Prosperity

But when a totalitarian government gets cozy with large financial and manufacturing concerns, it rings a twentieth-century bell....I’m thinking “Made the trains run on time.” I’m thinking “Greater Asian Coprosperity Sphere.” There is a technical name for this political ideology.  

P.J. O’Rourke, on China in 1997, from “Eat the Rich”

This popped up while heading for the train this morning - the MTA is actually good about keeping them on time. It’s the other one, though, that caught me. It’s far too easy to jump straight to what the name represents than what it means, much less what it says. And it’s “Coprosperity” that really sent me down a path, that I’d never really noticed before, that is perhaps the most important word there.

That would mean “shared prosperity” or at least “united prosperity,” that being a part of it means being a part of a prosperous group. If you offered that to people today, they would take it. People are CONCERNED, now, about economics, or at least about what plans they should make and how much money they might have a year or ten years or forty years from now. Last time around is too easily summarized as “There was a Crash, and then a Depression, and it started to get better and then there was a War.” Instead, it’s starting to sound like “There were a lot of people who thought they were doing well, and then they realized they weren’t doing well, and then some of them figured how they could do better, and it worked for them for a while, and other people realized the implications, and soon it went from casual economic warfare to massive actual warfare.”

And I can’t think of any reason why the same thing couldn’t happen this time around.

Ukraine

Meanwhile, the Ukraine appears to be in the same place as Russia.

Not a surprise: Ukraine has been tied together with Russia for most of the last 100 years (i.e. as part of the Soviet Union) and Turnings are emergent phenomena of cultures. That is, to the extent a nation is part of a larger group unified by communication, politics, and/or cultural affinities, their turnings will follow that larger group. (Conversely, if a group of people breaks away, they may drift into a different turning pattern.) 

Here, though, the Awakening protests are already heading into 1968, whereas Russia protests appears to have barely started by comparison. They have had both victories and defeats, although it’s not obvious what the end game will look like. They are trying to redo their democracy to be parliamentary (which I recall started in the U.S. around our last Awakening), getting rid of corrupt leaders, and ensuring that protest can continue. Which sounds quite like the U.S. about 40 years ago.

Crackdown

Back here again: Russia is in an Awakening.

“...Their arrest was the beginning of the crackdown. People didn't actually go to jail for peaceful protest in Russia at the time ...They are the first in a long line of people who have gone to jail since.”

I’ve previously wondered what the implication is that the U.S. is evidently two Turnings off from Russia. One reasonable answer is that it has saved all of our lives.  If our countries had been in sync, it would have been a massive feedback loop ending in nuclear war. 

Maybe. Or maybe we’d have been better off, more easily friends in the Crisis, more casual enemies when internal strife appeared. As it is, though, the safe road is to let them handle their internal problems internally. We wouldn’t have appreciated the Soviets taking sides in the Sixties....nor did we.

Royals

Grammys were last night, and an article in the Times evoked a precursor to my previous prediction. Mr. Soderbergh notwithstanding, the point at which distinctively Xer films appeared was a few years after they made their mark in music. The real, no-kidding, here-we-are-now point would have to be 1991, when Smells Like Teen Spirit destroyed what came before. (Still, what came before was often solidly of the same generation. Axl Rose, Slash and most other original members of Guns N Roses are Xers, as are many denizens of that “hair band” era.) 

Which means when someone starts talking about a “night for the underdogs,” "austerity themes," and victories for “second-hand culture,” contrasting (Xer) Ryan Seacrest with almost completely Millennial victories, it may be that music, at least, has fallen to the Hero hordes. Film is bound to be around the corner.

Afterthoughts

Before going on with that previous prediction, I have to acknowledge Steven Soderbergh as another young Xer with a distinctive style who was making a name in the film business - and five years earlier.

I realized it while watching a bit from “Frozen” where an “Are you ready?/I was born ready” exchange occurs. In Ocean's 13, of course,  this is spoofed by having Andy Garcia say it - then Clooney rolls his eyes as he walks away. Similar deconstructions happen in Oceans 11 and other films, which suggests that it’s a common thread - unfortunately, I haven’t seen Sex Lies and Videotape to say that it happens there. That it was a popular indie with an unusual focus is enough on its own for me to say it was a precursor to what came later.

