Tonight the SyFy channel debuts a new series called “Ascension,” inspired by the JFK administration’s Project Orion. The premise is that in 1963 a group of men, women and children were launched into space as part of a secret government program. Now it’s 50 years later, and they’re suddenly questioning the truth behind their mission. Meanwhile, the changes that has taken place back on earth have completely eluded them.
It’s a fun idea to play with.
So let’s say you’d been gone since the Ivy heyday — in space, on a desert island, in a coma — and came crashing back to present reality:
[yop_poll id=”43″]
What, pray tell, is worse?
Henry, Curmudgeon, Reactionary Trad, here’s your cue.
Well, just to stick to the theme of this blog, how poorly most everyone dresses. Closely related would be how badly so many people behave. Our society has become crass and vulgar in the past several decades, and this is reflected in dress & behavior.
I dunno it was pretty vulgar when we attacked black people with dogs.
I’d like to echo Philly’s sentiment- “Segregration now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” was from Wallace in Jan of 1963. This wasn’t some teenager with a blog or (good heavens!) some lout wearing black pants in a less-than-formal context…this was the duly elected governor of a state, shouting to tumultous applause.
As one of your younger readers, I’m often put out by the “grumble grumble kids these days” nonsense espoused on this blog. Then again, reactionary nonsense by the dying older generation isn’t anything new…
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
-Aristophanes, caricaturing Socrates (432 BC!)
That’s really funny. Before I even got to the Aristophanes quote I was already thinking of a famous quote along those lines. I think it was from a Roman, though. Hilarious that it goes back even further.
Evidently one day you too will share the sentiment.
Playing devil’s advocate, though, as I always must, I’d note that there’s a noticeable rhetorical technique (used, it seems, by young white liberals) that whenever anything about the past is praised the entire past is then immediately swatted down and thrown out by the former status of blacks, as if this one issue immediately nullifies any praising of American society, and possibly world civilization, before the Civil Rights movement.
Speaking of complaining about the younger generation, arch-nostalgist RVP just tweeted this from Taki:
http://takimag.com/article/dazzling_and_dangerous_taki#.VI-G2mNVYRA.twitter
Thank you, Christian. That’s exactly what is done. Taking George Wallace as the exemplar of pre-Civil Rights America is akin to taking the Inquisition as the exemplar of Christianity, or Nazis of European civilization, or Idi Amin of black people, or Mao Tze-tung of Chinese people, or… you get the picture. The worst of the lot is not representative of the whole.
The ever-so-slightly nuanced position is that every age has its saints and sinners, and that no age is entirely evil, nor entirely good.
This oh-so subtle point seems lost on many moderns, who imagine themselves to be enlightened and therefore superior to all who came before. This means they are also superior to the contemporary troglodyte, defined as those who fail to be as “enlightened” as they, which works out to be white Christians, more or less.
When those troglodytes point out that the enlightened ones support such barbaric practices as infanticide, for example, the enlightened ones fly into an apoplectic rage, and sputter the most vulgar epithet their enlightened brains know: racist. No matter that eugenicists like Margaret Sanger saw legalized abortion as a way to control the population of “undesirables” such as blacks; anyone opposed to unlimited abortion on demand, up to and including the crushing of the skull of a full-term baby as it comes out the birth control, is a sub-human.
According to the enlightened ones, anyway.
Craig…I haven’t passed thirty yet, but as far as espousing nonsense I’m of the fogeyish opinion that we millenials are pretty unbeatable…
At least in 1963 no one was under the illusion that America’s race problem was long gone.
Christian, upon further rumination, it strikes me that your observation reveals something else about the Millennials: they have been indoctrinated but not educated. They have been brainwashed to denigrate the past by calling it “racist” as soon as anything good is said about it. Since there is no thoughtcrime more heinous, the past becomes something not worth knowing anything about. This vilification of the past also smears those who lived in it. The practical upshot is that all of pre-Cultural Revolution America is tainted, and, by extension, the Americans who lived then—our grandparents, our great-grandparents, and so on—are veritable Boris Badenovs and Natasha Fatales.
