More Baby Boomer Nonsense, and Some Psephology

We are often in a hurry to point the finger of blame. Hey, it's what people do, it's very typical human behavior. Animal behavior, even! I've seen those funny dog videos where there's a mess of torn up couch cushions and the dog owner/ film maker asks two or three dogs who did it, and the innocent dogs put their paws on the dog that's covered in stuffing. I'm certainly guilty myself. I complain about the comically mislabeled “Greatest Generation” mercilessly.

All that is required to put all of this into its proper perspective is greater empathy in general and a much deeper understanding of the historical background of the age-group to be examined. That, unfortunately, is too much to ask for. It calls for a person who is a saint to begin with, and a tireless researcher besides. Those people are rare.

I complain about my parents' generation. That is a simple statement that could easily be made by anyone who has ever walked the earth. I try to keep it fact based. Not just personal observations and anecdotal notes, but historical perspective derived from reading books coupled with a broader base of observation. I will admit that the “Greatest Generation” had it pretty tough. They were born into a rough life, and they were little boys and girls when the depression hit. It hit a lot of them very hard. Then they graduated from high school and somebody started a World War. Sixteen million of them did military service during that mess; twelve million were still in uniform at the end of it. If they came home with little patience for their own children and an over-fondness for alcohol and cigarettes, or perhaps a quick temper and the firm belief that nothing really mattered, there was a reason. God bless the ones who hid those feelings well, and thanks for that.

Trials of the Baby Boomers

It's easy to look back and believe that true Baby Boomers* were born into a perfect world, some sort of Disney movie paradise of princesses and talking hedge hogs. Those photos and post cards of the 1950s make it all look like so much fun! The big, brightly colored cars with the tall fins. Pretty girls everywhere. MGM musicals, movies about giant monsters or adventures in space, and sanitized Hollywood war movies where there was very little shooting and the few soldiers that died did so bloodlessly and quickly, almost peacefully. One of the tricks to understanding anything is learning how to look at the reality behind the photographs.

I was raised in Queens, New York. The house that I lived in up to the age of ten, the upstairs unit of a worn-out, two family house, brother, you wouldn't let your dog sleep in that house. Between the coal furnace and the ancient, unpainted wooden surfaces, the place was a monument to dust. The food that my mother put on the table, man, if you fed your child like that in modern Los Angeles, Social Services would come and remove the child from the house. My mother did not believe in fruit, and for vegetables we saw only the occasional potato.

People forget the illness and disease that we had to endure. In these anti-vax times, people almost act like measles, the chicken pox, and the mumps, were good for children. They were not, but even our parents were blasé about the phenomenon. It was simply the way things were. It was common for them to bring a healthy child over to play with a friend who had the measles. Might as well get it over with! Whooping cough was no joke, babies died from that. Every heard of scarlet fever? That one kept you out of school for a year and left you with a permanently weakened immune system.

Polio! Try and laugh that one off, I dare you. I was seven years old before I got the polio shots, and that was the first year they were available. Dodged a bullet there.

The filth caused all kinds of smaller indignities. Skin infections; styes in the eyes; boils. On top of it all, most of us had poor hygiene. It was the age of the “Saturday Night Bath.” That's when we washed our hair as well. Two baths per week was plenty. The other days we just wore the same underwear and added some more Brylcreem to our hair.

The 1960s remind me of the opening paragraph of Dicken's “A Tale of Two Cities.” “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” It's so easy now to recall only the pretty, suddenly sexually available girls, and the wonderful factory hot-rods, and the brilliant music that characterized the late 1960s. But can we take a moment and recall that the entire decade was alive with social upheaval at home, and half of the decade was overshadowed by a terrible, deadly war overseas? The racism, The Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the police riots, the burning of entire neighborhoods, the assassinations. We true Baby Boomers began high school at the dawn of the 1960s, followed by either university, the draft, alternative military arrangements, or some kind of plan to avoid that whole thing. Many terrible things are happening today, but it's all more abstract now. We had been lulled into a false sense of security in the 1950s, and then, after Kennedy got shot, we were bombarded for an entire decade by non-stop bad news on high-boil, life-threatening developments, and existential threats. There was no censorship of the news back then. The riots and the war were all over the TV news, such as it was. Real battlefield footage, with hundreds of guys a week getting killed. Plus the off-screen suffering of the Vietnamese, which many of us intuited and were disturbed by. There were a few horrific years in a row.

