The Fear Of The Other Will Always Be With You

Notable passage in @WSJ https://t.co/gsJ1JqNkhK pic.twitter.com/7LWEA7mdy3

— David Shepardson (@davidshepardson) March 29, 2023

something about this tweet, and this tweet:

Terrific talk with @JeffSharlet https://t.co/5k9QdpcH95

— JJ the Santa Barbarian #SlavaUkraini 🥑 (@cookiesinheaven) March 29, 2023

Being back to back in emptywheel's twitter feed is just so perfect (and I take it as coincidence on her part; nothing more).

I remember the '60's, a period later described as a "near civil war," as a time so racous and fractious it was said many societies break up over such unrest.  The war, civil rights, multiple public assasinations, violence (around those assassinations, around the unrest), etc.   Inflation took hold at the end of the '60's, and wasn't broken until Volcker clamped down hard on the economy in the '80's (one vestige of that is credit card interest rates.  Prior to Volcker raising interest rates to control inflation, states had usury laws that capped interest rates at what would be considered absurdly low rates today.  Interest on loans still fluctuates, but credit cards regularly charge 2.5 times the highest possible rates under usury laws which were long ago abandoned.  So it goes.).  The '70's was a time of widespread political violence, mostly an outgrowth of the tensions and violence of the '60's ("Network" wasn't written in a vacuum.  Chayefsky only lightly exagerrated what was going on at the time, though we remember that decade now as all disco and "Saturday Night Fever.").

And I remember, in the late '70's, drinking beers with people convinced the social order was collapsing and we'd all need guns to protect ourselves and we'd better be stocking up on supplies because social order was done for.  (The same idiotic "survivalist" food supplies I can now buy in Costco. I think they mean it as a much more reasonable protection against another Harvey event.  Sic transit gloria.) Again, all those apocalypse movies that turned into zombie apocalypse video games that turned into move franchises?  Nothing new under the sun.  The "end of the world at the hands of humans" genre dates back to the '50's and atomic bombs:  either nuclear war ending all things, or "atomic radiation" creating giants ants, giant people, giant somethings.  I watched a lot of movies on local TV from the '50's about the "end of the world,"  Read a lot of science fiction about it, too.  Eventually it gave way to "bioweapons" which merged with "zombies" from "Night of the Living Dead" and when people quit listening for air-raid sirens and buying cars with symbols on them for CONELRAD stations (for use in national emergencies) and noting where the air raid shelters were (or building them in their backyards), they just shifted their anxiety to societal collapse because if the nukes weren't gonna bring it, "crazy people" were.  Or "big governments," which were the same people who were gonna bring nuclear apocalypse, so it was a pretty easy transition.

It was rather legitimately based on "economic anxiety" because the American Dream of the post-war era began to fail by the '70s,  a failure Reagan accelerated in the  '80's as boom and bust became a regular pattern we all just adjusted to.  Salaries soared for certain groups/businesses, and then those high-fliers were homeless and a new group soared to heights Midas never dreamed of; and the cycle repeated, about once every 7 (or less) years.  The Texas economy smashed to bits over the S&L debacle.  Bankruptcy, once barely a niche practice, much less a boutique one, became the only game in Austin.  I still remember the shift in understanding over the "bankruptcy stay." A lawyer at a docket call announced a case was stayed because on party had filed bankruptcy.  Lawyers harrumphed that Texas judges wouldn't recognize such nonsense; but fairly quickly we all did, because it was in the Bankruptcy Code, and where nobody had encountered it before, it quickly became SOP.

And then there was a boom again, and everybody forgot about the bust; until the next bust came along.  And housing prices soared, and mortgage rates soared, too.  And it was going too fast and too hard and something had to give, so why wouldn't it be society itself, and social order, and the "American Way Of Life" nobody could afford anymore, but nobody could do without, either.  My parents had bought their first house before I was conceived.  I bought my first house before my daughter was conceived, but I was married for 15 years before she came along, and in the house less than a year.  My parents were in a house almost the moment after they married.

Economic anxiety was very real, even if it wasn't by 2016.

So I've heard the grumbling that upsets Jeff Sharlet so, all my adult life.  I suspect it was there in the '60's, and the '50's, and the '40's.  In fact, my reading in American literature convinces me it's been there, one way or another, since the Republic.  It was certainly a factor in the Revolution, which was always more about economics than politics or "democracy."  Frankly, looked at a certain way, the "American experiment" is always about to fly apart.

Looked at another way, it isn't.  Apocalyptic visions of social dysfunction and moral breakdown led the reporting on New Orleans during the drowning left by Katrina.  Stories poured out of horrors in the Superdome where people sheltered:  gangs and violence and rape and murder and looting and burning and pillaging and...  Precious little of it was true.  People huddled in the 'Dome took care of each other, helped each other, cared for each other.  Much as would happen when busses of people came to Houston and were sheltered here before being relocated to housing and, in many cases, new lives.  There was some property crime, some "bad actors" set loose in neighborhoods.  But social order didn't break down then any more than it did years later when Harvey flooded Houston and the "Cajun Navy" came from Louisiana to help.  People helped their neighbors; they didn't kill them and steal their stuff and the town didn't dissolve into anarchy.  Not even years earlier when everyone created a traffic jam from here to Dallas and the town stood empty, ripe for the plucking.  Those of us who stayed here didn't rampage through empty houses, stealing electronics and guns and food.

But, you know, some cranks (there are always cranks.  I've known hundreds of them in 60+ years) threatening violence (and talk is cheap; still) is a sign of the end times.  Again.

Sure it is.  This time, right? Not like all those other times.  This time it's different!

Sure it is.