Everybody hurts:

“The Frankfurt School of philosophers emigrated from Nazi Germany and became dyspeptic critics of American culture. Several landed in Southern California where they were disturbed by the consumer culture and the gospel of relentless cheeriness. Depressive by nature, they focused on the disappointments and venality that surrounded them and how unnecessary it all was. It could be paradise, Theodor Adorno complained, but it was only California.”

– Adam Cohen in The New York Times in February of 2010, a newspaper that drunk deep from the Frankfurt School’s Jurassic-era political correctness.

Flash-forward nearly three-quarters of a century and the punitive worldview of “progressivism” stands still:

For almost 20 years I’ve lived in Iowa, where as a professor at the University of Iowa I’ve taught thousands of university students. I’ve written a couple of books on rural Iowa, traveling to all 99 counties, and have spent much of my time when not teaching, visiting with and interviewing Iowans from across the state. I haven’t taken up hunting or fishing, the main hobbies of rural Iowans, but I’m a fan of University of Iowa Hawkeye football, so I’m a good third of the way to becoming an adopted Iowan. I even have a dog, born and bred in Iowa (more on that later).

– “Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life” in the Atlantic this month by Stephen G. Bloom, whom the magazine describes as “Professor and Bessie Dutton Murray Professional Scholar at the University of Iowa. This year, he is the Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan.”

James Lileks proffers a handy annotated version of Bloom’s Frankfurt School-style cri de coeur from the heartland — best read over the veal scaloppine marsala in the Olive Garden.

Related: While Bloom is sending out an S.O.S. from Iowa to his fellow “liberal” elites in the Northeast Corridor, the Washington Post is busy having similar palpitations over another Midwestern state with locals far more conservative than their “progressive” betters can stand. After all, their self-professed diversity and tolerance for a multicultural society have their limits, you know. “WaPo’s Gowen Hits Hard at Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s First Year in Charge,” Tom Blumer writes at Newsbusters.

Still though, look at the flip-side:  linking to the same hyperventiling Post article, Jim Geraghty paraphrases, “The Tea Party Is Now ‘Completely in Charge’ of Kansas!” Running a whole state? not bad for less than three years work. Take that, OWS!

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As Mollie Hemingway writes at Ricochet, “I love it. My does regulation lead to unintended consequences.” And you can just feel the gnashing of teeth in the San Fransisco Weekly* contributor in response:

Come Dec. 1, you can still buy the Happy Meal. But it doesn’t come with a toy. For that, you’ll have to pay an extra 10 cents.

Huh. That hardly seems to have solved the problem (though adults and children purchasing unhealthy food can at least take solace that the 10 cents is going to Ronald McDonald House charities). But it actually gets worse from here. Thanks to Supervisor Eric Mar’s much-ballyhooed new law, parents browbeaten into supplementing their preteens’ Happy Meal toy collections are now mandated to buy the Happy Meals.

Today and tomorrow mark the last days that put-upon parents can satiate their youngsters by simply throwing down $2.18 for a Happy Meal toy. But, thanks to the new law taking effect on Dec. 1, this is no longer permitted. Now, in order to have the privilege of making a 10-cent charitable donation in exchange for the toy, you must buy the Happy Meal. Hilariously, it appears Mar et al., in their desire to keep McDonald’s from selling grease and fat to kids with the lure of a toy have now actually incentivized the purchase of that grease and fat — when, beforehand, a put-upon parent could get out cheaper and healthier with just the damn toy.

Of course comparatively speaking, there aren’t all that many kids left in San Francisco clamoring for the toys. But one issue at a time.

* A paper — and city — where the Butterfield Effect reigns supreme.

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We interrupt our usual blogging for a look back at how we spent our Thanksgiving vacation. There are a bunch of photos here of Your Humble Narrator meeting some of his Imaginary Internet Friends in person on the following page. They’re somewhat big files, so I’m putting in a page break to keep them off the homepage to minimize bandwidth if you’re not on a peppy broadband connection.

Packing for a two week trip in two very disparate climates is quite a challenge. Fortunately, my wife approaches these things in much the same detail that Eisenhower planned continental invasions and Von Braun approached lunar landings. Multiple Excel spreadsheets and pre-flight checklists are involved. (You think I’m kidding.)

And they’re needed, too, since we were about to head off to first a week on the National Review Caribbean Cruise, and then a week in South Jersey to visit my mom – and then a weekend excursion to New York before finally returning to California.

We flew out of San Jose Airport, where some bright spark has gotten the idea of placing a player piano in the parent/child waiting area just before the TSA line. Picture in your mind music by Hieronymus Bosch, and you begin the harmonic possibilities of nervous, fidgety five year olds banging on a player piano. It’s just what you need to hear while you’re worried about the TSA-induced small horrors to follow. You can feel the contempt of the TSA agents as you make your way through the line. They hate us – they really hate us!

Our flight from San Jose to Dallas was relatively uneventful, but the next leg, from D-FW to Miami was interesting. The stewardess had an unusually anal retentive briefing, perhaps because of how little Miami-bound tourists pay attention when it comes to opening the emergency exit in the unlikely event of a water landing. She started the briefing by referring to the Boeing 737 we were encased in as the “Lamborghini of the skies” – considering the aircraft’s high horsepower, low gas mileage and cramped leg space, I guess I can see that.

Nina has written her cruise notes, and James Lileks has plenty of notes on the NR Cruise, so I won’t rehash the trip at sea, except to provide some photos, which start on the next page.

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Like most people, I’ve never been much of a fan of Tina Brown, and have long reflexively shunned the copy of Newsweek I see in the supermarket checkout line, but after reading this post at Forbes by Jeff Bercovici, I’m suddenly more than little sympathetic:

What a few days it’s been for Tina Brown. First she got a journalistic colonoscopy courtesy of WWD, which burrowed deep into the dysfunction at the merged Newsweek/Daily Beast. Now Brown has been named one of the 25 least influential people alive by GQ magazine, which grouped her in with the likes of Marcus Bachmann, Hosni Mubarak, Hank Williams Jr. and Leo Apotheker. (And, okay, President Obama.) Not exactly the kind of press you want when you’re a professional shaper of opinion.

The article’s not online yet, but here’s what GQ had to say about her:

Brown spent 2011 transforming Newsweek from a magazine no one reads into a magazine no one reads but everyone despises. That’s what happens when you star-f**k the corpse of Princess Diana by Photoshopping her at age 50 for your cover, then do a separate Photoshop of her holding an iPhone, and then create a fake Facebook page for her that includes wall posts from Deepak Chopra. Did you know Tina and Di were friends? They were! This Photoshopped image of them having lunch with Stevie Nicks is proof!

