Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
In a few hours it will be another new year, 2019. I can remember when 1984 seemed far in the future, both as a calendar date and George Orwell’s predicted dystopia, to which 9/11 and the digital revolution gave birth in the 21st century. Now I find myself 35 years past 1984 and a stranger in a strange land.
Over these holidays two occurrences brought the strangeness of the present time home to me.
One was the arrival of the memoir, From the Cast-Iron Shore (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) by my friend and onetime colleague, Francis Oakley, an historian of the medieval era and past president of Williams College. The other was the report that a Japanese man had married a hologram. https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/28/health/rise-of-digisexuals-intl/index.html
Little doubt that feminism has made women troublesome, but preference for a hologram indicates a shifting preference for the virtual over the real. Many in the younger generations have friends they have never met face to face. They join together in teams to play Internet games, or they open themselves to the world of strangers on Facebook. It seems that digital interaction with people thousands of miles away is replacing the human interaction of a sports team or a date consisting of male-female face-to-face interaction.
I have read reports that young women pay for their university educations, if education it is, by egaging in digital sex work. They display themselves naked and provocatively in various sexual positions assessible on the Internet while engaging in sexual conversation, and the young men find this form of sexual engagement preferable to face to face contact with a woman. The saying is: “It is cheaper than a date and without commitments.”
On beaches I observe attractive women clothed in little but two shoe strings, a sight that would have driven the young men in my day crazy with lust, totally ignored by guys fixated on their cell phones. I sometimes think that people will stop going to beaches as they will prefer the virtual experience to the real one.
Francis’ memoir reminds me that the world he and I knew is over and done with, and that the kind of education that we got, him more than me, is no longer attainable.
The memoir reminds me that the rise of a poor Irish boy, via a Jesuit education and an Oxford scholarship to the presidency of America’s most prestigeous college, and my own rise to Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, normally a post conveyed to members of the financial elite, is something that no longer takes place. The ladders of upward mobility have been taken down. The middle class itself is declining into poverty.
Francis tells of the Irish farms of his relatives. The homes had no running water, and some not even an outhouse. My own grandparents farm did have an outhouse, but no running water. Water was obtained by going outside to the wellhouse and lowering the bucket into the well, and when filled drawing the bucket back up. The only hot water available was obtained by heating it on a wood stove where meals were cooked. The kitchen wood stove was usually the only heat for the house.
Francis, who attended Oxford in the decade following World War II, reports that there was no running water in his rooms. A scout, defined as “a domestic worker at a college at Oxford University,” brought a porcelain basin and a jug of hot water to the rooms in the mornings.
When I was at Oxford, as a rare post-graduate at Merton College, in the second decade after World War II, I could only stay in rooms during summers (as rooms were reserved for undergraduates during terms) when I returned for collaborations with my former professor. If memory serves, there was running cold water, but full bathroom facilities were located outside the rooms. It wasn’t that much different from my undergraduate days at Georgia Tech where bathroom facilities were located at the end of each hall of rooms in the dorms.
If time and events permit, I intend to return to Francis’ memoir, which is full of information about how the past, despite the hardships, produced more successful and more honorable people than we have around us today.
Amen and Amen ,my world as I grew up in is gone .My Grandparents are gone ,my dad ,my brothers and sister are all gone to heaven. Only one left is my mom . My old high school friends have past on or moved far away .Even my home town is gone for the most part. It seems like my whole life has been one big fuck up failure and I certainly wasn’t prepared for all the heart break .Sometimes I just want to hang my head and cry. Maybe that’s why I always come back to the Burning Platform . There are like minded people here who understand.
Well , enough of feeling sorry for myself. I hope all of you have a happy and safe New year. God bless.
BB- You have to snap out of this malaise in which you are mired . You could meet a beautiful woman in 2019 and start the best phase of your life, really snap out of it bud. Things are always changing BB, we have to roll with it.
Looking forward to your posts in the coming year, Happy New Year!
Two Negroes don’t like the pic of a white baby. Ungawa! (Fuck off).
I think you speak for a lot of people, me included. Try to keep on keeping on. That’s about all anyone can do.