Imagine just 1968! Opening with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam; the assassination of Martin Luther King; punctuated by urban riots, often instigated by the police or the FBI; the assassination of Bobby Kennedy; the wholesale chaos of the Democratic National Convention; leading up to the election of Richard Nixon. Even lacking the deeper understanding of the even more terrible things that were happening behind the scenes, 1968 was a rough ride.

All of that was against the background of the Cold War! MAD, “Mutually Assured Destruction.” I was strangely at peace with the prospect of nuclear war, but that might have been to mask my terror of it. I read novels about it, and books about war in general, and novels where humanity was wiped out. Those helped to settle me down.

You may grudge us some of the advantages that we did, in fact, enjoy. I probably would, in a younger man's shoes. Getting an education and a start at a decent working life was definitely much easier for us. All of that is nearly impossible today. I do not like that fact any more than young people do, because what hurts American citizens, any of us, hurts me. Whatever makes life harder for young people and young families in America weakens the nation and all of us. I would love to see much of that wonderful old deal reinstated for the benefit of young Americans today. But only Bernie Sanders, alone among politicians, is interested in doing such a thing, and I don't think that he has much of a chance. I think that he could have an outside chance of becoming president, but getting all of that legislation passed? Nope. Not a snowball's chance in hell.

Speaking of Elections

For there to be any energy in “Baby Boomers ruined the world,” either one of two things must have happened. Either Baby Boomers must be personally responsible for the ruinous policies and legislation that have led us to this sorry state, or they must at least have elected the public officials who are personally responsible for it.

The first proposition doesn't really work, because most Baby Boomers, most by a wide margin, are simple, ordinary working people. Look, I'm a lawyer and an itinerant university lecturer, big deal, I include myself in the simple working stiff category. If there is a core group of evil geniuses at the heart of this chaos, I doubt if there could be more than half a dozen Baby Boomers among them.

That leaves the election angle. It's amazingly easy to look that stuff up now. All of the following statistics come from the web site:

ropercenter.cornell.edu

1980

This is when the real trouble started. Reagan was the candidate of the Conservative backlash against the 1960s, which to Conservatives was a matter of uppity blacks and filthy hippies overturning everything that was sacred about American culture and traditions at the instigation of a bunch of communist university professors. You may be laughing now, but that is actually a simple statement of what self-identified Conservatives believed, and most people over thirty were very conservative.

Older, white voters elected Reagan. The 18-29 age group, not a large segment of the voters, was evenly split. Of all voters over the age of thirty, Reagan was fifteen points ahead of Carter.

N.B. Voters over thirty years of age in 1980 had been born before 1950, so almost none of them were Baby Boomers.

In a pattern that will repeat itself, Reagan took the white vote by a factor of 56-36. Carter took the black vote (83-14) and the Hispanic vote (56-37).

1984

Reagan took all voters by a factor of 59-41. Mondale only showed well among voters from union households, black voters, and Hispanic voters. This was a walk-over.

1988

Dukakis for the Democrats. Another walk-over.

George H.W. Bush saw his biggest scores in the 45-59 age group. Those voters would have been born between 1929 and 1943, so no Baby Boomers to blame here.

As time marches through these elections, financial demographics become more important. From here on out, Republicans have overwhelming energy in the upper income brackets, and Democrats take almost all of the votes in the lowest brackets.