Bercovici’s post is titled, “GQ Names Tina Brown One of the ‘Least Influential People Alive.’” And when it comes to being non-influential, that’s a topic the sclerotic men’s fashion magazine has long been expert at.

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A study in extremes: first up, the Consumerist Website has a scan of a Thanksgiving-themed Camel Cigarette ad from the depths of FDR’s Depression (click to enlarge). As Meg Marco writes in the scan’s caption:

This advertisement for Camel cigarettes appeared in the November 23, 1936 edition of LIFE magazine. It earnestly demands that you smoke a Camel after each course of Thanksgiving dinner — “for digestion’s sake.”

Some of our favorite quotes from the ad include, “smoke a camel right after the soup,” “By all means enjoy a second helping, but before you do — smoke another Camel,” and “My own personal experience is that smoking Camels with my meals and afterwards builds up a sense of digestive well-being.”

These days, New York’s famously politically correct Mayor Bloomberg has his own extreme approach to digestive well-being:

When a small church comes to the Bowery Mission bearing fried chicken with trans fat, unwittingly breaking the law, they’re told “thank you.” Then workers quietly chuck the food, mission director Tom Bastile said.

“It’s always hard for us to do,” Basile said. “We know we have to do it.” . . .

Lines at soup kitchens are up by 21 percent this year, according to a NYC Coalition Against Hunger report released yesterday. The city’s law banishing trans fat took effect in July 2008 and touched everyone with Health Department food licenses — including emergency food providers.

Frankly, I’m not sure which is loonier concept — and given the speed at which the centuries old practice of smoking was demonized in the last decades of the 20th century, I shudder to think of the even more rococo rituals and obsessions that will likely surround Thanksgiving in another sixty years.

(Originally published November 26, 2010.)

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In the London Telegraph, Theodore Dalrymple asks, “Why has Britain turned into a giant rubbish bin?”

An Englishman’s street is now his dining room, and his country is his litter-bin. When Englishmen – or a sizeable number to judge by the results – arrive at a beauty-spot their first impulse is to chuck at it a vividly coloured empty bottle or tin of revolting drink with which they have recently refreshed themselves.

Drive down the A14 from the M6 to Huntingdon or Cambridge and every verge, every roundabout, is littered by the thousand, or the million. Such filth is not the handiwork of a handful. Until I drove down and saw it flapping in the trees, I hadn’t appreciated how much polythene there was in the world. Where does it come from? Who knows? Even more to the point, who cares? Certainly not the local authorities, that have so many other bigger worries – like how to pay the pensions of staff who took early retirement.

Dreadfully incompetent and dishonest as public authorities are, our pavements are not mottled by discarded chewing gum because of them; and it is not only because of them that our streets are the filthiest in Europe, if not the world.

Not long ago I had the humiliation of being answered with an aggressive and flat refusal. Perfectly politely, I asked a woman, who threw her cigarette end down at my feet as we entered Euston Station, to pick it up. If in retaliation I had criticised her slovenliness, I should no doubt have been arrested for insulting behaviour. In the absence of any sense of civic duty, we have no defence against litterers.

Britain was not always so filthy. I suspect that it is the result of a toxic mixture of excessive individualism (there is no such thing as society), and of an easily inflamed awareness of inalienable rights (who are you to tell me what to do? I know my rights). What I do is right because it is I who do it; the customer is always right, and life is my supermarket.

The virtual world has become more real and all-encompassing to us than what used to be called the real world. Those who toss rubbish from cars are in a bubble, and in a trance; separated physically from the world, bathed in music, usually trance-inducing, they glide past everything around them like ghosts in haunted houses.

Overall, I don’t think America has a similar level of garbage; 35 years before Ward Churchill became a household name, by and large, Americans heeded the silent tears of proto-phony Indian Espera Oscar de Corti, better known as “Iron Eyes Cody.” But it certainly has a graffiti problem. Unlike litter, which “liberal” elites have always publicly frowned upon, many “progressives” see graffiti not as the vandalism it is, but as some sort of “free expression” by overzealous youth and/or an oppressed underclass.  (Doubly ironic when otherwise they’d be complaining about spray cans of paint damaging the ozone layer.)  You can see how bad graffiti has gotten when you drive by virtually any railroad yard or watch a freight train pass by — seemingly every railroad car has been vandalized with gallons of spray paint.

In his newest “Best of the Web” column (also the source of our headline above), James Taranto describes the problem getting worse, because, not coincidentally, the left is happy to give vandalism a free pass:

Heather Mac Donald will love this one: The New York Times reports on a disturbing new trend of vandalism against trees. In San Francisco, “every tree” on one block “has been spray-painted in shades of purple, red, white and black.” The reason? “Graffiti, taggers believe, is not easily covered or removed from trees without harming them.”

But here’s the part that tells you everything about the Times’s worldview:

The vandalism has angered residents, and possibly threatened the health of some trees, which are remarkably rare in San Francisco because very few tree species are indigenous. The tagging also appears to violate one of the tenets of the graffiti subculture: it is supposed to be a reaction to urban life, not an attack on nature.

We would describe the people who create graffiti as vandals damaging the property of others. The Times sees them as a “subculture” that has “tenets,” one of which is that you do not vandalize trees. Even more hilarious, it informs us of these alleged tenets in an article that proves they do not exist.

And this isn’t the first time that Gray Lady has given such vandalism a pass. As Mark Steyn writes in After America, “sometimes there’s so much writing you can barely see the wall:”

On my last brief visit, Athens was a visibly decrepit dump: a town with a handful of splendid ancient ruins surrounded by a multitude of hideous graffiti covered contemporary ruins. Sit at an elegant café in Florence, Barcelona, Lisbon, Brussels, almost any Continental city. If you’re an American tourist, what do you notice? Beautiful buildings, designer stores, modern bus and streetcar shelters…and all covered in graffiti from top to toe. The grander the city, the more profuse the desecration. Go to Rome, the imperial capital, the heart of Christendom: the entire city is daubed like a giant New York subway car from the Seventies. Look at your souvenir snaps: here’s me and the missus standing by the graffiti at the Trevi Fountain; there we are admiring the graffiti at the Coliseum.

A New York Times feature on Berlin graffiti reported it as an art event, a story about “an integral component of Berliner Strassenkultur.” But it’s actually a tale of civic death, of public space claimed in perpetuity by the vandals (like graffiti, another word Italy gave the world, as it were). At the sidewalk cafés, Europeans no longer notice it. But it is in a small, aesthetically painful way a surrender to barbarism—and one made even more pathetic by the cultural commentators desperate to pass it off as “art.” And it sends a signal to predators of less artistic bent: if you’re unwilling to defend the civic space from these coarse provocations, what others will you give in to?

