I’ve written a lot here about how the most dangerous types in peacetime are the ones who juuuuust missed participating in some vast social upheaval. The Nazis are an obvious example. The Nazi-est Nazis of them all — Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, etc. — were old enough to have seen and understood the great national cataclysm that was World War I, but weren’t quite old enough to participate in it directly. Thus, when their turn came, they had to go double-or-nothing to prove to their older kin and classmates that they had what it takes. In America, guys like Teddy Roosevelt don’t make much sense until you realize that they grew up hearing their fathers and older brothers reminisce about the Civil War. And so on.
Now, I’m all for bashing the goddamn Boomers, but let’s be fair (since it matters for historical analysis). There’s a common misconception about the Baby Boom. Here, see if you can spot it:
Did you see it? Look closer, and you’ll see that while 1947(-ish) appears to be the peak year in terms of total births, the vast majority of what we call “Boomers” were born after 1950. Let’s do some simple math. The very oldest Boomers were born in 1946. The Summer of Love was 1967. Even if we assume the Summer of Love came out of nowhere — which is impossible, of course, any movement that large had antecedents going back years, probably decades, but let’s assume — that means that any “Boomers” participating were, at most, barely 22 years old. They were just barely 24 when Woodstock came around. Granted that the youngest are the dumbest, and thus can have outsize influence, they still can’t have been largely, let alone solely, responsible for the idiocy of the hippies.
That’s all on the older crowd, the so-called “Silent Generation” — the ones who were old enough to be aware of World War II, but unable to participate directly.
It’s easy to verify. The Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the New Left, was penned by coddled college kids in 1962 — meaning, by kids born, at latest, in about 1942 (its principal author, Tom Hayden, was born in 1939). Here are the Chicago Seven and their dates of birth: Abbie Hoffman (1936), Jerry Rubin (1938), David Dellinger (1915!), Hayden, Rennie Davis (1941),John Froines (1939), and Lee Weiner (1939).
Hoffman, especially, bears scrutiny. Though he’s best remembered as a Yippie — that is, the founder of an ostentatiously youth-oriented movement — he was 31 at its founding. Don’t trust anyone over thirty, right?
1936 to 1946 is only a decade, but it’s crucial. A kid born in 1936 would have vivid memories of World War II and its immediate aftermath — fathers, uncles, and older brothers (and, in more than a few cases, aunts and older sisters) coming home from the service. A kid born in 1946 would have a completely different experience — ask any combat veteran about the first year or two back in the world, versus being home for a decade. Those guys — the kids who saw firsthand the angry young strangers they were supposed to call “Dad” — were the ones who did the real damage in The Sixties(TM), just as it was the almost-but-not-quite frontsoldaten who did the real damage in the Third Reich.
With me? Now hang on to your hats, because here’s where it gets pretty meta: It was the “Silent Generation,” not the Boomers, who did the real damage in The Sixties(TM). That is, the guys who juuuust missed the giant social upheaval that was World War II. The Boomers have done all the damage since The Sixties(TM).
That — The Sixties(TM), which is why I’m using that obnoxious (TM) — is the great social upheaval they juuuust missed. [These people] aren’t old fossils from the flower power years, though many of those fossils are still alive and kicking (including four of the Chicago Seven: Hayden, Davis, Froines, and Weiner). Has anyone heard from Billy Ayers lately? How about Noam Chomsky (born 1928)? I’m sure they have plenty to say … but nobody cares.
It’s not retreads from The Sixties(TM) out there doing this stuff. It’s the people who wish they’d been around for the Summer of Love that are doing it. It’s the people who just know they would’ve ended the Vietnam War, if only they hadn’t been in junior high at the time. This is their Woodstock, not least because they only heard about the original when they arrived for freshman orientation in 1976.
Severian, “Talkin’ ’bout My Generation!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-06-11.
September 23, 2020
QotD: Don’t blame the Boomers for the “Summer of Love” … most of ’em were too young to participate
September 22, 2020
QotD: City dwellers and the state
The Z Man, “Never Newark Nights”, The Z Blog, 2018-06-06.
September 21, 2020
QotD: Prohibition and the Temperance movement
… [T]he original Temperance movement started out with the very best of intentions, and was trying to deal with a real problem. In colonial and early-19th-century America, people (men, women and OH HORRORS even children!) drank enough that by modern standards we’d call them alcoholics. Modern Russians drink more, but if they were transported back to that time and place, they’d fit right on in. Part of it was because water was often not safe to drink (tea and coffee were often expensive and hard to get, while beer and other alcoholic drinks were made just about everywhere), part of it was snobbery (only really poor people drank water!) and part of it was because people back then believed that alcohol strengthened and warmed the body.