I’m also realizing that I’m unlikely to predict HOW the next Civics will change the world. There’s nothing obvious about the attributes of these Xer filmmakers that makes it clear where anything derives from the generation. Maybe - MAYbe - you could say that Reactives are Bad, they know they are bad, and the ability of making hit men et al relatable was about externalizing their own recognized Bad-ness. (Whereas in Goodfellas or The Godfather, there was more of a "these actually are NOT people like you or me" point of view.) A cursory consideration of Boomer, Silent and G.I. films and filmmakers is similarly unhelpful. Any forecast to that depth might have to take into account the state of the industry, of technology, the moment (and catalysts) of recent Turnings, et cetera.

Influences

Guy at the coffee place we frequent was complaining about Tarantino, how one word that does NOT describe him is “great.” Although it is not an applicable word for his last couple of films, he has enough under his belt to keep his legacy in the “great” column for a while yet. I’ll jabber on about that for a moment before taking a chance with an actual near-term prediction.

An earlier post mentions Tarantino, Smith, and Favreau as significant Xer filmmakers. Although each has a different justification, one connection is that their films that really heralded a new age were in the consecutive years 1994, 1995, and 1996. Although Reservoir Dogs made its director’s name, Pulp Fiction was a massive critical and box office hit. It had a distinct style and attributes that hadn’t previously been visible in mainstream movies. The most obvious of these is the non-linear story, moving back and forth so that the (chronological) beginning of the film is in the middle, the final events shown are after that, and the actual end of the film is halfway through the events shown. (But it all makes sense...) There is also the use of cultural ephemera, from Clutch Cargo to nostalgia clubs to obscure breakfast cereals, as a way to describe the people being portrayed, and to give the world depth. And while it was nothing new to make movies about criminals, hit men, molls, or washed-up boxers, how they were made relatable, even admirable, was at least different. All the talk at the time was about how it was world-changing, and looking back now it’s amazing how truly influential it was.

It did not immediately appear to be hugely influential on Kevin Smith, who produced and directed “Clerks.” on a budget so paltry it was shot in black and white -- there wasn’t enough money for color. It focuses on the truly ordinary Dante and Randall, a convenience mart and video store clerk, respectively. A lot happens on this day that the film portrays, even though much that we see (like Pulp Fiction) is people talking about what they do, what they’ve done, what they plan to do. The language is casually filled with profanity, to the point that it nearly earned an NC-17 rating despite having no on-screen sex or violence. Again, though, it is not like films that came before, and it was influential on what came after. Smith was able to parlay this into a respectable and continuing career. He helped launch the careers of Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Jason Lee, and others. Further, his ability to create a marketable film on the proceeds from sale of a comic book collection meant that almost anyone could at least consider selling a film regardless of their initial financial state.

That might not have been exactly what happened with Swingers, but director Doug Liman realized that their more substantial ($200K) but still minimal (by Hollywood standards) budget required a similar outlook. Still, we are seeing cultural callbacks - Reservoir Dogs is directly referenced and lightly parodied - and still it’s a film largely of people talking to each other. This time, those people are struggling actors in Hollywood, begging for anything that can help pay the rent, whether its a TV pilot, a character at Disneyland, a job at Starbucks. They are quotable, recognizable and (again) casual users of profanity.  Vince Vaughn’s career was launched when a request for permission to use music from (yep) “Jaws”  meant his performance was seen by Spielberg. Writer/director Favreau would get a few gigs, too,  and would eventually direct the huge Marvel Ironman movies. 

There's an additional thread of influence from Doug Liman, who followed on directing another indie film, “Go.”   With a non-linear narrative concerning a drug deal gone bad (or two, or three, depending on how you count), it may not be actually derivative of Pulp Fiction, but that film’s success probably made it easier to get this one to the big screen. The screenwriter was John August, who would go on to work with Drew Barrymore and Tim Burton. It was the big-screen debut of Melissa McCarthy, and one of the first big roles for Timothy Olyphant. And, of course, Liman himself would go on to direct big-budget action films.

Three young adult Xers, three writer/directors, three exceptionally influential films, all starting about 20 years ago.  Although its based on more than only them, my prediction is that we are nearly due for another world-changing few years like that. No later than 2016, we will see the first films with a true Millennial view, written and directed by people born after 1982, which will unstoppably influence movies for the following twenty years, possibly more. The first indications will be a young auteur, probably not yet 30, who is noticed for a film that is just not like what is out there now. 

I will fill this prediction out more, although that will require looking back at least to the mid-70s, and possibly back to the start of motion pictures....

