2/12/23

 Sunday, February 12, 2023

In bed around 9:15, awake at 4:50, and up at 5:15, thinking of Middletown.  30 degrees outside, clear skies expected for most of the day with a high of 43, winds WSW today 6 to 10mph, gusts up to 18 mph producing wind chills between 21 and 38 degrees. Sunrise at 6:53, sunset at 5:18, 10+24.

When Americans Lost Faith in the News  The formidable Louis Menand wrote this piece for The New Yorker issue on 1/30/3023.  "The press wasn’t silenced in the Trump years. The press was discredited, at least among Trump supporters, and that worked just as well. It was censorship by other means. Back in 1976, even after Vietnam and Watergate, seventy-two percent of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, the figure is thirty-four percent. Among Republicans, it’s fourteen percent." . . . "By the summer of 1968, when the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago, the Cold War modus vivendi had largely been shredded. Reporters felt that they were being used to publish the White House’s lies about the progress of the war in Vietnam, and they struck back. Even before the Convention began, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, and NBC had run stories saying that the war was unwinnable, in contradiction to what the Johnson Administration was telling the public. So when the Convention was being planned—Lyndon Johnson did not attend, having withdrawn from the race in March, but he was very much in charge—pains were taken to incommode the news media as much as possible.  The story of the 1968 Convention—where Johnson’s Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, won the nomination despite not having entered a single primary, and where the Party’s antiwar forces were defeated at almost every turn while police and the National Guard manhandled demonstrators and cameramen in the streets, and two correspondents, Dan Rather and Mike Wallace, were roughed up by security on the Convention floor—has been told many times." . . . "After Chicago, as Hodgson explains, coverage of political unrest, the civil rights movement, and the war was vastly reduced. By the end of 1970, people had almost forgotten about Vietnam (although Americans continued to die there for five more years), partly because they were seeing and reading much less about it. The networks understood that most viewers did not want to see images of wounded soldiers or antiwar protesters or inner-city rioters. They also understood that the government held, as it always had, the regulatory hammer."   . . . "It would make sense for the press to lose credibility if it had delivered biased or sensationalized news. But it hadn’t. It had barely covered the protesters at all. Something else was going on. . . . . "That something was the war. Vietnam was the beginning of our present condition of polarization, and one of the features of polarization is that there is no such thing as objectivity or impartiality anymore. In a polarized polity, either you’re with us or you’re against us. You can’t be disinterested, because everyone knows that disinterestedness is a façade. Viewers in 1968 didn’t want fair and balanced. They wanted the press to condemn kids with long hair giving cops the finger.  We are still there today. It is said that objectivity is what we need more of, but that’s not what people want. What people want is advocacy."

A Yale Professor Suggested Mass Suicide for Old People in Japan. What Did He Mean?  The Ballad of  Narayama lives on in New Haven!  "In interviews and public appearances, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society. “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news program in late 2021. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” . . . While he is virtually unknown even in academic circles in the United States, his extreme positions have helped him gain hundreds of thousands of followers on social media in Japan among frustrated youths who believe their economic progress has been held back by a gerontocratic society. . . .  “There is criticism that older people are receiving too much pension money and the young people are supporting all the old people, even those who are wealthy,” said Shun Otokita, 39, a member of the upper house of Parliament with Nippon Ishin no Kai, a right-leaning party."  Out with the geezers!  Hurry up and die already!  Outathaway, boomers!

Middletown/Muncie, IN.  We watched this documentary's 5th and 6th episodes last night and this afternoon.  The 5th episode, Second Time Around, concerned a couple entering into a second marriage for each of them.  I'm not sure what the point of the episode was, perhaps the once-burnt-twice-shy hesitation each of the partners felt about the permanence vel non of their relationship, their knowledge of the risk inherent in entering into such a 'permanent' legal relationship.  The film also made very clear the financial difficulty of finding a suitable house to live in in the early 80s when Fed Chairman Volker had raised interest rates so high that mortgages carried 16 and 17% interest rates, unthinkable today but obviously possible.  The 6th and last episode, Seventeen, is the most difficult and interesting in the series, focusing on race relations, threats of race-based violence, gun ownership, raging hormones, high emotionality, and all that we associate with adolescence and the transition from childhood to adulthood.   The protagonist of the story is a good-looking, vivacious, 17-year-old female high school student, Lynn, who likes to date and hang out with her Black classmates.  She also likes to smoke weed and drink beer, as all her peers do.  The episode is 2 hours long and, to my old eyes, presents a very dystopian portrait of Middletown, America.  The high school seniors shown in the film were 17 or 18 around 1981 when the film was shot; they would be approaching 60 today.  They were born around 1963 when I graduated from Marquette and was commissioned in the Marine Corps.  The world they lived in ad lived out was radically different from the world I lived in, the life I led in high school.  My friends and I didn't drink alcohol in high school, we didn't smoke marijuana, we didn't have sex with our girlfriends, and we weren't disrespectful towards our teachers.*  We all had aspirations for some kind of good future, first in college and then after college.  Wikipedia tells us that a "cohort" is "a group of subjects who share a defining characteristic (typically subjects who experienced a common event in a selected time period, such as birth or graduation)."  I wonder what the "defining characteristics" are that make my cohort so radically different from that of the high school students in Seventeen.  Some come to mind quickly like growing up in the 1950s versus the 1970s, going to one-gender Catholic high school rather than co-ed public schools, having as the most recently experienced war the 'heroic' and victorious World War II versus the shameful, disgraceful defeat in Vietnam.  The sexual revolution and the women's liberation movements also come to mind, but I wonder whether the underlying difference in our cohorts lay in the attitude toward Authority, respect in my era, for the Muncie kids, skepticism, or contempt.  In any case, I found the film scary and depressing.  I wondered how these adolescents would turn out.  Probably Republicans, probably Trump voters, some of them insurrectionists on January 6th or wishing they were.  Or am I just showing my bigotry?

[[ I  make my 'generation' sound like something out of an old Andy Rooney-Judy Garland movie, a bunch of Goody Two-Shoes.  We weren't.  I was introduced to pornography in an alley in Englewood by some other kid who had found an "8 pager" and s "French postcard" somewhere in his home. Our natural interest in matters sexual was only heightened by the Church's treating of all things sexual as TABOO!!! Before I 'straightened up and flew right', I hung out with the neighborhood gang who got into 'joy-riding' cars and engaging in vandalism, including arson.  When one of my neighborhood pals, Johnny Nelson, was arrested by the CPD and sent to JDH, the juvenile detention home, I saw the light and became a Goody Two-Shoes as a member of a group of 4 Catholic high school friends, 2 of whom joined the Catholic religious order that taught at our high school - Johnny Flynn and Jack O'Keefe.  The other 2, Larry Stack and I, went on to attend Catholic universities and to receive military commissions upon  graduation.]]