For the Times, I’d say the answer to that is endless. And if you can’t see the wall for all the handwriting upon it, you can thank the newspaper and its staff for the aesthetic “privilege” they’ve bequeathed to you.

(Thumbnail on PJM homepage by Shutterstock.com.)

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I don’t have the quote in front of me, so I need to paraphrase, but in a behind the scenes book on the James Bond franchise, the author describes a meeting between the Bond producers and a screenwriter in the early stages of prepping the film version of Diamonds are Forever. If I recall correctly, it was Harry Saltzman who said to the writer, “So, what is this movie about?” The writer earnestly replied, “It’s about James Bond saving the entire world from Blofeld’s evil clutches.”

Saltzman pounded the table and shouted indignantly, “Goddamn it, that’s not big enough!”

Which sounds much like this simultaneously hilarious and pathetic quote from a New York Times article on Obama’s legacy in reality, versus his own inchoate, yet boundless ambitions, as spotted by Ricochet’s Peter Robinson:

Toward the end of…[Jackie Calmes's New York Times article on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner]…she reports the following, which occurred on a conference call shortly after the 2008 election:

‘Mr. Obama spoke of the transformative domestic policies he had promised and now would pursue. Mr. Geithner, say people familiar with the exchange, cautioned that the crisis Mr. Obama had inherited was so severe that it would constrain him.“Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression,” Mr. Geithner said.Vexed, Mr. Obama replied, “That’s not enough for me.”’

And there you have it: an advisor giving the president-elect wise advice, which was instantly rejected as insufficiently transformative. The rest is history.

And note this exchange in the comments section:

Percival:

KC Mulville: I’ve rarely seen anyone hold the welfare of so many hostage to his own personal self-image.

That, in one sentence, sums up Obama with brutal precision.

And it also brings us to Jonah Goldberg’s latest column, and a reminder that,  to paraphrase John Lennon on God, Obama is a concept by which we measure our sins:

Last week at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Obama explained, “We’ve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades. We’ve kind of taken for granted — ‘Well, people would want to come here’ — and we aren’t out there hungry, selling America and trying to attract new businesses into America.”

The White House and its proxies insist that Obama wasn’t talking about Americans per se. He just meant we’ve been lazy about attracting foreign investment.

We’ll come back to that in a minute. For now, let’s take him at his word.

Still, you can understand the confusion. In September, the president reflected in an interview that America is “a great, great country that has gotten a little soft, and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades.”

Shortly after that, he told rich donors at a fundraiser that “we have lost our ambition, our imagination and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam.”

So, Obama thinks Americans lack ambition and are soft, but don’t you dare suggest that he also thinks they’re lazy.

The point of all this is pretty obvious. Obama has a long-standing habit of seeing failure to support his agenda as a failure of character. The Democratic voters of western Pennsylvania refused to vote for him, he explained, because they were “bitter.” He told black Democrats lacking sufficient enthusiasm for his reelection to “Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’.”

And of course Obama’s ego is large and contains multitudes — not to mention, underneath it all, he’s a hack Chicago machine pol who will say anything at any given moment, if it will move his agenda forward and he thinks no one will ever call him on his own self-described bullsh*t:

In 2008, Obama said Bush’s deficit of $9 trillion was “unpatriotic.” Now he questions the patriotism of those who think the Obama deficit of $15 trillion argues against spending even more money we don’t have. And of course, there’s that giant unfunded disaster known as Obamacare, which Nancy Pelosi claimed was a “jobs bill” because it would lead to “an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.”

But, yes, by all means, let’s blame our lack of competitiveness on the American people.

Well, it depends upon who you blame. Nick Gillespie of Reason reads early supine Obama acolyte Shepard Fairey the riot act, after seeing Fairey’s ridiculous V for Vendetta/OWS-inspired sequel poster:

If the Occupy movement, like Fairey, sees Obama as a “potential ally” then what does it say about the way that the president has in fact governed? Like Sen. John McCain, Candidate Obama cast a vote in favor of bailing out the big banks and financial institutions while running for president. He then upped the ante and has shown absolutely zero ability to conjure up an economic recovery plan that does not rely on fixes that were rusted-out by the time Richard Nixon took that final flight to San Clemente back in the 1970s.

Obama’s record on civil liberties and foreign interventions is indistinguishable from George W. Bush’s, whose exit calendar from Iraq he is fulfilling. Except that Obama has managed to lower the bar when it comes to killing American citizens and committing American resources without even the fig leaf of congressional approval. Who wants to support the Solyndra-style crony capitalism, or bizarre gun-running operations such as Fast and Furious? What part of record numbers of deportations of poor Mexicans and raids of legal-under-state-law medical marijuana dispensaries in California does Fairey and Occupants not understand?

Pretty much all of it, since in 2008, Fairey was but one of tens of millions of Americans who confused morality with aesthetics when going all-in on building the Oba-myth.

Related: And speaking of both OWS and confusing morality and aesthetics…

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Mark Steyn writes, “Occupiers part of grand alliance against the productive,” in his weekly column:

When the rumor spread that the Whole Foods store, of all unlikely corporate villains, had threatened to fire employees who participated in the protest, the Regional President David Lannon took to Facebook: “We totally support our Team Members participating in the General Strike today – rumors are false!” But, despite his “total support”, they trashed his store anyway, breaking windows and spray-painting walls. As The Oakland Tribune reported:

“A man who witnessed the Whole Foods attack, but asked not to be identified, said he was in the store buying an organic orange when the crowd arrived.”

There’s an epitaph for the republic if ever I heard one.

“The experience was surreal, the man said. ‘They were wearing masks. There was this whole mess of people, and no police here. That was weird.’”

No, it wasn’t. It was municipal policy. In fairness to the miserable David Lannon, Whole Foods was in damage-control mode. Men’s Wearhouse in Oakland had no such excuse. In solidarity with the masses, they printed up a huge poster declaring “We Stand With The 99%” and announcing they’d be closed that day. In return, they got their windows smashed.

I’m a proud member of the 1 percent, and I’d have been tempted to smash ‘em myself. A few weeks back, finding myself suddenly without luggage, I shopped at a Men’s Wearhouse, faute de mieux, in Burlington, Vermont. Never again. I’m not interested in patronizing craven corporations so decadent and self-indulgent that as a matter of corporate policy they support the destruction of civilized society. Did George Zimmer, founder of Men’s Wearhouse and backer of Howard Dean, marijuana decriminalization and many other fashionable causes, ever glance at the photos of the OWS occupiers and ponder how many of “the 99%” were ever likely to be in need of his two-for-one deal on suits and neckties? And did he think even these dummies were dumb enough to fall for such a feebly corporatist attempt at appeasing the mob?