TFP

This article isn’t shockingly perceptive or anything but it is always worth noting when people compare the current era with the Great Depression. It also suggests that we are in a period of technological advancement much like the 1930s - at least as described,  in The Great Leap Forward, wherein an increase in Total Factor Productivity (== technological advancement) set up later successes in World War II and the post-war period. Not saying that’s true, the difference in what was available before the war and after the war has always seemed like a quantum leap. 

The obvious followup is: Were there similar technological innovations happening in the 1840s, ahead of the American Civil War? To which the answer appears to be: Maybe? Googling 1840s TFP increases gets a number of results that mostly are trying to show to what extent transportation was the source. It appears that it does happen, though, indicating that: TFP increases from later Third to early (at least) Fourth Turnings. Probably worth checking in on at some point.

Transitions

A few of these posts have been alluding to how much of a generation needs to be in a particular period of life before that generation is actually there.  It’s an attempt to reconcile that a “generation” is a group of people, and one with a wide range of ages (ranging across 20 years, give or take) and yet somehow the group is described as being in a single period.  Let’s walk through it for a second.

This theory all presupposes that a given period of life - childhood, young adult, midlife, elderhood - is roughly the same length of time, and that length of time is roughly the range of a given generation’s ages. Which means that, when the last member of a generation is born (entering childhood) the first member is moving onward (to young adulthood). Which means that, actually, the entire generation  is only in the same given life period for a moment, a second, an instant.  So how can this all work? 

(The obvious answer is, “It doesn’t, this is all pseudo-scientific lite-sociology.” And I promise, I’ll come back to that option again at some point. But let’s roll with it for a second.)

One option is to say that when MOST of the cohort is in the period, we can work as if it all is.  They are going to be the most influential groups in the life period, the following cohort is not influential at all until it has some critical mass, and that a few are in a different life period doesn’t change what they have in common.

Another is to say that it’s not just how much of the cohort is in the period, but what proportion of people in the period are in a given cohort. Generations have different sizes, they grow until their last member is born and then never gain more, and preceding and following cohorts may be larger or smaller. Let’s say a constellation had 10K Prophets, 8K Nomads, 12K Civics, and 9K Artists, and that they were evenly distributed within each cohort. Let’s look at halfway through a Turning: When half of the Nomads are Midlife, there are 4K Midlife and 4K Young Adult. That means 5K Prophets are still Midlife, and 6K Civics are Young Adult. Nomads are outnumbered in both life periods - nobody is going to pay attention to them! A little bit further along, though, and there are 4K Prophets and 5K Nomads in Midlife, leaving 3K Nomads and 7K Civics in Young Adult. 

And it might be important that in the previous step Nomads didn’t have a majority, while in this step they do - perhaps we can’t say that the constellation has moved until every generation has a solid majority in a single life period.

There could be additional implications and effects - if (as with the Baby Boom) there was an early bump, does that mean they can gain influence earlier? Newer generations, one would think, would always be larger - what if a Crisis means fewer babies, enough to make a generation smaller at the end than its next-elder? Say, if in the example, few enough Civics passed in childhood that the Artists were still a smaller cohort for the next 40 years? (They might have significant influence for a very short time in each life period.) I’d say, though, that we’d have to be able to decide at least 1) what affects a generation’s influence 2) to what extent cohort size makes a difference and 3) how these change in the different life periods. 

Which, as the man said, is at least something testable. Or potentially so.

Firsties

Number 1 back there - the current generational constellation - got some short shrift. There’s not a lot we can say about it right now, unless you want to suggest that we are NOT in the Crisis because Millennials and/or Xers and/or Boomers are, somehow, not in the right  place. And the only way to do that is to redraw the lines between them significantly - not a small undertaking, with no guarantee that it’s any better than what Strauss & Howe themselves put together.

Still, it’s not useless info. We can use it as support for the Crisis starting 5-8 years ago (vs. 12). We can propose our starting point as more likely 2008 (oldest Millennial 27) or 2005 (oldest Millennial 24). We can look forward to the likely peak and end not only in terms of “22 years, roughly” but “when the youngest Xers turn 45” (that’s 2026). We could look into how many Xers are still having children (the oldest of us are over 50, but the youngest are early 30s) as evidence for whether we REALLY are in midlife. The Boom that names the Boomers was an early boost to the size of the cohort, which could mean that a larger proportion of them are already into elder hood, and does that make them more influential now or later?

Then again, I’m unlikely to find newspaper articles that talk about this, so maybe there really isn’t much to do with it. I’ll be aware, though.

Three

I decided that, if I could find three Crisis-relevant stories, I'd post them and leave it at that.