1992

This election was fascinating, mostly due to the presence of H. Ross Perot. Perot took a whopping 19% of the vote; Bush 37%; and Clinton 43%.

Bill Clinton was, of course, our first Baby Boomer president. Did he ruin the world? He was a mixed blessing. He kept the economy humming, and he managed to balance the budget. He also passed some odious legislation that made mass incarceration worse and made it almost impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. If the Boomers are my generation, Clinton did not represent our best. Neither was he the worst. That will come later.

Perot seems to have taken votes almost equally from Clinton and Bush, and the age demographics are all over the place. It's easier to point out that Clinton walked away with most of the black and Hispanic vote, and the low income vote too. This is the election where the votes of “self-declared Conservatives” begins to really show. 64% of them voted for Bush. There is no breakdown for the ages of the “Conservatives,” but there's a clue coming up.

(Let's skip 1996 as uninteresting, and 2000 as a bold and successful criminal enterprise including the Supreme Court, Governor John Bush of Florida, and Ralph Nader. 1996 was a nothing-burger; 2000 would require a shelf full of books. W. Bush was also a Baby Boomer president. He was an unambiguous stain on our brand.)

2008

Very interesting because Obama won even in the high-end income groups. Obama was our first “Post Baby Boom” president. McCain's slim successes came among white voters and voters over 65 years of age. His only high percentage win was the over 65s. Let the record show that anyone over sixty-five in 2008 had been born before 1943, so very few Baby Boomers voted for McCain. Baby Boomers voted for Obama.

2016

Trump is our third Baby Boomer president, and, like W. Bush, the result of a Boomer v. Boomer election. Trump is a stain not only on the Boomer brand, but also on his family, and the country in general.

Here we may be able to ascribe some mischief to Baby Boomers, but I suggest that it would be hard to focus on this one group at this late date as far as ruining the world goes. It was pretty much ruined already. By older Americans, I'll admit it, but not all older Americans are Baby Boomers. White voters over the age of 45 elected Trump. That group would be born before 1971, so it would include many Baby Boomers. It also includes part of Gen-X, and a lot of births that I consider too late for real Baby Boomer status.

Hillary made a very good showing with the under 44 group, and it's worth remembering that she did win the popular vote by almost three million votes.

The fascinating thing here is that Trump did not do well in the high income groups. All financial demographics were very close.

Those “Self Identified Conservatives” were hard at work in 2016, for Trump. He took that group by a factor of 81-16.

The Roper Center included some issues for this election. Voters declaring themselves to be motivated by immigration went for Trump 64-33. By terrorism, for Trump 57-40.

Conclusion

Trump's big rally crowds do appear to include a lot of potential Baby Boomers, but honestly, if you are looking for things to hang on Baby Boomers, wouldn't you agree that the world didn't just fall into ruin within the last ten or even twenty years? It's been a long process, a long, often hard road. Older Americans are leading the Trump charge off of the cliff, but Americans “over fifty” is a big, diverse group. Have the trouble makers all along been older Americans? If so, much of that time it would have been the Greatest Generation. Nixon and Reagan sure raised a lot of hell that we are still paying for, and their age-mates elected them.

America has gone from the relative prosperity and narrower income gap of the mid-century to the current chaos of debt slavery, the gig economy, increasing racism, domestic terrorism, rampant anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, and intolerance. It has taken us seventy years to come to this ruin. And the chaos is not limited to the United States. I think it would be quite a stretch to say that any particular group is responsible for the chaos that is rampant in North and South America, half of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and parts of Europe and East Asia. That's leaving climate change completely aside for the moment, except for mentioning that we'll have to wait for the fires to burn themselves out before we know what has happened to Australia.

We need solutions, not finger pointing.

*Born at least one year after the end of the war, and before 1956.