An unsigned piece at the New Criterion adds that it’s deju vu all over again:

Back in the day, folks like Jerry Rubin at least had (briefly) the attraction of novelty. What about his heirs, the motley assemblage staffing the entertainment known as “Occupy Wall Street”? Isn’t it, as the philosopher Yogi Berra observed in another context, déjà vu all over again? First tragedy. Then farce. Now, incoherent childishness and pathetic exhibitionism.

The media, natch, has gobbled it up: “Extra! Extra! Read all about it: Anarchists Occupy Wall Street! People with funny hair, unpleasant tattoos, and bad spelling demand revolution!” In one sense, the sideshow that is Occupy Wall Street has been a gift to copy-hungry publications. It’s always fun to quote the permanent adolescents. As Art Linkletter knew, they say the darndest things. You might be worried about paying the mortgage and junior’s tuition; they get to denounce “corporations,” embrace the “environment,” and declare that “Christopher Columbus was the first Zionist.” Who knew? “This is what democracy looks like,” read the banners. Actually, as Anne Applebaum wrote in a column for Slate, it is not what democracy looks like. It’s what free speech looks like in one of its more histrionic varieties. “Democracy,” Applebaum notes, “looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary, and many unglamorous time-consuming activities,” none of which is as enjoyable as shouting slogans and mugging for the camera.

Making a democracy function requires hard work, but much less so than tearing one down, particularly when your rage is driven by envy towards your fellow elitists. We explored the duality of the OWS gang a few times here this week — many seem to be Blue State Elitists angry at fellow Blue State Elitists whose education and  in some cases social connections allowed them to achieve far greater income and wealth than those who stupidly took Michelle Obama’s advice and avoided going into private enterprise (or went into private enterprise with a degree in Hegelian Post-Structural Dialectic Feminism instead of an MBA). And now it’s time to extract a little blue-on-blue revenge, as Victor Davis Hanson writes today at PJM:

Students with such high opinions of themselves are angry that others less aware—young bond traders, computer geeks, even skilled truck drivers—make far more money. Does a music degree from Brown, a sociology BA in progress from San Francisco State, two years of anthropology at UC Riverside count for anything? They are angry at themselves and furious at their own like class that they think betrayed them. After all, if a man knows about the construction of gender or a young woman has read Rigoberta Menchu, or both have formed opinions about Hiroshima, the so-called Native American genocide, and gay history, why is that not rewarded in a way that derivatives or root canal work surely are?

Class—family pedigree, accent, clothes, schooling—now mean nothing. You can meet your Dartmouth roommate working in Wall Street at Starbucks, and seem for all appearances his identical twin. But when you walk out the door with your environmental studies degree, you reenter the world of debt and joblessness, he back into the world of good money. Soooo unfair for those of like class.

Despite their lacking the taste that Alex in A Clockwork Orange demonstrated towards music, culture and hygiene, OWS, with their faux-hipster stylings and increasing love of violence, is yet another reminder that it’s Anthony Burgess’ world, we just live in it — some of us more peaceably than others.

Related: “‘Largely Peaceful March’ in Oakland? NY Times Again Downplays Occupy’s Destruction.” Gotta keep those readers occupying the cocoon.

Update: “#OWS Protesters Attempt to Storm AFP Defending the American Dream Summit.”

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In Mark Steyn’s recent After America, he begins with H.G. Wells’ legendary time traveler, transported from the late 19th century to first 1950 then to 2011:

He notices there is snow on the ground, and yet the house is toasty warm, even though no fire is lit and there appears to be no stove. A bell jingles from a small black instrument on the hall table. Good heavens! Is this a “telephone”? He’d heard about such things, and that the important people in the big cities had them. But to think one would be here in his very own home! He picks up the speaking tube. A voice at the other end says there is a call from across the country—and immediately there she is, a lady from California talking as if she were standing next to him, without having to shout, or even raise her voice! And she says she’ll see him tomorrow!

Oh, very funny. They’ve got horseless carriages in the sky now, have they?

What marvels! In a mere sixty years!

But then he espies his Victorian time machine sitting invitingly in the corner of the parlor. Suppose he were to climb on and ride even farther into the future. After all, if this is what an ordinary American home looks like in 1950, imagine the wonders he will see if he pushes on another six decades!

So on he gets, and sets the dial for our own time.

And when he dismounts he wonders if he’s made a mistake. Because, aside from a few design adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950: the layout of the kitchen, the washer, the telephone…. Oh, wait. It’s got buttons instead of a dial. And the station wagon in the front yard has dropped the woody look and seems boxier than it did. And the folks getting out seem … larger, and dressed like overgrown children.

And the refrigerator has a magnet on it holding up an endless list from a municipal agency detailing what trash you have to put in which colored boxes on what collection days. But other than that, and a few cosmetic changes, he might as well have stayed in 1950.

As Steyn adds, yes, today there are computers, an industry that grew in the 1970s and 1980s largely because it was under the radar and fast-changing enough so as not to get regulated to a pulp, but aside from that, technology — what Alvin Toffler would call “Second Wave” technology such as the automobile and jet travel — has stagnated and flattened out. If you look closely while watching the original Airport from 1970 with Burt Lancaster and Dean Martin, you can can see a model of the Boeing SST in a TWA paint scheme sitting on a desk in one scene. The SST was to be the next phase in commercial aviation; TWA had assumed that they’d be converting a fair chunk of their 747s into cargo planes. But once the then-nascent environmental movement killed the SST, commercial air travel in America has been stuck at subsonic speeds since.

Fashion has truly stood still — I’m not sure if I’m the best one to make this case, given that traditional menswear was perfected by Apparel Arts magazine in the 1930s; you can click through these images and find plenty of suits that would look perfectly acceptable amongst us would-be one percenters today. But the New York Post recently ran a photo essay on the permanence of the late ’60s Woodstock-era look. These duds are 45 years old; in 1967 or so when they debuted, that would be the equivalent of wearing the Great Gatsby’s wardrobe. Four years ago, when Michelle Malkin linked to a hilarious story on how déclassé the original Haight-Ashbury hippies found the latest band of young transients moving into their old neighborhood, I wrote:

I used to think that this was one of the most implausible episodes of Star Trek because it was so wedded to the fads of the era it was filmed in. (If the show had been shot 10 years earlier, would the guest stars have been black turtleneck-wearing beatniks?). Now I’m starting to believe that there will be a class of reactionary young people in perpetuity who rebel against accepted contemporary societal norms by dressing exactly the same as one group of teenagers fawned over endlessly by the media 40 years ago.