This could very well be the Cultural Expression and Community Purpose in one place. And, yeah, Millennial.

If most people don’t care, could the NSA still be a major part of the Crisis? I think it COULD be, eventually - if they care,  eventually. I’ll take this as evidence, though, that it isn’t quite the top contender.

On the other hand, people do seem to be paying attention to potential terrorism at the Olympics.  Enough that not only is the U.S. sending ships to the area (keep looking, it's halfway down the page), people are wondering what would happen, really, if something big occurred. And the truth is, it could. World War II stopped the Olympics before, and another Crisis might stop them again.

Headlines

That last one was pretty useful: By knowing what is really relevant - or at least where to focus - we can determine better what sort of items to really pay attention to, and perhaps learn from.

Today’s L.A. Times....er, SUNDAY’s L.A. times, I mean (I often get a day behind on the paper) has the following stories on the front page. Which are most about the Crisis?

1. “Feinstein emerges as spy agencies’ staunch defender”
2. “A deadly distinction: Tiny Westmont has L.A. County’s top homicide rate”
3. “Cartel expelled from town, for now”
4. “Not a usual month for fighting fires”

Unfortunately for Westmont, I’m placing it last out of these four. At most, it is only a symptom of a problem that could, maybe, be a (3): “a threat to the nation’s very survival.”

The firefighting one has a little more going for it, with an undercurrent of climate change as a possible and more likely (3). However, it also mentions the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which has been going on for 1500 years. While that means the bad fire season may not be anthropogenic, it could still be the sort of occurrence that makes everyone notice and care enough to inspire a revival of civic authority. (Remember, it only has to be perceived as a threat...)

Feinstein’s defense of the NSA is in part because she sees terrorism as a major threat. Obama may not have made major changes there, but they could expand. Whether the issue ultimately breaks pro-privacy or anti-terrorism, the divisions that could play out are all in there. There's certainly the potential for several of the indicators. (I was just realizing that the end of V for Vendetta, with everyone in Guy Fawkes masks, is very much a "part of a larger group" pattern.)

The Cartel story, though, hits at least 4 of the 7: major institutional changes (disbanding the police), civic authority (even if vigilanteism), larger groups (a crowd electing leaders by acclamation), and certainly in response to a threat. I find it interesting that people are not yet able to trust that the problems are resolved. (That's the sort of thing that could eventually lead to witch-hunts in the post-Crisis First Turning.) Mexico appears to be ahead of us in the Crisis by at least a few years, and we may witness more indications of what is coming our way by seeing what has happened recently, there.

Identifiers

Here's the official word per LifeCourse.com

1) "Prophets enter elderhood, Nomads enter midlife, Heroes enter young adulthood."

2) "America's institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up"

3) This is a "response to a perceived threat to the nations very survival"

4) "Civic authority revives”

5) "Cultural expression finds a community purpose"

6) "People begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group

7) The Crisis eventually becomes a "founding moment," "refreshing and redefining the national identity."

Unfortunately, 1 is often tautological: If you are in the Crisis, this is your generational constellation because when you are in this generational constellation you are in the Crisis. There is probably something that can be done there to quantify, say, how many of the Prophets have entered elder hood -- when the first one crosses the line isn’t as important as when n% have crossed the line. And if something indicates that no more Nomads are having children are starting new jobs, or when the youngest Civics are of draft age, we can probably predict....something.

For 2, we can look for places where there are radical changes in institutions. If the NSA - formed very shortly after the end of the last Crisis - gets completely redone, we can propose that this is expected, here in the Crisis.

Isn’t everything a “perceived threat” any more? Yeah, that’s the cynical Xer in me... 3 can perhaps be used to distinguish between events that are short-term or political in nature and those that really are Crisis related.

“Civic authority” has to be in comparison to the previous Turnings’ reliance on personal authority, moving from In Me I Trust to In Us We Trust. It doesn’t have to be governmental, and particularly doesn’t have to be the Federal government. This is a part that may be tricky to see, since it could be anywhere from the consolidation of Federal power in the American Civil War to the rejection of British power in the Revolutionary War. The Affordable Care Act is certainly a move back toward civic authority, and a major change in how government interacts with We The People, but that it doesn’t feel to me like a reaction to a threat. I expect the reaction TO the ACA to be the more Crisis-worthy moment, that socialized medicine will be seen as the greater threat.

