily because the US was the only show in town. That the rest of the world was in the stone age or had been bombed into the stone age. That a very large number of the jobs out there had to do with make weapons to fight those horrible communists. That the cheap gas and oil etc. were provided by US companies that used slave labor to steal it from other less developed nations.

And to tell you the truth few if any of us cared. We were too busy with rock and roll and the beat generation. Hot Rods and girls. The space race. A few of us became aware of racial bigotry and civil rights and began to come a bit more involved with this. Joining marches and protests and singing songs. But with the intention of returning to our nice comfortable lives.

The Vietnam war geared up and more of us get involved with protesting that – primarily to keep our heads from being blown off. And with the intention of returning to our nice comfortable lives. But along the way a lot of us became very disenchanted with our government and political system. We grew up idealistic and getting pretty much what we wanted. We expected to be treated well and listened to and when we were not… When we were treated like some kind of inconvenient pest, a large number developed a deep seated resentment. And far too often this was passed on to their children as well.

We were going to change the world…the system and when we could not, felt betrayed by the whole establishment. Government, education, corporate…you name it. But our expectations were unreal. We were unaware or refused to accept that the times and our it’s prosperity were one huge propaganda event. To show the world that our system was so much better that the “other” system. And as soon as this was no longer necessary, tossed aside like a used newspaper.

Because far too many of us – of my generation, the boomers – would not completely see that because we were white that others were not, was a big reason why our lives had been so comfortable. And that as soon as that was no longer necessary, we would become unnecessary as well.

We had the privilege to live a fantasy. A Disney kind of life for a while. But the fantasy is over. Time to get real.

Manhattan Buildings - flickr / Russ Glasson

America has been called the great melting pot. If so, then to me at least, it’s more like fondue that has gone horribly wrong. This great mixing of cultures has yielded a country that is becoming more splintered and divided each year. Instead of molding the traditions and cultural values that were brought over here by those from other areas into one, a number of these beliefs and values have been lost or simply tossed aside.

A country where personal agendas and monetary rewards take president over relationships and community. I remember when it was not so much. When everything did not have a price and avarice was considered by most to be crude and uncouth. Where you went out of your way from friends because friendship meant something. Where people looked out for one another and supported one another. Where jingoistic propaganda was not necessary to get people to back and idea or action. Where everything did not have to be sold by a carnival barker.

I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself just by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage-unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free any more to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has it’s pimp. - Rag Picker “The Madwoman of Chaillot“

Morris Berman brings this up using Seinfeld as a definitive example.

In the case of the Seinfeld scripts, Jerry provided the upbeat, overt aspect of the show’s humor, while Larry David supplied the subtext. Larry’s vision, especially about America, was quite dark. As a result, there is an undercurrent in the episodes, one which says that the United States is a country in which friendship is pretty much a sham and community nonexistent; a society where nobody gives a damn about anybody else.

This is true not only in the way that the four central characters–Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer–relate to those outside their little circle, but also in the way they relate to each other. They often talk simultaneously, “through” each other, as though the other person weren’t even present. All four of them appear to have only one motive: advancement of their own personal and immediate goals. In a word, the show is actually about the callousness, the almost autistic indifference, of daily life in America; and this is revealed in episode after episode.

Berman then gives a half a dozen plot synopsis as examples of this. But he leaves out I think a very important aspect in the socio economic context. That of the upper class white areas. The gated communities and those with home owners associations and condos and what not. Upper class suburbia and upper class town houses etc. But even the series Friends tried to play this kind of relationship for laughs as well, though with a bit more subtlety.

Among the poor and black and asian and latino communities, this is not the case. At least not nearly as much. For they need to have more brotherhood and fellowship to make it. And from my own small experience they do. This deep rooted community spirit was most prevalent within various ethnic and cultural areas but rarely between different ones. It was also quite visible in rural family farming areas and amongst those who were laborers and blue collar workers as well. It helped to bring together unions and other organizations. It was this value system and attitude that pushed us forward and paved the way for the inventions and progressive attitudes.

So it should come as no surprise that as this value of brotherhood and community as diminished, so have the unions and other organizations. The “Me Generation” and their offspring have take over. Born with a silver spoon in their mouths, dishwashers to keep them clean and sanitary and a guaranteed income from their bought and payed for education. Those that want to throw out anything that they personally do not benefit from but costs them money. A nation that goes to war for no good reason but to further someones agenda. Where Ayn Rand can is a popular metaphor. And as Berman points out at the end of his piece:

When Jerry phones his lawyer, “Jackie Chiles” (a Johnnie Cochran look-alike), to explain that they were arrested for not coming to someone’s aid, Jackie explodes with indignation: “Why, that’s ridiculous!” he barks. “You don’t have to help anybody. That’s what this country is all about!” As the popular American expression has it, He got that one right.