I’ve already quoted from Tom Wolfe’s The Great Relearning essay a few times in regards to Occupy Wall Street, but it keeps playing itself out, again and again, and again. As Wolfe noted, at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, doctors began treating a myriad of diseases “that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.” They were reappearing in 1968 because San Francisco hippies thought that basic hygiene and not sleeping around were, like, dullsville L-7 ideas for squares, maaaan. 

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One of the key themes of George Orwell’s 1984 was the constant erasing of both language and history, as this highlighted by this passage describing the updates to the infamous “Newspeak Dictionary:”

 ‘How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.

‘Slowly,’ said Syme. ‘I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.’

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said. ‘We’re getting the language into its final shape — the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.’

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’ he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in The Times occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’

Did you know that Occupy Boston has a lending library? The New York Times will tell you all about it, in hilariously bland and pious United Colors of Benetton tones*:

The growing collection includes more than 500 books, sorted by genre — consumerism, gender, activism/organizing — and overseen by a bookstore owner and a number of librarians supporting the movement, including some from the Boston Radical Reference Collective. The library has a simple checkout system, an expanding archive of Occupy Boston’s meeting notes and proposals, and a nascent program of speakers and writing workshops.

John Ford, who temporarily shuttered his Metacomet alternative bookstore in Plymouth, Mass., to run the tent library, said it was intended to help protesters learn about systems they find frustrating and explore possible alternatives.

“I hope, at the very least, it just makes people more inclined to be thoughtful about what they’re doing here,” said Mr. Ford, 30, as he stood in front of a table piled with newly donated books that had yet to be filed.

How thin must their copy of the Newspeak Dictionary be? And where would it be filed? Forget General Ripper’s obsessions with fluoride** for the OWS gang, the Dewey Decimal System is the monstrously conceived and dangerous capitalist plot we’ve ever had to face:

The librarians have eschewed the Dewey Decimal System, concerned by historical accounts that portray Melvil Dewey, its inventor, as a racist and misogynist.

That sort of thing seems to be going around the Bay State these days:

Anne Foley, the principal at Kennedy School in Somerville, Mass., sent an email to teachers warning them about celebrating Thanksgiving, the Boston Herald reported.

“When we were young we might have been able to claim ignorance of the atrocities that Christopher Columbus committed against the indigenous peoples,” Kennedy School Principal Anne Foley wrote.

“We can no longer do so. For many of us and our students celebrating this particular person is an insult and a slight to the people he annihilated. On the same lines, we need to be careful around the Thanksgiving Day time as well.”

Teachers have already been told not to let students dress up for Halloween.

Parents told MyFoxBoston that they felt the principal was overreacting.

“My kids were brought up with Halloween and whatever have you. She has no right to tell these kids they can’t have it,” one woman told the station.

“The children, they need to express themselves and be children. Don’t take holidays and fun time away from them. They have so much homework. They don’t have enough play time,” another said.

Superintendant Tony Pierantozzi told The Herald that Halloween is “problematic” because of connections to witchcraft.

“I don’t think they should not be able to celebrate these holidays I mean this country was formed with the idea that everything is a free country, and they should be able to celebrate these holidays,” a Somerville woman told MyFoxBoston.

Somerville Mayor Joe Curtatone, who has three kids at Kennedy, also weighed in.

“I’m the son of Italian immigrations, so I take Columbus Day very near and dear, and I’m proud that he discovered America and that America’s named after another Italian,” Curtatone said. “If we ignore and we don’t want to talk about it, if we want to stifle debate, then we’re ignoring history.”

But history is fungible. The Gregorian calender has been under assault for several years; as we’ve just seen, traditional holidays such are increasingly verboten, and at Occupy Boston at least, the Dewey Decimal System is verboten. The accelerating speed of the great PC cleanup is fascinating though. In his recent book Primetime Propaganda, Ben Shapiro accurately noted that ABC was the first TV network to begin to tilt left in the late 1960s; the other two followed by the early 1970s. Yet even back then, liberalism still at least made an effort to appear compatible with traditional American history; as Ace noted shortly before the past Fourth of July, ABC’s beloved Schoolhouse Rock cartoons from the mid-’70s would be verboten today:

To understand where we were, and where we are now:

These cute cartoons ran on Saturday mornings as a pro-social, pro-civic bit of public service, in the interests of educating kids (or… edutaining them, at least) and instilling some patriotism in them.

And now?

They wouldn’t run. They are “controversial.” These cartoons are now rightwing jingoism, and possibly incitements to violence and disorder.

Speaking of which, the Retronauts Website has as interesting look back at Apple computer advertising through the years. 15 years or so before marketing the Apple in the mid-1990s with such mainstream counter-cultural icons as Muhammad Ali, Gandhi and John and Yoko, Apple’s ad agency took a more historic approach. Some of their earliest ads showed the Apple II being enjoyed by Ben Franklin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Thomas Jefferson, and the Wright Brothers. Could any of these figures be used non-ironically in an advertisement today? While I’m not aware of the PC clean-up brigade bringing their truncheons and airbrushes to bear on Ben Franklin, Henry Ford is better known for his anti-Semitism than his automobile (which has long under attack from the left), Jefferson for Sally Hemings than helping to found the country, and Edison’s light bulb is being banned. And between chemtrails and “binge travel,” don’t even get the far left started on the environmental horrors of commercial aviation.

As Bryan Preston noted at the start of the month, OWS is attempting to recreate civilization on the fly, as numerous past movements born in a state of religious fervor have attempted. That’s a task that seems easier and easier to accomplish, as the amount of knowledge required — and acceptable in polite society — continues to shrink.

spotlighting the hilarious quote about about OWS eschewing the Dewey Decimal System, yesterday, James Taranto wrote, “Take a college humanities department and deprive it of all the support it receives from capitalist enterprises–investment income from the institution’s endowment, tuition money from well-heeled parents, subsidies from taxpayers–and what do you get? A bunch of crazy freeloaders sleeping in a park.”

But the occupiers have been systematically denied a fair chunk of knowledge for quite some time now. And they’ve been quite eager to go along with process, all the while borrowing a fortune to learn less and less.

It’s almost enough to make you want to surrender to the madness and declare peace.

Update: Intellectual foundation for Occupy Wall Street finally revealed to world.