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
—George Orwell
I used to be so optimistic that, no matter what happens, my generation would never be as insufferable as the one (Gen X) that came before it. Clearly, that was taken as a challenge.
“as if this one issue immediately nullifies any praising of American society . . . .”
Just so. It’s pure casuistry which, taken to its logical conclusion, argues that we ought not say “please and thank you” because people said that before the 1964 Civil Rights Act; and, in fact, avoid all tendency toward manners for the same reason. And, who cares if over a quarter of students entering Ivy League schools require remedial lessons in grammar because, after all, back when high school graduates were schooled in grammar, there was Jim Crow. And, after all, who is to say that “To be or to not be” isn’t just as beautiful as the original version. And, then, there is the question of relativism when it comes to dress. I was Christmas shopping (or should I have said “Holiday shopping”) at a very respectable establishment here in lovely Pasadena when, looking upon the grown man in front of me, I wondered whether he intended to go shopping in his underwear. The point is this: The coincidence of the fact that the era in which everyone knew to put cloths on over his underwear before leaving the house was also the era preexisting laudable advances in civil rights, doesn’t make it okay to go out in public in your grubby, disgusting, sagging underwear.
I’ll return to answer. I have neither the time nor inclination to get lost in a “which generation/era was better” pissing contest (pardon the strong language). I like this website and mostly enjoy the articles- but there is a strong tendency to condemn all things new. I sought only to balance that viewpoint by pointing out the Golden Age of Ivy Clothing was also a far more openly racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, and cloistered world than today. I admire the clothes, but I don’t think it’s wise to let that admiration color an entire understanding of the complicated and nuanced perspective that history demands.
Are there many problems that continue to this day? Of course. But the way I see it, we as a nation have made a lot of progress- not that there isn’t still long to go. It’s one thing to bemoan the “casual takeover” or find it distasteful how jeans and t-shirts have become ubiquitous. I right with you all on those points. It’s another thing to project how I feel about eugenics, Henry. And, really? I brought up a point you didn’t like, so I am an indoctrinated Orweillian villain? Puh-lease.
I don’t think I’m going to convince anyone of anything here, so I’m not going to waste my time arguing. You guys can take comfort in the fact that long after you’re all gone, I’m sure it’ll be me shaking my cane, complaining about how when I was a young man, my generation always finished our peas and washed up after supper.
Craig, you’re missing the point. All generations have their faults. However, your “balancing” the viewpoint by saying that the Golden Age was “far more openly racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, and cloistered” than we are is not only the kind of statement that makes people hate their own past, it’s also so broad as to be risibly false.
For example, yes, some people used racial epithets, and their use was perhaps more pervasive than today. Now, instead of whites using “the N-word,” we have blacks openly using “whitey” and “cracker” and the like. Progress! Once upon a time, homosexuals might have gotten beaten up if they approached the wrong man; now, people can lose their livelihoods for reserving the right to refuse service if the one refused service is homosexual (and that’s the reason for refusal). Progress! So we’ve replaced anti-black epithets in the public sphere with anti-white epithets. We’ve replaced anti-homosexual action with anti-Christian action. Do you think there’s a chance that future generations will look down on us the way that some of us look down on our ancestors?
I was not assigning any view on eugenics to you; I was making a statement. However, I stand by my assessment, which Christian also observed: praise of the past is followed, in a Pavlovian manner, by denigration of the past, specifically, the cry of “racist,” and that this is little more than indoctrination. “Racist,” as I observed, is the vilest epithet that the modern mind (such as it is) can hurl. While you did not use “the R-word,” your meaning is clear.
Now, perhaps you do have a “complicated and nuanced perspective” on history, but that’s not clear from your original comment (nor even from your second). In any case, I was responding more to Philly’s puerile comment than yours. And I love your Aristophanes quote!
The world is essentially the same. Oppression is part of the of the human experience. They way it is manifested and who is oppressed may change, but that’s about it. It is hard to accept. I know.
OK, Ox, I see where you’re coming from. Yes there will always being evil in the world. However, when it comes to black/white, Civil Rights and slavery before that, you need to pick your words more carefully.
When it comes to “oppression,” the world is much, much better than in the past.