“Cultural expression” and “community purpose” - I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean, even if I do think we see in culture a reflection of the current Turning. I’ll grant that “Casablanca” does feel this way, and I expect that “The Best Years of our Lives” does, too. Does “Fantasia,” though (from 1940)? How about “The Thin Man” (1934)? When is this expected to start? “The Hurt Locker” might count. So, too, might “The Hunger Games” and its sequels.

“Members of a larger group” is something that can be identified, at least. It seems related to the “Civic authority” item, and the tricky part is determining what groups are forming and why people see themselves there.

For The Founding Moment, no doubt we will have to wait until after the  peak to realize.  The rest of these, though, have something to work with.

Considerations

It can be difficult trying to expand on The Crisis every day. Even if there is something happening that’s relevant, it can get repetitive. There aren’t that many attributes that describe the Crisis:

• Specific generational constellation (Young Civics, Midlife Reactives, Elder Prophets)
• Dissatisfaction with the unfocused societal attitudes that started in the Awakening and became worse during the Unraveling
• Institutions become more powerful, generally at the expense of individual freedom
• Generally, a large-scale and disruptive war (generally at the peak, so not always helpful)

And if I try to describe a different one each day, I’ll still be doing a similar post several times a month. Other times, something that can be seen as an indication of the Crisis may be a weak sort of prediction that may be as relevant to the Awakening (when social structures are changing) or the Unraveling (when they are not what they were) as well. Which undercuts the very idea of saying "We're in a Crisis, and here's how we know."

Still, this has me thinking that I should go through my own concepts of what constitutes the Crisis, compare with those actually in Generations/The Fourth Turning, and really use them as the starting point for my observations. Then I might still end up repeating myself, but I’ll at least know that I am and where and why.

And may help me come up with a reason that the NSA situation is going to turn more on the Dissatisfaction trend (in which case we have some hope) and less on Strengthening Institutions (in which case ... not so much). 

NSA

Today’s post should be writing itself, too. It’s not because is too big and too small to talk about. We have a huge spying bureaucracy that is trying to use all means available to track possible terrorists and terrorist plots. It has some non-intrusive methods to do so, that also happens to require keeping track of everything done by everyone that every person with a phone line. (Which goes to show how we’ve discounted the term “non-Intrusive.”) For a long time, now, we’ve accepted that much was required if we didn’t want planes being flown into innocent people, again. 

Of course, some of the problem is that people didn’t know what was being kept, what it meant to say “never again, no matter the cost.” And when we started finding out, we didn’t necessarily like it. And even people who were all for it, were less for it when it turned out the President wasn’t always going to be a member of their political party.

In any case, today President Obama has made some changes to what the NSA can do. That the NSA was doing what it was, was in no small part because of changes in attitude. And that Obama had little choice but to require those changes, too, were because attitudes can change back quickly.  At some point, we’re going to fall more one way or the other, and that will be the point when we know what the Crisis has been building to.

Hunting

And sometimes the posts just write themselves.

On the front page of the Los Angeles Times this morning, a Colorado town is considering whether to issue hunting licenses for drones. Actually, the person proposing the ordinance is already issuing them, although one shouldn’t expect them to have the force of law at this time. As the story mentions, the town’s trustees split their vote on whether to approve the ordinance outright, so it’s going up for a vote among the residents. It’s a divisive issue. 

The proposal doesn’t distinguish government drones from corporate ones. It’s not, therefore, strictly a Don’t Tread On Me small-government stand. People do recognize some reasonable justifications for a more sober consideration of widespread drone activity - who knows that a drone isn’t delivering illegal drugs, or a bomb? And it limits the number of shots that can be fired (3, unless someone is in danger) so it doesn’t support unlimited shooting just because the target is not alive. 

Despite this restrained and diplomatic tenor, the proposal also justifies the hunting by calling drone overflights an act of war.  

No, really. Act. Of. War.

Not a variation on “home is his castle,” nor “right to protect sovereign airspace,” but Act of War. And I am going on record as saying that this would only happen during a Crisis. This is the only time when “Act of War” can be brandished and NOT be the primary item discussed, whether for its hyperbole or its applicability. That suggests people either agree with it (and no doubt many do) or ignore it. That happens enough, and at some point there will be a reaction,either as the ignorers tire of extremism - or the agreers tire of inaction. 

And that will be when things really become interesting.

Benghazi

While Obama isn’t my vision of the quintessential president, he’s no worse than we deserve. Like any other, he has to deal with mistakes made by people for whom he is responsible, even if he didn’t know nor could have predicted what might have happened. It is perhaps a fault specific to the Crisis that every single mistake gets trumpeted by the opposition, minimized by the President’s party, and investigated to within an inch of Uncaused Causality.