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Irony — now in single-serving thousand calorie packages:

We, the Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors, compelled by our personal convictions and our Company’s mission and values, wish to express our deepest admiration to all of you who have initiated the non-violent Occupy Wall Street Movement and to those around the country who have joined in solidarity. The issues raised are of fundamental importance to all of us. These include:

• The inequity that exists between classes in our country is simply immoral.

• We are in an unemployment crisis. Almost 14 million people are unemployed. Nearly 20% of African American men are unemployed. Over 25% of our nation’s youth are unemployed.

• Many workers who have jobs have to work 2 or 3 of them just to scrape by.

• Higher education is almost impossible to obtain without going deeply in debt.

• Corporations are permitted to spend unlimited resources to influence elections while stockpiling a trillion dollars rather than hiring people.

We know the media will either ignore you [Red-line that irony meter, boys! --Ed] or frame the issue as to who may be getting pepper sprayed rather than addressing the despair and hardships borne by so many, or accurately conveying what this movement is about. All this goes on while corporate profits continue to soar and millionaires whine about paying a bit more in taxes. And we have not even mentioned the environment.

Ben & Jerry’s is a division of the British-Dutch Unilever conglomerate:

Unilever owns more than 400 brands as a result of acquisitions, however, the company focuses on what are called the “billion-dollar brands”, 13 brands, each of which achieve annual sales in excess of €1 billion. Unilever’s top 25 brands account for more than 70% of sales. The brands fall almost entirely into two categories: Food and Beverages, and Home and Personal Care.

Unilever’s brands include:

Aviance Axe/Lynx Ben & Jerry’s Blue Band Dove Flora/Becel Heartbrand Hellmann’s Knorr

Lipton Lux (soap) Omo/Surf (detergent) Rexona/Sure Wish-Bone Sunsilk TIGI (haircare)

The URL of Ben & Jerry’s corporate anti-corporate manifesto is http://www.benjerry.com/activism/occupy-movement/ — and “occupy-movement” sums up both the lifespan of their product, and the protestors’ poster boy rather well.

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Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream has long had a left-wing, socialist vibe to it, but when did ice cream stores in general really embrace radical chic?

During the summer of 2010, Doug Powers spotted the vacationing President Obama emerging from an ice cream store with a rather disquieting logo:

No doubt, Leonard Bernstein stopped by there regularly. But for old school radical chic, there’s the perception given off inadvertently by this shop, in a story that was catnip to the Drudge Report:

“Once and for all, people, it’s an ice cream cone.” But still, whatever flavors the shop offers, we’re assuming that Woodrow Wilson would only have bought vanilla.

Related: Zombie’s latest photo essay and video: “Racist Cupcakes? Berkeley Erupts over Affirmative Action Satire.”

Nothing more painful than seeing aging hipsters. Except those who get taken in by their own Alinsky-ite rules.

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What a difference three and a half years makes. In 2008, Sarah Silverman went to bat for the Unicorn Rider.

Today, she’s merely settling for the unicorn:

Found via James Lileks, who responds to a survey being proffered by the makers of the above video:

Generally associate Sarah Silverman with jokes about urine or menstruation. Other than that, she’s cute. Also, the ad tries very hard to be one of those clever, insincere internet things people don’t really like, but feel obligated to know about in case someone makes a parody or a remix. What’s more, the ad should not last longer than the gum’s flavor, but that would mean ads of less than five seconds in duration. Although that would be okay.

And man, is that a lot of work — both for the ad makers, and those of us forced to watch it, and then make strained political analogies in order to justify linking to it — to sell a pack of frickin’ gum, or what??

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H.L. Mencken, in The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

NIETZSCHE was a preacher’s son, brought up in the fear of the Lord. It is the ideal training for sham-smashers and freethinkers. Let a boy of alert, restless intelligence come to early manhood in an atmosphere of strong faith, wherein doubts are blasphemies and inquiry is a crime, and rebellion is certain to appear with his beard. So long as his mind feels itself puny beside the overwhelming pomp and circumstance of parental authority, he will remain docile and even pious. But so soon as he begins to see authority as something ever finite, variable and all-too-human – when he begins to realize that his father and his mother, in the last analysis, are mere human beings, and fallible like himself – then he will fly precipitately toward the intellectual wailing places, to think his own thoughts in his own way and to worship his own gods beneath the open sky.

As a child Nietzsche was holy; as a man he was the symbol and embodiment of all unholiness. At nine he was already versed in the lore of the reverend doctors, and the pulpit, to his happy mother – a preacher’s daughter as well as a preacher’s wife – seemed his logical and lofty goal; at thirty he was chief among those who held that all pulpits should be torn down and fashioned into bludgeons, to beat out the silly brains of theologians.

But while Nietzsche declared that “God is Dead” in 1882 (God would seem to provide a rejoinder 18 years later), everyone in pop culture seems determined to pose as His son. The most recent example was spotted at Glenn Beck’s perhaps appropriately named Website, The Blaze. “Atheist Comedian Ricky Gervais Poses as Jesus in ‘Blasphemous’ Mag Cover:”

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“You have to hand it to Anna Wintour at Vogue. She knows how to pick them,” Paul Rahe writes at Ricochet:

Last March, as you may remember, I drew attention in a post entitled Tyranny’s Allure to the fact that she had done a lavish spread entitled Asma al-Assad: Rose of the Desert complete with a puff piece on Asma and her husband Bashar al-Assad and that she had had timed it perfectly – on the eve of the butchery in Syria that continues to this day.

And now, Wintour may be the only person on the planet with an advanced case of Huntsman-mania! To give Huntsman the John, Paul, George and Ringo treatment, Wintour comissioned a profile of Huntsman written by Jacob Weisberg of the Washington Post-owned Slate, complete with photos by Rolling Stone veteran Annie Leibovitz. And as a service to her readers, as Rahe writes, “On the off-chance that readers of Vogue entertain a bias against Mormons, Weisberg stokes their bigotry, then tells them not to worry. Huntsman is not really one of those people. He is not the genuine article like Mitt Romney. He is more like a cafeteria Catholic.” (Do Vogue readers lose much sleep over Harry Reid’s faith?)

Rahe believes that the political brain-trust at Vogue is playing a slightly more nuanced strategy with Huntsman than simply trying to make him the one Republican that their readers can trust. “It amounts to a hint that Barack Obama might profit from ditching Joe Biden and putting Jon Huntsman on the ticket,” Rahe writes. Or barring that…

I very much doubt that electing a Republican President is what Weisberg really has in mind. He suspects, as I suspect, that Huntsman is positioning himself to bolt from the party and denounce the eventual nominee as an extremist. Why else would someone – who can think of no grounds on which to criticize the incumbent – run for the office he holds?