Cigarettes

There was a time when almost all of the adults smoked cigarettes. “Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em,” was more than just a catchy saying. It was a way of life. That was the World War II generation, and you could say that during that nerve-jangling episode in world history there were more reasons to smoke than there are usually. The young adults of the time were self-medicating to an extent. The depression was just ending, and between that and the war there were tons of good reasons to be nervous and worried. Not just at the tip of the spear, either, not just the combat troops, but all throughout the rest of the military and into the population of most of the world. They developed the habits of drinking at every opportunity and smoking as close to constantly as they could manage. After the war, it was tough to stop, and most of them didn’t see any good reason to even try stoping anyway.

Many of us had family doctors who had served in the wartime military. My own doctor was one of the unlucky few who had actually treated combat casualties and been relatively close to the front. He was a steady kind of fellow that no one would say was the nervous type. He had picked up the smoking and drinking habits, though. He had a big ash tray on the desk in his office and he didn’t mind smoking while he was treating patients. He had a bottle of scotch in the drawer, too, and in between office appointments he would take a little nip. He left the rocks glass on his desk. I’m sure that he’d occasionally pull out another glass and share a drink with a patient if the situation called for it. He knew which of his patients had been in the shit during the war. Give ‘em a drink, let’s smoke a butt, reminisce a little. He was a good doctor, not like some of them who couldn’t handle their liquor. I still have a mark on my shoulder that looks like a small tattoo of the islands of Japan, left by a botched tetanus shot from another doctor who had been taking a few too many nips that day. He jammed the needle straight into the bone. He’d been in the war himself.

Camels sold their product with the pitch, “not a cough in a carload!” See, now I wouldn’t have recommended that saying to them. As the Romans used to say, “the guilty flee, when no man pursueth.” Why bring up coughing yourself? I’m pretty sure that was a mistake.

Lots of the members of that generation paid the price for all of that self-medication. My old doctor included. He suffered a fatal heart attack at a relatively young age. Several of my uncles paid that price, too, or got the cancer or something. They were certainly a bad influence on us Baby Boomers, that “Greatest Generation.”

The first cigarettes that I smoked as a boy were rush jobs, and I don’t really remember them. They were Pell Mells that a cousin and I had stolen from my uncle. Whether I enjoyed them or not, I do not recall, but I was not discouraged, that much is certain.

The first cigarettes that I do remember smoking were non-filter Chesterfield Kings that my friend Jackie and I stole from his mom. She smoked those things by the carton, more than a pack a day, so she’d never realize it if four of them went missing. We took a book of matches and the four cigarettes and went to the big park on the river in our town. There was a hill rising above a nice path along the river that was covered in dense, old bushes. We knew a spot where you could climb the hill with some difficulty and come to a “fort,” as we called such things. It was an open space covered by the bushes with enough hard packed dirt for two or three boys to sit comfortably. Facing the river there was a gap in the foliage that provided a nice view of La Guardia Airport, right across Flushing Bay. We were twelve years old at the time, still in grammar school.

It was probably the first time that I inhaled, so it would have been the first time that I got the full effect. And the effect of a Chesterfield (filterless) King was considerable. We smoked our two cigarettes apiece and we compared notes. I remember thinking, wow, no wonder the adults smoke these things. I thought they were great.

In the fullness of time, I tried a lot of other things as well. I must confess that I liked almost everything that I tried, and that I added a few things to the list of my, what? Habits? Sure, habits, why not. For want of a better word, although not, certainly, in the medical sense. Only those devices that one uses to comfort oneself through the difficult passages in life, which for many of us came pretty much every day.

Speaking now, in February, 2018, it’s been about a year and a half since I smoked a cigarette. It’s not like I was a dedicated cigarette smoker all of my life, I wasn’t. I went strong through my late teens, but after that I was an on again, off again cigarette smoker, and always more like a few, nothing like a pack per day. During my fifties, I literally smoked three cigarettes per day. That was hard for people to believe, but it worked for me. I enjoyed those three cigarettes, one in the morning; one upon returning home from work; and one after dinner.