It wasn’t that long ago that a major motion picture implied all the possible fear of the Enemy, the Other, with one word: “Libyans!” It was much less long ago that the country’s leader ended up on the wrong side of a civil war. It was less than a year after the end of NATO involvement that the “Temporary Mission Facility” in Benghazi was attacked. Which is to say, this wasn’t a hardened bunker of a consulate, built up over decades to be an unbreachable fortress. It was a recently implemented and staffed diplomatic mission that sounds like it was set up primarily to facilitate intelligence collection.

Which does lay a lot on Obama’s shoulders, considering he involved the U.S. in the civil war and authorized the consulate (certainly implicitly, if not personally and intentionally). He can’t blame the setup on Bush, nor on calcified traditions in an area where he was not personally involved. (Okay, so it was Bush who moved to normalize relations with Libya six years earlier, and who appointed the first ambassador there since 1972, and that a month after Obama’s election.)  If nothing else, he should have been aware of the  situation in a country that represented a significant foreign policy event of his first term.

I’d still say, though, that the complaints were much more about trying to embarrass the President than make substantive fixes to foreign or defense policy. I recall reading claims that “There was a ship in the Persian Gulf that could have helped but it wasn’t sent!” There is a whole other country (at least) between the Persian Gulf and Libya - it would be DAYS away at top speed. The fighting was over within a day, so even an airborne assault would probably have been too late to help - assuming one could be planned, staffed, and implemented that quickly in a state of limited intelligence. With that sort of assertion, it's not only not going to be taken seriously, it simply reeks of partisan attack. 

Worst

Yeah, where I said “Not bad” in that last one, go ahead and remove the “not.” Check those links or pick up one of the books. I’ll work on it for next time.

Meanwhile, today is the Feast of the Ass (rarely celebrated currently) and the anniversary of the landing on Titan by Huygens. Titan! A moon of Saturn! The outer solar system! I don’t know how I missed that.

And I’m trying to move back towards talking about the Crisis. Today seems like a good day for that, although I can’t describe just why. Maybe that everything in the news seems to be pitched as The Worst Thing Ever. Net Neutrality is dead, dead, dead. The Israeli Minister of Defense doesn’t like Secretary Kerry. Secretary Gates disagreed with Obama.  A bridge was closed for spiteful political reasons. This is our news.

Or, if you prefer, civility is dead. Your cable company will do what it wants with the internet, and it's your problem if that doesn’t go the way you prefer. Our primary ally in the Middle East has people with no compunctions about complaining when we aren’t doing what they would prefer. The former Secretary of Defense thinks its fine to complain about his boss a few months after he stopped working there. And a bridge, paid for by taxpayers for the use of taxpayers, was shut down because some taxpayers weren’t doing what the ruling class - sorry, governor's hirelings - would prefer.

Perception is reality, I’ve been told. If everyone thinks The Worst Thing Ever is happening every day, then it is. That might even be the real definition of the Crisis. We’re all going to get more and more unhappy that we don’t have the life we prefer, until something forces us to change it into one we can stand. And then we’ll really know what Worst Thing Ever can mean.

Theory

Because this is a seat-of-the-pants sort of blogging, not a painstakingly researched investigation into particular areas, it has naturally ended up with what is most natural for my writing style. And when writing about generations, that means casually using the jargon that Strauss & Howe put together. So I have 3 days of “Reactives in the Awakening” posts without any explanation on Reactives or Awakenings. If you are here, I have to expect you know about them. Further, I can’t quite take the time to cross-reference every fundamental principle - if this was a physics blog, I would expect you to know the difference between a proton and an electron, not to mention a positron.

Still, there should be some place set up so you can catch up on enough to follow what’s going on. For the moment, that will be posts like this one, where I will attempt to summarize the theory for newbies. And while that’s not so difficult, it is difficult to do it without getting bogged down in minutia. A once-a-month attempt should give me enough examples that I’ll have a good elevator-speech version that can be used in more places. Here goes:

The Strauss & Howe model of history suggests that there is a two-stroke cycle in human history, comprising a ~90-year “Saeculum” composed of four ~22 year “Turnings.” People growing up during a Turning have much in common with those who grew up in previous Turnings of the same type, and the Turnings themselves represent periods in history with high-level similarities. 