The trial over, the judge sentences our heroes to a year in jail, commenting that “your callous disregard for other human beings threatens to rock the very foundations of society.” But which society? What the show tells us, in episode after episode, is that callous disregard for other human beings is the foundation of society–American society, that is. And so the subtext finally breaks through in no uncertain terms: Seinfeld was A Show About Something, after all.

Seinfeld ran for 10 seasons and was one of the most popular shows at the time. And no wonder, it presented American upper class values to a tee. This show about nothing in a country about noting.

Black Friday - flickr

“History is a set of lies that people have agreed upon,” Napoleon said. “Even when I am gone, I shall remain in people’s minds the star of their rights, my name will be the war cry of their efforts, the motto of their hopes.”

It has always been thus, that people will glorify and embellish the past to suit their own egos. Especially when it comes to wars and the victors but even the losers as well. With stories and monuments and what not. Hollywood has made a fortune on this. Books by the millions have been written glorifying the past one way or another.

And as Chris Hedges point out, to inflate peoples egos and diminish others.

The split between those in Memphis who hold up authentic heroes—those who fought to protect, defend and preserve life, such as [Ida B.]Wells and Burkle—and those who memorialize slave traders and bigots such as Forrest points up a disturbing rise of a neo-Confederate ideology in the South. Honoring figures like [Nathan Bedford] Forrest in Memphis while ignoring Wells would be like erecting a statue to the Nazi death camp commander Amon Goeth in the Czech Republic town of Svitavy, the birthplace of Oskar Schindler, who rescued 1,200 Jews.

The rewriting of history in the South is a retreat by beleaguered whites into a mythical self-glorification. I witnessed a similar retreat during the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As Yugoslavia’s economy deteriorated, ethnic groups built fantasies of a glorious past that became a substitute for history. They sought to remove, through exclusion and finally violence, competing ethnicities to restore this mythological past. The embrace by nationalist groups of a nonreality-based belief system made communication with other ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural language. There was no common historical narrative built around verifiable truth. A similar disconnect was illustrated last week in Memphis when the chairman of the city’s parks committee, William Boyd, informed the council that Forrest “promoted progress for black people in this country after the war.” Boyd argued that the KKK was “more of a social club” at its inception and didn’t begin carrying out “bad and horrific things” until it reconstituted itself with the rise of the modern civil rights movement.

This is not limited to political history but to economic history as well. Idolizing the events and leaders of a past that was not nearly as glorious and successful as even those of us who lived it would like to imagine. The post WWII era and FDR’s New Deal. Which either helped tremendously or hindered horribly our economic endeavors. Depending on which revisionist history one adheres to. It generally was not quite that clear cut.

The Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s and (supposed) prosperity following WWII seems to be the current interest of both the right and the left. All conveniently forgetting that this was simply one of many economic downturns and may not even have been the worst. The depression of the late 1800s was by some accounts far worse and even lasted far longer.

But the economic fundamentals were shaky. Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872 kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America’s heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region’s assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs threatened European trade and a European way of life.

As continental banks tumbled, British banks held back their capital, unsure of which institutions were most involved in the mortgage crisis. The cost to borrow money from another bank — the interbank lending rate — reached impossibly high rates. This banking crisis hit the United States in the fall of 1873. Railroad companies tumbled first. They had crafted complex financial instruments that promised a fixed return, though few understood the underlying object that was guaranteed to investors in case of default. (Answer: nothing). The bonds had sold well at first, but they had tumbled after 1871 as investors began to doubt their value, prices weakened, and many railroads took on short-term bank loans to continue laying track. Then, as short-term lending rates skyrocketed across the Atlantic in 1873, the railroads were in trouble. When the railroad financier Jay Cooke proved unable to pay off his debts, the stock market crashed in September, closing hundreds of banks over the next three years. The panic continued for more than four years in the United States and for nearly six years in Europe.
The long-term effects of the Panic of 1873 were perverse. For the largest manufacturing companies in the United States — those with guaranteed contracts and the ability to make rebate deals with the railroads — the Panic years were golden. Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, and John D. Rockefeller had enough capital reserves to finance their own continuing growth. For smaller industrial firms that relied on seasonal demand and outside capital, the situation was dire. As capital reserves dried up, so did their industries. Carnegie and Rockefeller bought out their competitors at fire-sale prices. The Gilded Age in the United States, as far as industrial concentration was concerned, had begun.