During my sixties, and owing to stresses that would crush coal into diamonds, my intake went up to six or seven cigarettes per day. If you are still young, dear reader, God bless you, but please believe me that there comes a time in our lives when the handwriting on the wall is not only clearly visible, but it is also bursting into flames and can be read from space. So, I quit. It was not that the stress in my life was reduced, quite the opposite was true. It was just that I came to realize that the well-being of others was involved, not just my own wants and needs. I was not worried about second-hand smoke, because I only smoked on my balcony, and with the doors closed. No, I realized that every year that I could add to my life would make someone else’s life easier. There was someone who would miss me after I was gone, and who’s life I could make easier by my assistance and companionship. In other words, I selfishly sought to extend my life, because I enjoy this feeling of being important to someone.

I can honestly say that I never crave a cigarette. I never look longingly at the cigarette display in the convenience stores. I do kind of miss them, though, because I did always enjoy smoking them. Okay, add them to the list of things that I miss. The list is as long as my arm by now, and the cigarettes are the least of it.

August 14, 1945

On another historical note . . . the importance of reading many books covering the same material. Different historians have very different tones to their writing, and they drop in different details from the historical record of the times. I read a book last week that included some detail about a subject that I had only seen covered in more general terms elsewhere.

The book was The Fall of Japan, by William Craig, covering only the tail end of the war and the immediate aftermath of the Japanese surrender. Mr. Craig also wrote Enemy at the Gates, about the battle of Stalingrad. They’re both good reads.

Mr. Craig’s approach to writing history is suitably academic, but it is more personal than most historians. Where many historians dryly set forth facts, Mr. Craig includes a lot of personal detail about the people involved in the events. He illuminates their thought process so that we may get some idea of what they were thinking, and why they acted like they did. I enjoy his style.

I’ve read another book that covered exactly the same subject and time period: Downfall: the End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, by Richard B. Frank. Mr. Frank’s book included a lot more detail about the decision to employ the atomic bomb, among other strengths. I think that Mr. Frank was better on the geopolitical aspects of the events. Reading both books, with their different emphases, provided a full picture.

The details that were new to me were about the behavior of Americans back at home, mostly American servicemen, upon hearing of the end of the war.

The announcement was made in America on August 14, 1945, in the afternoon. We’ve all seen the famous pictures from Times Square in New York. The most famous one is a sailor in dress blues kissing a woman rather enthusiastically. Only in the last couple of years has it been reported that she probably did not wish to be kissed in that manner. Other books that I have read only noted that there was general relief and celebration on the announcement. Well, it was a lot darker than that.

There were at least twelve million (mostly) men in the armed forces at the time. I’ve seen it reported to be a rather higher figure, but at least twelve million. This was the “Greatest Generation,” often credited with having made great sacrifices for their country and having defeated the evil powers of the world almost on their own. In reality, they were a rough bunch that didn’t particularly want to be there. They resented the discipline and the dangers involved, and they were very anxious for the whole thing to be over.

The celebrations of the servicemen that day were neither good natured, nor innocent.

In many cities there were extensive displays of public drunkenness, public nudity, and public sex. The sex was often not consensual. Mr. Craig focuses on the revelries in San Francisco, which seem to have bordered on a riot. San Francisco was a big Navy town. It was full of members of all of the services. The announcement of the surrender was immediately greeted by an excess of enthusiasm.  The drinking started right away, and before long every liquor store in San Francisco had been looted. Hundreds of cars were stolen, and the drunken, joyriding servicemen careened around the streets incautiously. There were twelve deaths all together, some were deaths by misadventure (a bag of empty liquor bottles thrown from a high window killed a passerby), but most were the deaths of people being run over.

Women in San Francisco were seized, stripped and raped, often repeatedly.

The San Francisco police were instructed to keep back. They just watched the action. No sense in starting another war, I suppose. Let the boys blow off some steam!