As we mentioned in the previous post, former Republican presidents are always treated by the MSM with a Strange New Respect they never received from journalists while running, or in office. And as the second coming of Jumpin’ Jim Jeffords, Huntsman will recieve similar hosannas from the legacy media. But outside of the Sunday talk shows, and the back pages of Vogue, will anyone care?

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As Slate noted a few months ago, back in the 1980s, Spy Magazine had lots of fun running its “Separated at Birth” column; which lives on today in the form of the “Totally Looks Like” Website and numerous other clones. At the Celebslam gossip site today, there’s a photo of Halle Berry with a very close-cropped hairdo, sort of reminiscent of Mia Farrow’s gamine style when she was married to Frank Sinatra in the swingin’ mid-’60s. Not to mention, more than a little reminiscent of…

Style has always moved from the top downward; the Duke of Windsor has been a permanent influence on men’s fashion since the late-1920s. For a while, it seemed like every politician wore his hair like JFK’s; Al Gore’s make-up designer was accused by some of cloning Ronald Reagan’s ruddy look during the 2000 presidential debates. So it shouldn’t be too much of a suprise that President Obama’s look is trend-setting as well these days — and not just for guys, it seems.

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Back in the early nineties, when Saturday Night Live was undergoing a brief renaissance with Lorne Michaels back at the helm and Dennis Miller, Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Mike Myers and company in the cast, the show produced a very funny parody commercial of the sort of Dockers ads that were running all over TV at the time. You know, the guys, hangin’ out, shootin’ the bull, and doing the sort of guy stuff that guys do while wearing really unfortunate trousers:

At the Bleat this morning, James Lileks looks at an unfortunate new ad that Levi’s has produced, with even more unfortunate timing:

As James writes, “The target market is dismissive in the YouTube comments: ‘Go forth and do what? Wear pants?’”

Go forth and march behind a red flag and challenge the massed police in your Levi-branded pants to show your individuality! You have no idea what the protest is about, but it must be awesome because some sort of smoke is deployed, and anyway, protesting has to be good because the police are against you, right? Anger is not an emotion, it’s a thesis, and its expression is its proof.

The text is a Charles Bukowski poem, which sums up the presumptive narcissism of the demographic nicely: the gods wait to delight in you. Sure they do. They’re all sitting around Olympus practically hyperventilating with anticipation. The production company is “@radical.media,” which of course would be horrified if people marched down the street to smash their offices for being corporate tools. Regardless of the brand of jeans they wore. But we’re on your side! We had a red flag! Look, let me freeze on the ad and blow it up, there’s a chap in a Che shirt with a Palestinian scarf!

They use these images because they don’t believe any of it matters. The world is a prop warehouse. Nothing means anything, except perhaps you, who are so amazingly special the very act of putting your hand in the air speaks to your transcendent nature. Also, you want to have sex. YOU ARE SO AMAZING.

As Mark Steyn writes in After America, “If you take the assumptions of almost any group of college students sitting around late at night having deep-thought-a-thons in 1975, 1986, 1998, and imagine what a society governed by that sensibility would be like, you’d be where we are now—in a western world in elderly arrested adolescence, passing off its self-absorption as high-mindedness.”

You can see all of that postmodernism get pushed even further through the looking glass in a Montreal Gazette headline that reads like an Iowahawk parody of what the toothless PC-obsessed MSM would report on these incidents: “London Rioters Resent Media Image of Hooded Teen Thug.”

Malcolm Muggeridge and Anthony Burgess, call your office; it’s your world, we’re just living in it.

Related: “Does the rioting in England reminds anyone else of A Clockwork Orange?”

No. Alex had much better taste in music and clothes.

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“The day is finally upon us — it’s International Beer Day and that means it’s time to go out and celebrate beer!  By celebrating you’re joining a community of hundreds of thousands of men and women around the globe, all rejoicing in the deliciousness that is beer. Ready to celebrate? Here’s what to do:”

I’m not sure how detailed the instructions actually have to be beyond, “pop top and pour,” but click over just to ensure you’re in 100 percent compliance. Speaking of which, I’m pretty sure you can still celebrate tomorrow, if you miss the official holiday today.

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One of the funniest extended sketches that SCTV ever ran was the episode where the Soviet Union hacked into the broadcast feed of fictional Mellonville’s best-known TV station:

As you can see by the screen capture on the YouTube clip above, a big part of the joke were the 1950s-era buzzcuts and cheap clunky shoes these parody Soviet TV stars were wearing. Not to mention 3CP1′s broadcasting infrastructure, with its giant Playhouse 90-era TV cameras (the “new Soviet minicam!”) and enormous strap-on lavaliere microphones, in contrast to the sleek, technologically-advanced west. All of which was a reminder that Khrushchev promised that the Soviets would “bury” the US, but they couldn’t even bury Florsheim or Radio Shack. Or as P.J. O’Rourke wrote, when he tagged along a Nation magazine cruise on the Volga, right around the same time this sketch aired in the early 1980s, his fellow passengers were American leftists “who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper,” just to be on the safe side.

But there’s something about leftism that really makes its proponents want to live in the past. For American unions, it might be because the mid-1950s was when white collar workers began to outnumber blue collar, organized labor in the US. For the Bay Area left, hey, wasn’t Santana just totally bitchin’ at Woodstock?

Which brings us first to Moe Lane on “The Hysterically Outdated SEIU Intimidation Manual:”

Seriously, are these people idiots or something?  They’re using an unrevised contract negotiation manual that’s old enough to vote?  The font alone is a dead giveaway that nobody’s critically thought about this thing in over a decade and a half: in fact, the generally poor condition of the copy given to the courts as part of the case suggests that the SEIU may not even have a clean version of it in digital form in the first place.  There’s probably one kind-of OK copy somewhere in the files of the central office, and they use that to make as many photocopies as they need, when they need it** – and no, this isn’t nit-picking: it reveals a serious problem in their training system.  I’ve been in office situations where the training manuals were done once, then never ever ever corrected or updated; and, after about three years or so, new hires quickly learn to never bother with the manuals, because they’re useless.

And there’s my point: this manual may be great on walking union goons through the finer points of descending en masse on people’s homes and scaring teenagers, but it’s less than useless when it comes to controlling the media narrative.  It’s amazing that what’s supposed to be a standardized collection of labor relation wisdom does things like:

Click over for the rest. And then click over to Zombie’s post at the Tatler, which catches some Bay Area protestors angry with the Trader’s Joe chain for some reason, and doing their damnedest to raise California’s unemployment even higher than its current 11.7 percent:

Now we move on to Stage Two of the Trader Joe’s protest, a sophisticated elaboration of Alinskyite tactics that even Alinsky himself didn’t envision. Since this protest is not a naturally occurring public uprising, but rather a planned maneuver by a clique of activists, one must generate one’s own media coverage, since it’s unlikely that any news outlet will deem your stunt worth covering.