I’m afraid this is an example of Thinking While Being White. I’m white, too, so I also do it, but I try to be mindful of it.
The fact is that our country enacted a very specific and very cruel form of oppression for centuries, so a line like “the way it is manifested and who is oppressed my change,” is a pretty odious remark when it comes to centuries of institutionalized slavery of one particular group of people.
Thank god we eventually improved as human beings, rather than remaining “essentially the same.”
Actually, as someone who reads this blog, I have a tendency to romanticize the past as well, and I often find myself complaining that everyone today is sloppy and rude and in it for themselves, and that’s why I find it useful to remind myself that I need to compare our present to the real past, and not my magical version of it.
These weren’t some minor flaws on some otherwise perfect society. It wasn’t an issue of some people using racial slurs and some people not—at the same time that everyone was wearing those natty jackets I love, there was a systemic American apartheid that actively and constantly oppressed an entire class of people, and anyone who wasn’t actively fighting against it was complicit in it.
That’s why people quickly bring up America’s racial history anytime people get a little too gooey when people try to romanticize the past. It was really bad! We really did set dogs on people! But there are plenty of other ways in which society has changed for the better—for women, for gay people, for non-WASPs in general. There are plenty of people who are very happy to be living in the present instead of the past.
None of this is to say that today’s society is perfect, far from it. I absolutely agree with the above poster who mentioned that one of the most noxious habits of modern America is pretending that racism has been solved. The difference is that, when you hold up the past as some ideal that we have fallen from, you create a paradigm where we have already created the ideal society, and all we need to do is work back to it by shedding anything new. This is doomed to failure, because that ideal never existed.
If you accept that the past, for all its virtues, was horribly flawed, you can still accept that modern society is flawed as well. But instead of trying to shed all of the progress we’ve made in an attempt to restore some mythic idyll, we can keep improving our society in novel ways, while hopefully retaining the best bits the old.
This isn’t particularly radical; it’s Burkean. It’s the reason we wear OCBDs and not togas.
I think you need to compare each aspect of society seperately. You can look at manners and dress, and then you can look at social issues such as equality and discrimination.
Big picture, it’s all wrapped-up together. Men stopped wearing hats in the ’60s, manners and dress became less formal, precisely at the time of the Civil Rights movement, and later (as society got even more casual), the women’s movement and Black Power etc. of the ’70s.
Now take a spcific topic, in this case a favorite of mine: social dancing.
Young men and women still gather socially to listen to music and dance together, just as they did in Fitzgerald’s time. But I think it’s possible to pass value judgments on the rise and fall of social dancing in America.
Before men and women seperated in 1960/61 with the craze for the Twist, they danced together. Certain skills and familiarity were reequired, but this also gave the less naturally talented a structure to work from. The man and woman had to cooperate in order for it to work.
But there are arch feminists who feel women shouldn’t follow male leaders on the dance floor (and perhaps anything else).
The lindy hop, or swing dancing, is America’s national dance. The waltz, polka, tango, mambo, etc. all came from somewhere else. And jazz is our national music. During the swing era from 1935 until the end of the war, we had an optimistic, athletic and truly American dance form (created by African-Americans, it’s worth noting) while producing popular music of the highest quality we’ve ever produced.
The twist seperated men and women, and save for the brief disco phase, which however garish, produced some great music (Barry Gibb was a serious songwriter; I’ve seen the sheet music), young men and women still gather socially to dance.
But they do so seperately, with no set steps except things like simulations of intercourse, and they dance while holding drinks in their hands, and the music has an aggressive tone with often vulgar if not profane lyrics.
It’s possible to argue it’s all relative. It’s possible to argue it’s progress. And it’s possible to argue it’s decline.
But I think you have to make a pretty sweeping generalization to say that partner dancing was popular at the same point in time as institutionalized discrimination, and therefore cannot be endorsed. But the dance floor dry-humping of today, because it’s in our age of enlightenment, is perfectly fine because it is done at a point in time that professes equality.