The Four Turnings are

• High: The First Turning is the hopeful period after a major historical Crisis. The most recent High was from 1946-1963, where America and the West were ascendant after World War II. 
• Awakening: The Second Turning is time of social and spiritual tumult, a reaction to the safe sameness of the High. The most recent Awakening was from 1964 to 1984, when youth rebelled against just about everything around them.
• Unraveling: The Third Turning is a time of personal freedom and also of uncertainty, as the last shreds of conformity are swept away.. The most recent Unraveling started in 1985, and evidently ended in 2008 - for me, that was all about the Dot-com era, just as earlier Unravelings are known as “The Roaring Twenties” or “The Gold Rush,” even if that hardly covers the period.
• Crisis: The Fourth Turning is when, after years of talking about changing the world, people start to get serious about it. As indicated by the blog title, here, we are currently in a Crisis period. Before this, the Great Depression and World War II comprised the earlier Crisis, from 1929 to 1945.

Reinforcing this cycle, people who have formative experiences during these periods often have similar outlooks and share some personality traits. This causes the appearance of repeating generational archetypes, so that people raised during the Revolutionary War, say, have similarities to those raised during World War II.

The four generational archetypes are

• Prophet (Idealist): Raised during the static High, Prophets want to change the world. 
• Nomad (Reactive): Overwhelmed by the changes of the Awakening, Nomads reject idealistic hopes, growing up cynical and practical.
• Hero (Civic): Raised during the Unraveling, Heroes are young adults during the Crisis, and are later able to take credit for much of the victories wrought there.
• Artist (Adaptive): During the Crisis, children are simultaneously over-protected and under-indulged, as adults focus on the massive tasks at hand. Artists can tend toward the neurotic, and their young experience with uncertain times leaves them interested in stability afterwards.

Not bad, although not enough to explain how the generations and cycles reinforce each other. The concept that the length of the Saeculum and Turnings are related to attributes of human life would only take up more space here.  If it whets your interest, though, you may also want to check The Fourth Turning site, the Generations topic on Wikipedia, or this site that I ran into while looking up Willy Loman. Hope it helps. 

Whiner

The “whiner” comment about Captain America comes from a time I asked my (Civic) niece what she thought of that (fundamentally Civic) movie. She thought it was fine, although that attribute of his was tiresome. And it’s not unwarranted: He complains when he’s not able to get in the Army, complains when he is a super-soldier who’s only doing bond drives, and doesn’t really stop until he’s complaining about being tossed into the 21st century. His reason for doing what he does is mostly not high-minded or morally exceptional, beyond “I don’t like bullies.” When Erskine is killed it sets him on the path to take down Hydra, even though his justification at each step along the way feels a lot like a personal vendetta of retribution.  Not a soul-stripping sort of vengeance, though, and he seems to internalize it in terms of justice and appropriate response. Still, he can’t seem to move on, can’t seem to let go of his anger and disappointment with the hand that Life has dealt him. 

At least, compared to the other Avengers. Barton and Romanoff appear to be well-satisfied with what they do and how they do it. Thor’s anger seems more of a personality trait that he encourages for tradition’s sake.  Bruce Banner and Tony Stark have some right to be similarly disappointed: The Hulk is too dangerous to everything around him, and being on the verge of your last heartbeat every second has to be life-changing. With them, though, there is  least have the alternate explanation that They Deserve It, whether as an assassin with a guilt complex or a weapons dealer injured in a war zone. It’s a far cry from the way Steve Rogers has had his dreams repeatedly answered and dashed. Which is, lets face it, just what is likely to happen in Hero stories, if not to heroes. I’ll be interested to see if they continue with that theme in The Winter Soldier. 

Captain

I really like Captain America: The First Avenger. The bad guys are so over the top, the advanced technology is so ridiculously BIG just for the sake of it, and it’s unusually ambivalent ending is not like other superhero movies. Plus, of course, it’s such a solid Hero movie, and he is such a solid Hero. 

Even if he is a bit of a whiner.

What do I mean by a “solid Hero movie?” That the narrative thrust is Heroic in nature, as befits a movie about a Hero. And that means that the good guys succeed against the bad guys, through the use of teamwork and significant sacrifice. (Teamwork being a notable attribute of Civic generations, and the rest following on from the realities of Crisis-era conflict.) Steve Rogers wants to be part of the war effort against Hitler, and tries over and over to be accepted into the Army. When he becomes Captain America, his modus operandi is to use his powers in concert with a team of fellow soldiers. Together, they are able to defeat Red Skull and save the United States from what is unleashed from the tesseract. And along the way he loses the doctor who enhances his potential, his best friend, the girl who believes in him, and 70 years of his life. 