Two of the good side effects of the Temperance/Prohibition movement were the provision of safe, clean drinking water in American cities and towns, and the modern fruit-juice industry (as a lot of churches went hot-Prohibition, they got uneasy about serving wine at Communion, so they went to work and came up with non-alcoholic substitutes.) Welch’s Grape Juice was started by a pastor who wanted non-alcoholic “wine” for Communion, and caught on, real big.
Eric Oppen, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2020-06-18.
September 20, 2020
QotD: The anti-slavery movement
What did Wilberforce “cure”? Two centuries ago, on March 25th 1807, one very persistent British backbencher secured the passage by Parliament of an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout His Majesty’s realms and territories. It’s not that no one remembers the disease ever existed, but that we recall it as a kind of freak pandemic — a SARS or bird flu that flares up and whirrs round the world and is then eradicated. The American education system teaches it as such — as a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had conjured out of their own ambition.
In reality, it was more like the common cold — a fact of life. The institution predates the word’s etymology, from the Slavs brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome. It predates by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. The first legally recognized slave in the American colonies was owned by a black man who had himself arrived as an indentured servant. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers. As Metaxas puts it, “Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.”
Mark Steyn, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, 2014.
September 19, 2020
QotD: Dictatorship of the Cancel Culture proletariat
While not the most important, the first of these points is the most relevant on a day-to-day basis. Without endorsing these behaviours, the plain fact is that the huge majority of people have probably at some point told an ethnic or regional joke, sent a pornographic or un-PC snap, had sex while intoxicated, used a slur tied to sexual orientation / race / gender online or in the lockerroom, worn a St Paddy’s Day or Cinco de Mayo outfit they would really prefer a mulligan on, or committed other Cardinal Sins against Wokeness. As a result of this, many young people are intently aware that Twitter and Facebook wars involving the unearthing of old content generally end with egg on the face of everyone involved. Caucasian NBA point guard Donte DeVincenzo was humiliated in late 2018 by the revelation that – at age 14 – he had described his hoops handle as “ballin’ on these nig*as like I’m Derrick Rose”. He ended up deleting his entire social-media presence. The point of monitoring this sort of thing, for the many people and organisations that do so, is not punishing the tiny minority of real racists and abusers out there so much as keeping normal citizens too terrified by the potential unearthing of past indiscretions to comment lustily on the issues of the day.
The fact that virtually anyone could in fact “legitimately” be cancelled leads into extreme partisan hypocrisy. While anyone who attended church as a lad might correctly suspect that the hard right is capable of similar behaviour, cancellers today are overwhelmingly concentrated on the “social justice” left – and they are, at least occasionally, reluctant to eat their own. This often results in remarkable and hilarious double standards. In February 2018, for example, liberal Virginia governor Ralph Northam – nicknamed “Coonman” – escaped any serious censure after he was revealed to have apparently appeared in a mid-1980s high-school yearbook photo wearing shoe-polish blackface.
To be fully fair to Northam, the same photo included a student dressed in full white robes as a Ku Klux Klansman, and CNN has noted that Northam has never actually said “whether he was wearing the Ku Klux Klan outfit or [the] blackface”. Oh, fair enough. At any rate, he serves as governor of Virginia today. Not to be outdone by any of his neighbors to the south, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was revealed that same year to have worn black- and brown-face several times, and as late as 2001, once apparently painting his entire body to appear in costume as Aladdin at an Arabian Nights revue! He, too, remains solidly entrenched in office today.
Wilfred Reilly, “They can’t cancel all of us”, Spiked, 2020-06-17.
September 18, 2020
QotD: Heinlein’s “Crazy Years”
Things like the girl who had to remove a decoration from her purse before boarding a plane because the decoration was in the shape of a revolver, though about finger sized and evidently cut in half lengthwise. The TSA thought the ban on guns applied to this too. (Of course, she’d flown with it before, so it was just this TSA station, but nonetheless its rulings were absolute.)
Things like the little deaf boy who can’t sign his name because one of the letters looks like a gun.