These additional details, plus a few from other cities, put that Times Square kiss photograph in a new perspective. 

Are Americans Nice People?

I like to think that Americans are a friendly, cooperative people, fair minded and good, but is that all really true?  It’s more or less true, I believe, but the question is:  how much more, or less? 

We all have things that we keep carefully hidden from ourselves, and opinions that we wisely keep to ourselves.  It may not even be a good idea to dwell too long on the subject of America’s true character.  We all have a vested interest in the myths, and we all would prefer to believe that America is, on balance, a positive force in the world.  My attitude, like the good Irishman that I am, is that America is not better than other countries, but it’s probably as good as any of them. 

But Americans themselves . . . are they nice?  Are they good? 

D.H. Lawrence is quoted as saying that “[t]he essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.”  The truth may lie somewhere in between.

My Grandparents’ America

This was really the pre-ironic America, a society without Freud and free from self-examination.  This generation, born in the late Nineteenth Century, went through their lives believing that America was literally the America of Saturday Evening Post covers.  They knew that that wasn’t true, because they knew their lives to be desperately hard.  They believed it anyway, maybe just for public consumption or maybe because they had convinced themselves that it was so.  It wasn’t like a Norman Rockwell painting at all, though.

That was America, pre-workers’ rights or civil rights, the America of Jim Crow (and the north wasn’t a whole lot better either), a time and place of grinding poverty and epidemic infant death.  My maternal grandmother experienced five pregnancies that resulted in three live births.  My paternal grandfather’s first wife died along with their first child, in childbirth.  There was a lot of early death in general.  Disease was rampant, antibiotics hadn’t been invented yet, and people had no insurance and no money for medical care.  My maternal grandfather died, overworked and under-appreciated, of pneumonia, at the age of about forty.  There was also a lot of fighting among the men.  My paternal grandfather participated in a great number of these fights, and started most of the ones he was in.  And there was a lot of rape, too.

My maternal grandmother’s sister was raped, and it was a particularly terrible example of the practice.  It was 1918, and she was tricked into a private space and gang raped by a group of Doughboys shortly before they shipped out for World War I.  Her great beauty and outgoing personality were her undoing.  She got pregnant and had the baby, a well-loved aunt of mine. This kind of thing was much more prevalent than is understood or remembered, because the shame of it all drove most women to keep the act a secret.  If my aunt hadn’t gotten pregnant, I would certainly not know of the event.

The point is, America has never been the sunny place that appears in its own self-aggrandizing public relations materials, or should I say propaganda.  In reality, no segment or demographic of American society could stand any of the others during this period.  Some would say that it is no better today.

Those were rough times.  They were rough people living rough lives, in the midst of great economic achievement and obscene wealth.  Not nice at all, and with very little good to recommend it, with the possible exception of jazz.

My Parents’ Generation

The greatest myth of all surrounds this generation, born, let’s say, around 1920.  That’s the myth of the “Greatest Generation,” so-called mostly because they are credited with having won World War II.  For one thing, they had help, you can ask the Russians and the Chinese about that.  For another thing, their conduct of the war was less than great.  It was less, indeed, than admirable in many cases. 

Prisoners of war?  Well, forget the Marines’ treatment of the Japanese soldiers that they met, there was no taking of Japanese prisoners, by their own choice.  And the Marines get a pass, because they had been roughly handled by the Japanese soldiers and they could say that they were responding in kind.  In the European Theater of Operation the worst prisoner abuse took place in the war between the Russians and the Germans.  On the Western Front, the American armed forces committed many of the more egregious excesses.  Many, many prisoners never made it back to the lock-ups, and “die-hards” were simply killed.  SS troopers, and many ordinary German soldiers, were all treated as die-hards. 