Great comment, Philly! I think it’s easy for people living in 2014 to forget that society in general was pretty hard on *anyone* who wasn’t a straight male WASP in 1963, and it wasn’t just about the terrible stuff going on in the south. And the farther back in history you go, the worse things were for higher and higher percentages of the human population.
Some pros: I think the world was a bit quieter then, and there were a lot fewer people, so there was more open space. And of course, the clothes…
Christian, I was not commenting on America and maybe oppression is the wrong word.
It took me a long time to accept and I am not saying that it sits well, because it doesn’t, but what I am saying can be applied to any civilization ever. People in power will do whatever it takes to maintain power and their will be groups of people that suffer because of this.
Even when things looks different they are still very much the same.
Yes, but my point is just looking out for you to choose your words carefully. It’s one thing to say to make a general though facile observation that there will always be groups with “power.” But the people of Africa were enslaved for 400 years, and the Third Reich attempted to exterminate the Jewish race.
Very true that no time is perfect, and we need both tradition and change. It is a mistake to revere the past too much, but the tendency to discard the old for the new, always assuming the new to be better, is perhaps a worse error. It is fitting on this website in particular to recall Chesterton’s statement, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.” I prefer the music of the swing era to that of today (even though it was before my time), and I think that the perfect era for clothing, men’s and women’s alike, was roughly 1958 to 1963 or so, long before I first ventured into Brooks. My current reading matter includes Dorothy L. Sayers, P.G. Wodehouse and Rex Stout, most of whose writing was first published well before I was born. However, I am glad not to be heating with coal and keeping food in an actual ice box, let alone fighting Hitler, or dreading the USSR’s rockets. Moving forward a few years, I like contemporary technological comforts like air conditioning and the internet, but would prefer not to have nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea and ISIS on a rampage in the Mideast. Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner and a hypocrite, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and designed Monticello. LBJ was a manipulative and vulgar racist who regularly used the “N-word” but did more for civil rights than JFK. Do we throw away the good because of the bad? Mankind is never going to be perfected, and we will always have some bad with the good. A simple and honest look in the mirror should confirm that for most of us.
The decline of America, in my opinion, began in 1957 when the Dodgers announced they would move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. It has declined exponentially ever since!
Thanks for clarifying Christian. I appreciate it. By no means am I trying to down play the brutality of slavery or any other atrocities against mankind. If anything I am saying that we have not made the type of progress that we like to think has been made.
I also wanted to draw attention to the fact that this is not an American problem. It is a human problem.
“But I think you have to make a pretty sweeping generalization to say that partner dancing was popular at the same point in time as institutionalized discrimination, and therefore cannot be endorsed. But the dance floor dry-humping of today, because it’s in our age of enlightenment, is perfectly fine because it is done at a point in time that professes equality.”
I think this is very well put, and, again, I’m really inclined to agree with you here. But I think that’s why it’s important to articulate exactly what you’re talking about, and where a broad pronouncement like “things were better back then” is dangerous, especially when it ascribes this to people back then being somehow more fundamentally decent than they are now.
To bring things so off track that they’re back on track, I think it’s interesting how this relates to clothes: the era that this blog celebrates was just period in a long decline in formality. In the ivy heyday, everyone was wearing what someone from the Edwardian era would think of as actual sportswear, which I try and remember every time I rankle at seeing someone wearing leggings and a North Face. The early sixties weren’t the last gasp of upholding the old traditions, they were just one more phase of chipping away at them. If not for that kind of change, the era we celebrate would never have existed.
And this isn’t to suggest I think fashion is just a downward line. Say what you will about hipsters, but they’ve really brought back a kind of attention to style and craftsmanship that had disappeared in the last couple decades. It think the nineties were really probably the nadir of formality: looking around the streets today, you will probably see a lot more people walking around in jackets and ties than you would have in 1996, and even people who don’t go that far are at least doing better than white sneakers and dad jeans.
Charlottesville – Great comment.
“I dunno it was pretty vulgar when we attacked black people with dogs.”
Who is we? Oh you mean Democrats
Charlottesville well said.
In the late 50s in Greenville, Miss. I never heard the N-word. I’m not saying things were perfect, but people were polite to each other regardless of race. Yes politics were repressive, but Jim Crow has ended and everyone is in tall cotton. All it took was government.
