I’m still listening to Days of Rage and it’s making me angry. It turns out that all of this already happened. There was a BLM (called BLA) back in the 1970s. People weren’t allowed to say openly that it was violent and terrible. Everybody had to pretend that running around murdering people was a normal reaction to invented racist abuses. The Left glorified cop killers. NYTimes ran cover for them.
I understand why the Left needs an ever-growing supply of immigrants. It needs a fresh audience to put on the same boring play. That they’ve been singing the same song for fifty years, and we are all sitting here, listening to it, scared to interrupt, it’s a real letdown.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’ve listened to podcasts about it and read some excerpts but I cannot bring myself to read it. I think it’ll make me too mad.
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It will, I promise. Because nothing was learned. Nothing. We are replaying the same moronic scenario, again and again.
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Haha. Yeah, I’d rather read your posts on it. Reading the book straight up would kill me. I first came across this book through a 30-minute audio review by the great Charles Haywood, whose biting language made it funny and entertaining. He is a supremely gifted orator and polemicist.
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And then Reagan arrived in 1980 with the slogan, “Let’s make America great again.”
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Hopefully the current right wing wave has more of a lasting legacy than that one did. Even giving Nixon, Reagan, etc. their due (and I do think they deserve some credit), it was more a temporary reprieve from the left than a lasting cultural move away from the eternal 60s.
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“the eternal 60s”
Many white leftists want it to be 1969 forever because that was the last time they felt relevant.
Many black leftists want it to be 1954 forever because the civil rights movement gave them meaning that the post civil rights reality can’t.
Many on the right want it to be 1956 (give or take a year) forever because they didn’t have to hear about others complaining so much.
Not many are really invested in the present and/or making it different from the past.
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Whenever right wingers wax poetic about the 50s, I think “are they not what led to the 60s?” Clearly something there was unsustainable, not to mention foul cultural winds were already afoot (ex. Beat Generation.) I may be biased because I find the 50s aesthetically displeasing and overrated.
The left has their own version of this where they cry about how wonderful and progressive Weimar Berlin was. We all know what followed that…
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Strangely, nobody likes the Soviet aesthetic (and rightfully so) but everybody is trying to recreate the USSR.
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Au contraire, there are many young fans of Soviet realism
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Oh. OK, that’s not good news.
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Young people also serve the left’s purpose well. I don’t remember any of this firsthand and I didn’t learn about it in school (we learned about MLK, sure, but not any of the left wing violence.) Those who have an interest in the counterculture tend to be guided to hagiographic accounts of the era. And you don’t have to be that young to not remember the sociopolitical environment of the 60s and early 70s.
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“I find the 50s aesthetically displeasing and overrated“
The after-war period – the late 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s before the Vietnam War turned ugly – was in terms of style and aesthetics the most significant in modern times: it was the golden age of advertising and consumerism, a great age for product experimentation, the age of design for everybody, the age of the body beautiful before food additives and industrially processed foodstuffs turned most Western nations into clinical obesity cases.
Of course, one may criticise all that as being shallow and spiritually irrelevant, but in terms of beauty they were fabulous years and sadly missed by countless people. The feeling of nostalgia when people look back on that era is palpable in every country in Europe and the Americas.
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The 1970s were aesthetically the ugliest in the US. Look at the hairstyles. Look at the outfits. It’s all gross. Or home design. Today, a house with a well-preserved 1950s aesthetic sells extremely well. But the 1970s aesthetic isn’t even perceived as such. It’s simply perceived as outdated and vulgar.
So I disagree, 1970s and early 1980s were the ugliest. Then it all got better and it’s never been that ugly since. Although the overindulgence of young people today in tattooing every inch of their bodies and men.in painting their fingernails black is not heartening.
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The 70s at least were still experimenting with bringing plants and little fountains and fishponds indoors. You could cover a lot of ugly with some nice foliage and good natural light. That was only on the high end though, and I think there were practical problems with moisture and mold– probably it worked better out in the desert. Median 70s houses… butt ugly, dark paneling, orange countertops, mustard and avocado colors, Textured shag carpet. Sigh. You’re right, even the most egregious home-reno people these days hesitate to mess with an original 50s tiled bathroom, even if it’s pink. People dig that. Nobody feels that way about 70s anything. The 80s were a continuation of the ugly, where all the bright garish colors were stripped out, everybody gave up on natural light and indoor plants, rooms got bigger, furniture got bulkier to suit the bigger rooms, and nothing improved aesthetically. The only thing that got even remotely better in the 90s was the “southwest” furniture style, and it was still obese in its dimensions. In general the trend was for less fussy, but also poorer quality. Nobody will remember the 90s aesthetically, because none of the furniture will still be around to know what it looked like. Only pictures. That was when everything switched from ugly, cheap, heavy oak lumber (nearly indestructible) to white vinyl over particle board and plastic drawer-pulls. Spill water on it once, and it dissolves.
We have lived in a few very small houses now, and it remains difficult to find used furniture that is suited to the size of the rooms– I am always on the lookout for either cheap dorm furniture (doesn’t last, sadly), or things from the 60s or earlier– everything’s narrower, and the chairs are shorter. The combination is not a work of domestic harmony, but at least it fits in the room. You’d think with so many people still living in homes that were built in the 50s and 60s, there would be new furniture made to suit those spaces. But no, we’re still in the monster-chair era of furniture. So much of it is trying to look “vintage” but utterly fails because it has to accommodate people who weight 250 pounds.
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True, but maybe only truly understood by those that actually lived then. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but it was much better than our current existence — particularly for children. And that certainly is not “shallow and spiritually irrelevant”, that emptiness arrived with the endless Marxist/feminist contemptuous lies.
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LOL. meant to address that to Avi ;-D
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