I took my 12 yo grandson to El Paso. Since we were on a short holiday visit, I couldn’t drive over to Carlsbad Caverns or Ruidoso. It was too cold to think about a ride on the aerial tramway to Ranger Peak on Mt Franklin. Juarez was out of the question, we did not have passports to get back. I took him by my old high school instead. I showed him the A letter on the mountain and explained that there used to be school letters for Jefferson and Bowie high schools also. We turned off Copia onto Altura and north on Byron.
This is the high school of my dreams and my nightmares, I said. I have had many dreams of missing homework, an unexpected test, of being lost in the halls unable to find my classroom, of it being the first day of school and I don’t know what classes I should go to. It’s also the prettiest school around and I imagined people from all over the country coming back to El Paso for the holidays would be driving up this street slowly as we are doing, visiting their old school.
See that side? I had English class in that room, the English classes were on the south end. The senior government and history classes were on the upper floor close to the office by the tower. Sophomores would approach unsuspecting freshmen to sell them a ticket to the tower, the access was through the library and I doubt the librarian was going to accept it.
There’s an urban legend that a distraught cheerleader flung herself from the tower in a depression over the breakup with a jock. I never heard of that.There’s the cafeteria on the lower level on the north side, it was also the site of the senior prom towards the end of the year and the much revered homecoming dance early in the year.
Look over there, across the former street, now a parking lot, that building is a new addition. Whoever designed it ought to be shot. It has no connection to the Spanish style of the school, the bricks don’t match and that curved facade makes it look like a theater. Maybe it is one.
We’re in luck today, ordinarily we would pay a fee like they charge when you go see the Dallas Cowboys stadium, nobody is there but they charge you a fee to tour the place. Nobody is charging us anything today. Let’s take a look at our football field. We climb up about 40 steps to the top of the bleachers. They would light up the A on the mountain during the home games, they had a special club of boys who would go up there and put kerosene in coffee cans inside the painted part of the mountain.
The cheerleaders would chant Hey Hey Look at the A and then the ‘On Wisconsin’ song to the words of ‘Come on you Panthers’. The football field looks new and lustrous, the grass is gone, replaced by shiny AstroTurf.
Looking into the quadrangle, it looks smaller than I assumed it would be, but then, the students here were only about 4,000 back then. At ground level of McKee Stadium, the entrances to the boys and girls showers are marked and I seem to recall there is a basketball court between them. This is the site of pep rallys and one in particular never leaves my memory because our incoming freshman class had been diverted from our expected El Paso Technical high school to Austin high. We chose to show our disappointment by sitting through the school song.
There are so many things to recall and so many to forget. I feel the same as many former El Pasoans do about the school and the city. It’s a nice place to visit…
http://digie.org/media/5548?page=3
The world known to you and I is freakin’ GONE Dr. Roberts.
Like a fart in the wind. Gone.
The world known to you and me
The old world, Western Civ, is indeed on the way out. It has been in permanent decline for at least a century. It will not be returning. No time for conservatism, there is noting left to conserve. Preservation perhaps.
After a rough bit, maybe a century or so, we (our progeny) will find a new way. It will be a busy time, full of opportunity and peril.
No sooner did Germany conquer Europe than the world went to shit. There was a time when things stabilized for a long period and change was kept at bay. That period is known as the Dark Ages.
Teddy Roosevelt quotes:
“A soft, easy life is not worth living, if it impairs the fibre of brain and heart and muscle. We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage… For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.”
“Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.”
“Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism. … We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”
On effort: “Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.”
On inaction: “To sit home, read one’s favorite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men’s doing.”
On courage: “A soft, easy life is not worth living, if it impairs the fibre of brain and heart and muscle. We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage… For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.”
On work: “I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.”
On daily life: “We must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and above all the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this Republic in the days of Washington, which made great the men who preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.”
On self-knowledge: “Unless a man is master of his soul, all other kinds of mastery amount to little.”
On diversity: “I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope — the door of opportunity — is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong.”
On being American: “Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as be seen as a people with such responsibilities.”
On corporations: “Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism. … We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”
On striving: “You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other.”
On success: “It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself.”
On conflict: “The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.
On virtue: “No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.”
“Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering”
“It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.”
https://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/islams-conquest-of-america/#comment-314689
Nostalgia for a way we never were. Certainly some things were better back in the day, but many things were seriously messed up and needed to be changed.
Blast from the past.
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Robert (QSLV)