A thought about texting, it’s the new autism.
Idiots. I was born in 1957 and I promise you that everything has got a whole lot better since I was six.
Even natural shoulders?
Philly opines:
“These weren’t some minor flaws on some otherwise perfect society. It wasn’t an issue of some people using racial slurs and some people not—at the same time that everyone was wearing those natty jackets I love, there was a systemic American apartheid that actively and constantly oppressed an entire class of people, and anyone who wasn’t actively fighting against it was complicit in it.”
It is precisely this sort of overgeneralization that lands you in hot water. Jim Crow—the legal imposition of second-class citizen status on blacks—was wrong, but it was in the South and only the South. To claim that people in Hawaii, Minnesota, and Nevada, for example, were “actively complicit” is not just hyperbole; it is an unwarranted smear.
“The difference is that, when you hold up the past as some ideal that we have fallen from, you create a paradigm where we have already created the ideal society, and all we need to do is work back to it by shedding anything new.”
No. This is a straw man. No one, and I mean no one, who speaks approvingly of the past also talks about the resurrection of everything from that time. Just look at the comments in this thread!
What we are saying is that there are good things we have lost, as well as bad things we have acquired. We would like to see a return of the good and the expunging of the bad, while keeping the good things that have come along. Sticking to clothes, we lament the loss of the jacket-and-tie look as everyday wear, and yearn to see people dressed nicely again. On the negative side, we decry the wearing of pajamas in public, and would love to see people regain enough of a sense of decorum that they would not dress so immodestly (which does not necessarily entail wearing a jacket & tie). None of this means we want iceboxes, polio, or Jim Crow laws brought back.
Many thanks, MAC and OCBD (I very much enjoy your website as well, by the way). I should probably qualify one aspect of my comment. I said that the apogee of men’s and women’s clothing was, in my opinion, roughly ’58 to ’63. I should note that I speak only as an appreciative observer of the women’s clothing of the era, and that my appreciation stems mainly from films, photos, etc. Had I been forced to wear a girdle, hose and gloves on a hot summer day, I might have a very different view of the heyday. I doubt there are comparable women’s sites singing the praises of latex undergarments and nylons. Sure did look nice, though.
Maybe not, but there are certainly men’s sites that sing the praises of latex undergarments and nylons…
Charlottesville
Girdles are the reason we had to marry them first to get to third base and round for home. I agree on women’s clothing of the time, class act.
Christian — “there are certainly men’s sites …” Indeed. Not that I would know, of course. I can recall my mother gardening in a skirt and hose when I was a tot, which today seems beyond strange. I think my wife is quite thankful for the change in fashion’s expectations for the fair sex.
Yet, if you can believe it, there are women (and their websites) extolling the virtues of—corsets! No, not the Victoria’s Secret sort of thing, but actual, functional corsets. Their fans claim that in addition to helping with posture, they restrict how much can be eaten (thus aiding either weight loss or weight maintenance), and relieve back pain.
I’m guessing that modern corsets use something other than whalebone for support.
OCBD, I agree that oppression is the wrong word, because it stinks of Marxism. However, your restatement about those in power seeking to remain in power is spot on, and yes, we, as humans, are far less advanced than we would like to imagine we are.
Charlottesville, you comment—and especially your Chesterton quote—are right on the money. Not only will we never be perfected, but we are inherently flawed and incapable of perfection.
MAC, thank you for pointing out what people often like to forget: the Democrats were the party of segregation. That is, until LBJ concocted the “Great” Society plan, of which he said this: “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”
Redcoat, name-calling reflects poorly on the one who calls names, and does nothing to advance an argument. In fact, it’s #1 on this list of intellectually dishonest debate tactics.
Speaking of which, I watched “Star Trek” last night and thought that Vulcan “spock-on” when it came to this observation:
https://twitter.com/IvyStylecom/status/545033482960109568
“I dunno it was pretty vulgar when we attacked black people with dogs”.
Today the whole society is vulgar,middle class almost no longer exists,but in return black peoples are fired by police.
Is a great stride,isn’t?
1963 forever.