Terror bombing by American air forces started a long time before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It was, in fact, old hat by then.  Every German city of any size at all was leveled, and towards the end this was done by fire-bombing.  Every single Japanese city was leveled.  Nagasaki completed the set.  The loss of civilian lives in Germany and Japan was huge.  (Other countries suffered greater losses, but not at the hands of Americans. Rather, at the hands of the Germans and the Japanese.  That's another story.)  

Racism was rampant all through this period.  During the earlier, simpler times, racism was casually accepted and almost universal.  By the Thirties and Forties, civil rights were beginning to be discussed, and black Americans were beginning to speak up a bit (they had to be very careful about it, you know, or they’d get themselves hung from a tree or something).  In these discussions, the vast 

majority of white Americans gave a resounding HELL, NO.  That’s not very nice.

Over in California, there were the Zoot Suit riots.  White people were furious to see Chicanos getting decent jobs and wearing decent clothes. 

And let’s not forget the internment of Japanese AMERICANS during the war.  Those poor souls lost all of their stuff and spent years in dusty desert shit holes before the Supreme Court decided that it was all illegal, done because they happened to be members of a group of Asians that we didn’t like.

The “Greatest Generation” were themselves, almost to a man, a bunch of racists and xenophobes for the remainder of their lives.  Thank you for your service!  But a little more common decency would not have been out of place.

More Recently

My generation wasn’t much different, not much better.  We had a few things happen that started to open some eyes, things like the integration of baseball and rock and roll radio in the Fifties.  (By the Sixties, radio was segregated again.)  Most young people were still ill disposed to black Americans who did not play baseball or make hit records.

It’s possible that we fought a bit less than previous generations as boys, but we fought a lot.  There was a lot of bullying, and a lot of rough teasing of the handicapped, especially the mentally handicapped.  There were good boys and bad boys in my milieu, but the bad outnumbered the good.  We who found ourselves somewhere in the middle were a mixed bag of tricks with little to recommend us.

As adults, we hardly fight at all, for the same reason that children don’t fight much anymore.  These days, fighting is very likely to result in one’s getting shot, either during the fight or afterwards.  America is a violent place, senselessly so. 

Regarding racism, things have always been terrible and it would be ridiculous to suggest that they have gotten much better.  The furious row over our Kenyan Witchdoctor President and his Wookie Wife preclude any hosannas at all.  What could have been a moment of triumph has proven to be a moment of shame.  Not to mention that police shootings of black Americans now make the old school lynchings seem almost quaint.  The situation now may be even more horrible and discriminatory for blacks than at any time since the abolition of slavery, because it’s all so out in the open again and it’s obviously sanctioned by a substantial part of our government. 

Not only blacks are getting shot, and it’s not just police doing the shooting.  Everyone is shooting everyone these days.  It’s the new national sport!  Mass shootings; grudge shootings; ambush murders; accidental shootings; suicides; shootings incident to crime.  Children find guns and shoot other children, and then get charged with murder as adults (this is a way that our sick society attempts to exculpate itself). 

And we are as xenophobic as ever.  Just ask any Muslim.

Conclusion

But what about those Americans, eh?  How about that American character? Over-rated, at best.  And certainly not in the mold of so-called “American Exceptionalism.” 

Was D.H. Lawrence right about us?  He was close, at least.  We are a hard bunch, and stoic, and proud of our isolation (we call it, “independence”), and there are lots of killers among us, more, it seems, every day. 

   

I do think of us as a friendly, sociable people, though, which is a positive.  We’re direct, I guess that one can cut both ways.  We’re undeniably hard working, our government and our Galtian overlord super-rich masters do make sure that we keep those hamster wheels spinning.  We’re creative, that’s another positive.

 

But . . .

Cooperative?  It happens, but not always.  We hold grudges, and we’re still very selfish, xenophobic and racist. 

Fair minded?  Usually, but only if times are good, and not at all if a minority is seeking to level the playing field.

Nice? That may never have been in the cards, except for some blessed individuals.

Good?  That, dear reader, is probably out of the question.