As the panic deepened, ordinary Americans suffered terribly. A cigar maker named Samuel Gompers who was young in 1873 later recalled that with the panic, “economic organization crumbled with some primeval upheaval.” Between 1873 and 1877, as many smaller factories and workshops shuttered their doors, tens of thousands of workers — many former Civil War soldiers — became transients. The terms “tramp” and “bum,” both indirect references to former soldiers, became commonplace American terms. Relief rolls exploded in major cities, with 25-percent unemployment (100,000 workers) in New York City alone. Unemployed workers demonstrated in Boston, Chicago, and New York in the winter of 1873-74 demanding public work. In New York’s Tompkins Square in 1874, police entered the crowd with clubs and beat up thousands of men and women. The most violent strikes in American history followed the panic, including by the secret labor group known as the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania’s coal fields in 1875, when masked workmen exchanged gunfire with the “Coal and Iron Police,” a private force commissioned by the state. A nationwide railroad strike followed in 1877, in which mobs destroyed railway hubs in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cumberland, Md. The Real Great Depression – Scott Reynolds Nelson

But both sides of the debate really do not like talking about this part of history since upon close examination it revels how shaky the argument for capitalism really is. For this is the era that Marx was writing in and about. This crisis of capitalism that so parallels our own current situation. But that was the late 1800s and the capitalists were still able to grow and invent their way out of this mess. At least temporarily.

Inventions and growth though have built in limitations as well. This is one crisis that will not be grown out of or invented out of or even be solved by imperialistic wars, such as those used by Germany in the 1930s.

And like all eras of history, it has been glossed over by those who would like to think the years prior to WWI were so peaceful and nostalgic. Conveniently forgetting how horrific they actually were so as to vindicate their own agendas.

Cell Phones -Scallop Holden/flickr

I just finished doing an electronic restoration on an old Hallicrafters S40 communications receiver circa 1947. Replaced all the old paper capacitors and the electrolytic capacitors and a few resisters. I also replaced the audio output tube and its associated components with an audio amplifier module I had since that particular vacuum tube was pretty pricey and the transformer as well.

Where I currently live I am not to far from the transmitter sites of some local radio stations but this did not seem to bother this radio when I was tuning around, I was able to listen to a station in Toronto Ontario quite well. This was not the case with a much newer Radio Shack DX302 that I had which was overloaded by these close and powerful signals to the point of making it nearly useless trying to receive anything on the AM broadcast band.

With my hearing the way it is, I find the sound from the old Hallicrafters much more pleasing to listen to than my newer high priced receivers for AM and shortwave. But to be fair the old Hallicrafters was not as sensitive on the upper shortwave bands as any of the newer ones I have, including the RS DX302.

This not a diary to bash current technology. After all I have been mucking about in it since I was 10 years old and I am now in my 60s. Also, I enjoy working on and building and modifying radios and such, and have done so for nearly that long. I am concerned, though, about a few aspects of it.

I had a talk the other day with a gentleman who was here to do maintenance on my furnace. He came into my radio room and was fairly impressed – I guess – with my equipment and such. We got to talking about the current electronics and such, and how people just pitch them out when they break rather than getting the items repaired. I said that was the main reason I left the field of repair and went into computers. The occupation just went away. In fact component level repair is just not practical on today’s electronics. The parts are way too small and require specialized tools to replace them — assuming one can even get the replacement parts. In the case of microprocessors and specialized chips, this is quite often very difficult or impossible.

Which brings up another aspect of our current technology. The old vacuum tube equipment, though some it was pretty cheaply made, it was still quite robust. It was not as affected by voltage spikes or lightning or heat and humidity as current equipment is. It was much more repairable and less complex, to the point that you did not need much training or specialized tools to maintain it. Also we were not nearly so dependent on it in our lives.

Like the old cars with carburetors and distributors and such, that if they died on the road you could do some kind of quick fix to get you to a gas station to do a more complete repair. Nowadays that simply is not possible. Nearly every part is controlled by a computer.

Speaking of computers, I helped a friend last night with her’s because it had some unwanted software on it and getting rid of it was a considerable task. Computers are beyond most people to maintain, even the software can become unusable pretty quickly. With our dependence on them, this is becoming a major hassle.