“When it comes to “oppression,” the world is much, much better than in the past”.
Chris,really?
Not exist only the United States.
Middle east is better now or in 1963?
Pakistan,Siria,Sudan,Eritrea are better?
Egypt is more free,Africa is less hungry and sick that in 63?
And in our advanced first world Italy is more rich and happy?
France have less racial problems,UK middle class is more affluent?
Russia is less aggressive?
More,live better the average Joe the plumber of 1963 or his grandson in 2014?
Financial elites are less greedy,banks are more honest in 2014?
The heaven is only in the sky,the perfect golden age is only a myth..but that 2014 is better than 1963 is not true.
To discuss the entire world is a very complicated issue (very interesting to see you mention Eritrea, as there’s a community of them in my hometown in California; I tutored several of them in English when I was a student and still remember a few phrases in their language; also, the older ones spoke Italian).
Also, please note that in the poll I created an option to vote that half of the world is better and half is worse.
In regards to the United States, I will simply point out that we currently have a black president serving his second term.
Here’s one point of view:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmmiJ1q-arA#t=27
Chris,i understand,
But also regard United States discrimination and segregation concerned the States in south.
In US in early 60s,the total of black peoples were 10% of total population.
Many of this 10% of afro-American citzen lived out of those segregationist States.
http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/united-states-history-volume-2/section_13/08918166994116ab52579e96168eb0ef.jpg
The problem wad huge,i don’t understime the great injustice of this situation,but was ONLY A PART of early 60s US scenario.
And why not remember that was in late 50s and early 60s that the situation began to change?
Today exist many injustices;for exemple In November 2012 the U.S. Census Bureau said more than 16% of the population lived in poverty, including almost 20% of American children.
Is the 1963 the hell and 2014 the heaven?
I don’t think an believe that mainly 1963 was better than 2014.
Thank you, Carmelo, for having a better understanding of America than most Americans. I always enjoy your interesting and informative comments here, and look forward to more.
The problem is the one that has been pointed out above: too many Americans have been indoctrinated with anti-American propaganda, such as that contained Howard Zinn’s execrable “A People’s History of the United States,” an intellectually fraudulent work in which the unapologetic Stalinist Zinn portrays America as little more than a hell hole of oppression and racist hate. Zinn murdered America in the minds of tens of thousands of young people, an act of evil whose malignant effects continue. While it may be largely unknown among younger people now, it influenced many, both directly and indirectly.
For the record, even Zinn’s fellow travelers found his book embarrassing for its simple-mindedness and outright lies.
“The problem is the one that has been pointed out above: too many Americans have been indoctrinated with anti-American propaganda”.
Indeed.
Same in Italy.
In late 60s/70s various leftist intellectuals,many linked with the communist party demolisher the history of the Italian union,
Our indipendence war was see as a Piedmont conquest of Italy for the interest of few capitalists.
The police operations of Italian army aganist fierce gangs of bandits looters in south Italy (i’m a southern and know what i speak) was see as ruthless extermination.
Result?
Now we are a more divided country.
Regarding wearing uncomfortable clothes given current climate – wearing ties and coat in Tokyo during the start of typhoon season is not the most comfortable. But I considered it important that I did. It’s all relative.
Interesting how the political polarity our two parties promote on cable news seems to infiltrate this discussion. I wonder how our comments would read if we still watched only an hour of local news and read a newspaper?
I only like the good things from the past. I don’t like the bad things.
Henry:
“No matter that eugenicists like Margaret Sanger saw legalized abortion as a way to control the population of “undesirables” such as blacks; anyone opposed to unlimited abortion on demand, up to and including the crushing of the skull of a full-term baby as it comes out the birth control, is a sub-human.”
So you buy into the ahistorical revisionism of the neo-natalists while cursing the younger generation for using “racist” as an epithet?
When Sanger worked and wrote, mere discussion of birth control was illegal. Nevermind the “A-word”, simply discussing how not to become pregnant with a doctor was a criminal act. Any slip-up between husband and wife was a breech birth or uncontrolled bleed or postnatal infection away from death and family disaster. But that was just for the girls, amirite?