So as part of the protest, you bring along your own photographer to immortalize Trader Joe’s public humiliation. But how to make it seem “important,” a historically significant protest that will be remembered for generations? Simple! Just switch the digital camera to “black-and-white” mode, so the images look like historical artifacts from the protest glory days of the ’60s and ’70s! Ah, those old black-and-white pictures of Cesar Chavez trying to unionize the farmworkers, these images are imprinted indelibly on the public consciousness. So we can replicate that importance and glory by making the pictures of our protest also be black-and-white. Instant gravitas!

Incidentally, if the current far left seems like a cult, well, in his later years, Chavez got there first, much to the chagrin of this recent Atlantic author:

Located in the remote foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains, the compound Chavez would call La Paz centered on a moldering and abandoned tuberculosis hospital and its equally ravaged outbuildings. In the best tradition of charismatic leaders left alone with their handpicked top command, he became unhinged. This little-known turn of events provides the compelling final third of Pawel’s book. She describes how Chavez, the master spellbinder, himself fell under the spell of a sinister cult leader, Charles Dederich, the founder of Synanon, which began as a tough-love drug-treatment program and became—in Pawel’s gentle locution—“an alternative lifestyle community.” Chavez visited Dederich’s compound in the Sierras (where women routinely had their heads shaved as a sign of obedience) and was impressed. Pawel writes:

Chavez envied Synanon’s efficient operation. The cars all ran, the campus was immaculate, the organization never struggled for money.

He was also taken with a Synanon practice called “The Game,” in which people were put in the center of a small arena and accused of disloyalty and incompetence while a crowd watched their humiliation. Chavez brought the Game back to La Paz and began to use it on his followers, among them some of the UFW’s most dedicated volunteers. In a vast purge, he exiled or fired many of them, leaving wounds that remain tender to this day. He began to hold the actual farmworkers in contempt: “Every time we look at them,” he said during a tape-recorded meeting at La Paz, “they want more money. Like pigs, you know. Here we’re slaving, and we’re starving and the goddamn workers don’t give a shit about anything.”

They also bitterly cling to their guns and religion, too.

All of which is a reminder of something Christopher Hitchens said a few years ago, “Those who do think they’ve got a critique of capitalism turn out to be reactionaries. They prefer feudalism or agrarianism; they’re pre-capitalists.”

They’re certainly living somewhere in the past, which brings us to Pajamas alumnus Richard Miniter’s new essay in Forbes. Richard wonders how long the left can hold out its entry into the 21st century:

The Democratic Party, as we have known it for the past 70 years, is now in its last days.

Yes, the House Republicans may raise the debt ceiling for a mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers. Yes, Barack Obama may win the 2012 presidential contest. Yes, bureaucrats and judges will continue to impose new and costly regulations on the economy.

But it doesn’t matter. The long-term trends are almost all bad news for the left wing of the party.

This week’s fight over raising the federal debt limit exposes a key weakness in the warfare-welfare state that has bestowed power onto the Democratic Party: Without an ever-growing share of the economy, it dies. Every vital element of the Democrats’ coalition — unions, government workers, government contractors, “entitlement” consumers — requires constant increases in payments, grants and consulting contracts. Without those payments, they don’t sign checks to re-elect Democrats.

Like it or not, Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev: a man forced to preside over the demise of a political system he desperately wants to save.

Don’t worry, 2008 will look pretty even more nostalgic in black and white photos. The lavalieres are a lot smaller these days, though.

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On February 17, 1941, Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine published his landmark “American Century” essay in that magazine’s spin-off, Life. As Alan Brinkley wrote in The Publisher, his 2010 biography of Luce:

“What can we say and foresee about an American Century?” [Luce] asked. His answer was bold, ambitious, idealistic—and filled with the missionary zeal that had shaped his life. “It must be a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills. It must be an internationalism of the people, by the people, and for the people.” America was already the “intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world,” he claimed, and Americans were “the least provincial people in the world.” But more important than that the United States now had “that indefinable unmistakable sign of leadership: prestige. And unlike the prestige of Rome or Genghis Khan or 19th Century England, American prestige throughout the world is faith in the good intentions as well as the ultimate intelligence and ultimate strength of the whole of the American people.” The creation of an American century would require great vision. It would mean a commitment to “an economic order compatible with freedom and progress.” It would mean a willingness to “send out through the world [America’s] technical and artistic skills. Engineers, scientists, doctors, movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators.” It would mean becoming “the Good Samaritan of the entire world,” with a duty “to feed all the people of the world who … are hungry and destitute.”

Most of all, the American Century as Luce envisioned it would require:

a passionate devotion to great American ideals … a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of co-operation….[W]e are the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization—above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity…. It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.

From these elements, he concluded, “surely can be fashioned a vision of the 20th Century to which we can and will devote ourselves in joy and gladness and vigor and enthusiasm…. It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century.”

The following year, Warner Brothers would release Yankee Doodle Dandy, starring James Cagney, and the year after, Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart as a disillusioned American expatriate who rediscovers his ideals in the crucible of war.

Needless to say, these days, Time-Warner, the successors to Time-Life and Warner Brothers are nowhere near as comfortable about such ideals as Luce and Jack Warner were. Whereas Luce thought our Constitution was an ideal worth sharing with a world then being yoked under the totalitarian influences of fascism, communism and Japanese imperialism, today, of the American Constitution, Time magazine asks that would have been unthinkable during Luce’s day:

And HBO, a TV network owned by Time-Warner agrees with that sentiment. On the cover of the July HBO program guide in my hotel room today is this image of the Statue of Liberty with the face of Larry David, the producer of Jerry Seinfeld’s long-running “Show About Nothing” Photoshopped in:

At Big Government yesterday, Phillip Dennis asked, “What Has Happened to Liberals In the Past 50 Years?” Here’s one answer: They went from viewing America as a beacon of freedom (or a Shining City upon a Hill, to borrow a phrase popular with both liberal icon JFK and former Roosevelt liberal Ronald Wilson Reagan) worth sharing with a beleaguered world to a Show About Nothing during that time. If only they had Upped Their Game during this period, instead.

Related: “Were the Founders Democrats?” That depends on whether you spell it with a large or small-d.

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