Not simply computers but nearly everything we do now requires some sort of high tech to accomplish. There are processors in nearly everything now  and the infrastructure as well. And little of it is protected from anything. From simple communications to every financial transaction and even many medical tasks. And all this data runs on fiber optic cable that has little protection from the the environment or from sabotage. Our electric infrastructure is right out in the open  and as we have seen a number of times, can be brought to halt rather quickly.

We know how much pandemonium is caused if we lose electricity for a week. Imagine what it would be like if we lost it for a month or more. Or if we lost our data communications for a month or more, which can happen. It is nearly impossible to protect as it is so vast. But the loss of a few key sites could bring the whole thing down.

The fact that this has not occurred yet does not mean if would not or could not happen. And it’s a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to disable than flying planes into buildings. Weapons have already been developed to disable the electrical grid or parts of it.

One of the main reasons for this is the centralized control that is maintained by private monopolies, making our infrastructure very vulnerable. So while we sit back at our computers…sipping on our electrically brewed coffee…remember this the next time you use your cell phone.

Honey ! I'm Home - flickr

I read a diary a bit ago where the author was waxing nostalgic over what they missed about the 1950s and 1960s post WWII era. The supposed benefits of the cold war etc. Mostly the economic advantages those of us white middle class had.

I too miss some things about the era I grew up in. I shall list a few of them here.

I miss climbing trees and wondering about without having to think about where I was wondering much. Fences at that time were mostly for keeping farm animals in and other animals out. There were no gated communities and you rarely saw a No Trespassing Sign. Those were usually on some official building or some such.

Science and radio were big deals. Watch Mister Wizard and Discovery were cool programs. Both explained and demonstrated things that even a 1o year old could understand. And there were great science fiction shows as well. Like Science Fiction Theater and of course Twilight Zone. But even the games show were intelligent. Like The GE College Bowl and To Tell the Truth. Or funny ones like You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx. The original show about nothing. Mostly a venue for Groucho’s wit and (often suggestive) humor.

Intelligent talk shows with Steve Allen and Jack Parr and Dick Cavett. Intelligent cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle and Beany and Cecil. Dramas and plays by Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling , Orson Wells and Gore Vidal. Kiddy TV hosts and The Three Stooges and Our Gang Comedies and Abbot and Costello.

Schools with recess and science toys that you could actually do something with. Sure they could be dangerous but that was half the fun. Science itself was cool and fun. And the radio played music. And the musicians could play instruments.

There is something else that is also disappearing at an alarming rate these days and it is more than alarming a particular part of this country. To the extent that they are losing the minds over it. A cultural phenomena that has been depicted in the movies, on radio and in television for decades. The white christian male dominated society as presented so eloquently by Doug Muder, a 50-something ex-mathematician in his latest essay. The Distress of the Privileged. He uses the movie Pleasantville as an example.

In a memorable scene from the 1998 film Pleasantville (in which two 1998 teen-agers are transported into the black-and-white world of a 1950s TV show), the father of the TV-perfect Parker family returns from work and says the magic words “Honey, I’m home!”, expecting them to conjure up a smiling wife, adorable children, and dinner on the table.

This time, though, it doesn’t work. No wife, no kids, no food. Confused, he repeats the invocation, as if he must have said it wrong. After searching the house, he wanders out into the rain and plaintively questions this strangely malfunctioning Universe: “Where’s my dinner?”

Privileged distress. I’m not bringing this up just to discuss old movies. As the culture evolves, people who benefitted from the old ways invariably see themselves as victims of change. The world used to fit them like a glove, but it no longer does. Increasingly, they find themselves in unfamiliar situations that feel unfair or even unsafe. Their concerns used to take center stage, but now they must compete with the formerly invisible concerns of others.

If you are one of the newly-visible others, this all sounds whiny compared to the problems you face every day. It’s tempting to blast through such privileged resistance with anger and insult.

Tempting, but also, I think, a mistake. The privileged are still privileged enough to foment a counter-revolution, if their frustrated sense of entitlement hardens.

So I think it’s worthwhile to spend a minute or two looking at the world from George Parker’s point of view: He’s a good 1950s TV father. He never set out to be the bad guy. He never meant to stifle his wife’s humanity or enforce a dull conformity on his kids. Nobody ever asked him whether the world should be black-and-white; it just was.

George never demanded a privileged role, he just uncritically accepted the role society assigned him and played it to the best of his ability. And now suddenly that society isn’t working for the people he loves, and they’re blaming him.

It seems so unfair. He doesn’t want anybody to be unhappy. He just wants dinner.