Things like kids getting in trouble because of a fictional story they wrote. Things like my younger son – it’s a theme, yes. The boy is lightning rod on his mother’s side. More on that later – getting sent to the school psychiatrist because he used the following sentence in an essay “Some people think I’m crazy.”
[…]
There’s half (half?) of our literature and movies, which glorify behaviors that in real life get you killed or make you a bum. There’s the fact that being thrifty, hard working and honoring your contracts makes you “uncool.” There the fact our women are taught to hate all men and men are finally learning to avoid women. There’s …
You say it in groups of Heinlein fans, and people go “Well, these ARE the crazy years.” And you move on.
Sarah Hoyt, “These Are The Crazy Years”, According to Hoyt, 2013-07-17.
September 17, 2020
QotD: Baden-Powell and the Scouting movement
In 1907, Baden-Powell took 20 boys to Brownsea Island on an experimental camp. Boys from different social backgrounds participated in camping, observation, woodcraft, chivalry, lifesaving and patriotism. This was the start of scouting. There was soon great interest and demand for scouting across the world. Today there are over 54 million scouts, operating in almost every nation on earth.
I know about this legacy not from my own experience – I was never much of a scout – but from my family. My father was a scout and scout leader. He played a part in widening the horizons of thousands of young people in Paisley and then Derby where he lived. He was proud of the legacy, and rightly so.
My own children have benefited greatly from being in the scouts. One of them, when aged 14, attended the 23rd World Scout Jamboree in Japan. He returned having made friends from many countries, rich and poor, black and white, and with an invaluable insight into the world and its cultures. Local scout leaders are community heroes, without whom the lives of many children would be poorer. At a time when children can feel their lives are overregulated, and parents that their offspring don’t get out enough, the scouts are especially important.
How many people have left a legacy of this magnitude and worth? The statue-toppling crusaders prefer to ignore Baden-Powell’s real legacy and focus on aspects of his life that were reactionary, yet commonplace at the time he was alive. On retirement in the 1930s, he warmed to some of Hitler’s visions, and in a 1939 diary entry he described Mein Kampf as “a wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation etc”. A certain admiration for Hitler was, in fact, shared quite widely among sections of Britain’s elite in the 1930s. Besides, none of this has any bearing at all on his scouting legacy today.
Jim Butcher, “Baden-Powell’s legacy should be celebrated, not toppled”, Spiked, 2020-06-14.
September 16, 2020
QotD: Firearms apocrypha
People like to repeat the myth that the tiny M-frame .22 “Ladysmith” was discontinued because a puritanical D.B. Wesson heard that it was popular with “ladies of the night”, because that’s sexier than the fact that it was selling poorly, expensive to make, and constantly broke when people ran the then-new .22 Long Rifle cartridges through the fragile little guns.
Similarly, there’s a legend involving Mr. Wesson that’s attached to the final iteration of the .38 Double Action […] In this case, the story goes, D.B. heard the tale of a police officer who, while arresting a miscreant, had the offender reach over and pop the latch on his top-break Smith, dumping the rounds on the ground, like Jet Li with the slide of a movie prop Beretta. The officer, goes the legend as it was told to yours truly, was killed in the ensuing struggle.
Moved by the fate of the dead officer, the apocryphal tale has Mr. Wesson designing the Perfected Model top-break. This model features a Hand-Ejector style cylinder latch that must be operated in conjunction with the more normal “T”-shaped barrel toggle in order to break the revolver open.
This origin myth is almost certainly, to use the technical term, a load of hooey.
Tamara Keel, “Sunday Smith #60: .38 Double Action Perfected Model”, The Arms Room, 2020-06-14.
September 15, 2020
QotD: Racism and the minimum wage
South Africans were not alone in their minimum wage conspiracy against blacks. After a bitter 1909 strike by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen in the U.S., an arbitration board decreed that blacks and whites were to be paid equal wages. Union members expressed their delight, saying, “If this course of action is followed by the company and the incentive for employing the Negro thus removed, the strike will not have been in vain.”
Our nation’s first minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, had racist motivation. During its legislative debate, its congressional supporters made such statements as, “That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.” During hearings, American Federation of Labor President William Green complained, “Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates.”
Walter E. Williams, “Minimum Wage and Discrimination”, Creators Syndicate, 2017-02-08.