Levels of distress. But even as we accept the reality of George’s privileged-white-male distress, we need to hold on to the understanding that the less privileged citizens of Pleasantville are distressed in an entirely different way. (Margaret Atwood is supposed to have summed up the gender power-differential like this: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”)

George deserves compassion, but his until-recently-ideal housewife Betty Parker (and the other characters assigned subservient roles) deserves justice. George and Betty’s claims are not equivalent, and if we treat them the same way, we do Betty an injustice.

Indeed this idealic world that is presented in the movie and that the author (Doug Muder) uses to make his point is crumbling all around. To the point that it no longer represents a viable voting demographic. It is especially upsetting to those who are authoritarian on the the religious/political right. Those that the republican party could count on since the time of Nixon.

It’s this domination that is under attack and it’s the threat of having their guns taken away – there by leaving them impotent and defenseless against this onslaught – that is driving them now to extreme reaction. It was bad enough that their view and place in family was being threatened by gays and women and minorities, but now they see themselves with no way to fight back. Guns – the symbol of American manhood from those John Wayne westerns to the fighting on Guadalcanal.

It’s this bullied, boorish arrogant America of the 1950s they do not want to lose. Where their word was final in all situations. Where they could get what they believed they deserved and win any argument – with a bullet if necessary. Now a black man has come out and said they can no longer behave in this manner and has threatened to remove their Smith and Wesson manhood.

And it’s just not fair.

I remember watching part of a movie a while back with David Ogden Stiers as a musician and this young lady who came to audition her violin with him. When she finished he told her that the she played the piece flawlessly but that her performance lacked feeling. Lacked soul. Lacked emotion.

I feel that this country has lost it’s feeling and soul. It’s emotion.

Before the industrial revolution everything you got was made by hand one at a time. There very likely were apprentices and helpers involved but it was one at a time. Each unique in some way from the the others. made by craftsman an artisans who learned and honed their skills and trade over the years.

Then the industrial revolution got underway big time. By the late 1800s and early 1900s, most things were being built in factories and thanks to people like Henry Ford – on some kind of assembly line. But even with assembly line techniques and interchangeable parts, most of what was made was of fairly high quality. As you can see with this 1938 Philco floor model or this Model A Ford.

Some were of very high quality indeed. Like the E. H. Scott or this high end Zenith Stratosphere. Not only did they make the radios, they made a lot of the parts inside as well. Even the vacuum tubes. And the mechanical tuning assemblies were also complex and well made. As you can see in the photos above, the cabinetry was of very high quality as well. With fine detail work and wood inlays and a fine finish.

This attention to detail carried over to WWII. With nearly everything made for the war effort. For the time they used the best available parts. I myself have owned a number of pieces of equipment and radios from that time period and am still impressed with some of the designs and workmanship used. Even small radio receives and transmitters made for bombers by the millions and by different manufacturers had were of the highest quality available at the time. Using precision gear reduction tuning and heavy shielding and other things.

There are those who are of the opinion that this attention to quality was also part of what lead to the depression of the 1930s. That the car makers and electronics makers of the time did too much of a good thing. The products lasted too long and the newer models were not enough improved for people to want to buy new ones. So sales slowed down, inventory remained unsold and people began to be laid off. All this before the bank failures and what not.

This kind of craftsmanship could still be seen up through the early 1950s but some time around the middle of the 1950s and onward things began to change. All of this long before the Japanese and German imports began to appear in any numbers. The fancy cabinetry was going as was the inside quality as well. Early television sets had nice cabinets and well well designed for their day. But by the mid 1960s the cabinetry there was pretty much gone and the electronics inside got cheaper and cheaper.

New and improved was not so much since the electronics inside did not change much from year to year. I know I used to repair them. No real change came in the electronics until the manufactures began to offer solid state television sets. And RCA and Zenith and GE and the rest did not do this until SONY began selling their new TRINITRON sets here which made our stuff look like stone knives and bear skins by comparison.

And by the late 1970s even RCA and Philco were pretty much gone. Zenith followed soon there after. Only the names remained. And the jobs went with them. Quality electronics along with quality furniture and cars became a niche area. Mostly for high end audio equipment and sports cars.

Along the way personal physicians who made house calls and spent time with their patients and milkmen who delivered the milk and left notes in case the cows got into the alfalfa. Local TV shops and corner markets as well.

And we began to just throw things out. Not because they could not be repaired, but because they were out of fashion some how. We started to be a disposable society. Doctors who treated cases instead of people and civilian deaths became collateral damage. And now there are those who seem to think we have a disposable planet as well.

So here is an example of what we were once capable of.