September 14, 2020
QotD: Airportland
Most readers have spent time in Airportland. We know its particular wan light; the general flatness that makes the incline of jetways such a shock; its salty, sugary, and alcohol-infused cuisine; its detached social ambiance; its modes of travel (the long slog down the moving walkway, the hum of the people-moving carts, the standing-room-only shuttles, the escalators, the diddly-dup diddly-dup of roller bags, and — oh, yes — the airplanes); its fauna (emotional-support animals) and flora (plastic ficus); its mysterious system of governance; its language. Now and then, in Airportland, you spot a first-time visitor — confused by TSA rules, late for her flight, burdened by too many carry-ons. If you think the French are rude to those who don’t speak their language, you haven’t been paying attention in Airportland. We Airportlanders give these newbies no quarter. We sigh in exasperation as they’re sent back through security check for all the things they neglected to remove from their person. When they’re wandering Concourse E looking for their plane, because they thought they were in seat E68 (you know, like in a theater), when actually their flight leaves from B12 and their ticket class is E, we may take pity. But we hardly remember being that person, because once you’ve inhabited Airportland a handful of times, you’re a native.
And like native speakers, we don’t think much about the strange lingo we speak in Airportland. Take Gate. Some years ago, flying out of Peshawar, Pakistan, I passed through a dark set of catacombs inhabited by ruthless security guards and intelligence personnel with perhaps five checkpoints all lit by flickering overhead bulbs. Finally, like C.S. Lewis’s Lucy passing through the wardrobe into Narnia, I emerged into what I thought at first was a harshly lit bus station. It had the requisite faded plastic chairs and desultory counter offering stale packaged snacks and room-temperature soft drinks. Then I saw the sign over the doorway leading outside: GATE. I breathed a sigh of relief. Unlikely as it seemed, I had found my way to Airportland. But why Gate? Well, apparently there once was an actual gate, which stayed closed until the propellers of the plane were safely tied down and the passengers were free to pass through and board from the tarmac. (There were, of course, no “Jetways” — once a trademark, now generic — back in the day.)
Other terms of art abound in Airportland. Take concourse. It’s from the Latin, meaning “flowing together,” and outside Airportland it generally refers to an open area where passageways meet and people gather. In French, concours means “contest.” At the airport, the concourses are simply wide corridors, usually designated by letter, but if you like you can think of them as flowing, since they’re usually filled with a stream of humanity, and it often feels like a contest simply to reach the gate without incident.
Lucy Ferriss, “The Language of Airportland”, Lingua Franca, 2018-06-10.
September 13, 2020
QotD: Price controls versus reality
Non- (and poor) economists, seeing only that which is in front of their noses, observe the government-controlled prices and conclude that the results of these controls must be just what the government publicly proclaims it wishes these results to be. “Look! Rents are lower with rent controls! Wages are higher with minimum wages! We have helped the poor!”
Those who fall for such superficial appearances, of course, do not grasp the nature of market forces and the role of prices. But the naiveté of such people runs much deeper: they are the sort of people who believe that if the messenger is forced to lie, the underlying reality changes, with the lie thereby converted into truth. Such people, in other words, believe in miracles. They believe that state officials performing incantations can miraculously change economic reality.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2018-05-16.
September 12, 2020
QotD: A toast, of sorts
With a lance and a musket and a Roman spear
To all of the men who have stood with no fear
In the service of the King“The Card Cheat” by The Clash (written by Topper Headon, Mick Jones, Joe Strummer, and Paul Simonon)
September 11, 2020
QotD: “Karen” and other stereotypes
I love stereotypes. They help us understand what the Greeks called syndromes, carrying them beyond the narrow world of medical jargon. “Karen” began as the stereotype for the woman who “wants to see the manager,” but was soon extended through a gallery of related traits. One thinks affectionately through a shortlist of the Karens one has known. For the Christian, it can impact one’s prayer life. (I found myself once praying for a certain Karen Surname, then spontaneously extending it to “Karens everywhere,” with a memorial for the Beckies. I noticed as I searched my memory that many of these Karens were biologically male.)
And today I wonder, as I have often done, at the genius of colloquial language, and the unerring way with which it uncovers fresh stereotypes, that enhance our perception of reality, in a way like painting and the other fine arts. (In a lost portrait, Leonardo depicted a Karen of the Renaissance.)
David Warren, “Karens & their kind”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-06-10.
September 10, 2020
QotD: The power and wisdom of the voters
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956.
September 9, 2020
QotD: Drama critics
Brendan Behan, quoted in “Notes by Sage of Nonsense”, Globe and Mail 1961-03-18.