"Yeah. Yeah, I just... I had a date."

For comparison,  Tony Stark is not a "good" man to start, doesn't succeed through teamwork, and doesn't have sacrifices nearly as profound. Those attributes are shared with most of The Avengers, in fact, which is one reason why Steve Rogers stands out on that team.

Did I mention the technology? The personal submarine waiting at the docks in New York, the bigger-than-a-Duesenberg staff car, the oversize tanks, the Spruce Goose scale flying wing bomber carrying fighter aircraft that will each take on an American city...Still, they manage to be appropriate for the era, advanced enough to seem futuristic while still belonging in WWII. And fun to watch.

Bias

If I really wanted to, I could continue down the previous path and talk about how “Zombieland” has a good example of a Reactive mentoring a Civic, gaining opportunities for redemption and belonging while showing what needs to be done to survive. Interestingly enough, Woody Harrelson repeats that role in “The Hunger Games.” 

Instead, I’m going to take Harry Potter seriously and start eliminating positive bias from my generational thinking. 

Theories of history aren’t falsifiable, which means they aren’t scientific. One problem would seem to be that there isn’t a way to check proposed tests, there being neither multiple histories to compare nor the ability to run experiments. When alien races are discovered, we may be able to do some cross checks. Or, if there was some way to identify Crisis and Awakening events in bison, elephants, wolves, maybe pilot whales - some animal intelligent and social enough to have culture that could be parsed in this way.  Lacking these options, the natural tendency is to indulge positive bias, always seeing where the theory works but not paying attention when it doesn’t. So when doesn’t it work as we might like?

One of the more damning situations is the set of predictions that were made in Generations that definitely did not come true, concerning future presidents of the United States. The particular prediction I’m considering was that the Boomer generation would start in the presidency in the late 1990s or early 21st century, with GenX starting 10-20 years later.  Instead, the first Boomer was Clinton, elected 1992, and the first GenXer is Obama. One could point out that Clinton read “Generations” and was impressed with it, perhaps enough to positively influence his own success. Still, one of the main absolutely confirmable predictions was unsuccessful, and what value is a theory that can’t predict? 

Another example to consider is the American Civil War anomaly. While Strauss & Howe were able to trace back their proposed generational cycle to the 15th century, they did find that it faltered around the 1870s. Instead of the Hero generation expected from the Crisis, there was a Reactive generation followed by an Artist generation. The Awakening  happens as expected, and the wheel continues to turn after that point. While decent reasons exist for why this anomaly occurred, it’s an acknowledged and definite difference between what is predicted and what occurred. Plus, the lack of another, similar anomaly suggests a hole in the theory around their existence and cause.

Another problem to consider is that two people won’t definitely identify the same Turnings given the same historical events.(A related issue - perhaps less significant - is the inability to recognize a move between Turnings while you’re in the middle of it. “Generations” was published a few years into the Third Turning, though, so there has been exactly one transition to check. )  On “The Fourth Turning” forum, a discussion of Ancient Rome gets several different results, at least one of which is different from mine. (Seems obvious that 44 BC is the start of a Crisis, Christ’s ministry is in an Awakening, the pacification of Judea and Year of Four Emperors as a new crisis, but that’s not what the first proposal on the thread thought.) There is similar disagreement on Russia’s cycle (particularly the period after the Revolution and WWII - when does the Crisis start and end?) If this was approaching a science, we should be able to get similar results. 

Bodhi

What’s less necessary than a Point Break remake? A socio-historical discussion of why it might not be such a good idea.

However, this continues with my recent theme of Reactives vs. the Awakening posts, so I’m rolling with it.

Easy stuff first: It’s a 1991 movie set in the then-modern day, with Keanu Reaves’ (1964, Nomad) Johnny Utah up against Patrick Swayze’s (1952, Prophet) Bodhi. Johnny is an FBI agent investigating a group of bank robbers whose cycle of activity strongly suggests they are surfers. The laid-back intense nature boy and the ex-quarterback FBI agent makes for an inherent generational contrast - and c’mon, it’s “Bodhi,” short for “Bodhisattva,” incarnation of the Buddha.  Bodhi is Taking On The Man, as if it’s still 1967.  Except now it’s the Man who is under 30. 

Ultimately, Johnny is defending the status quo, the current social structures, while Bodhi is rebelling against it. A few years earlier, it might have been possible to set up a story making Bodhi an unequivocal good guy. By 1991, though, the thought of bank robber being appealing BECAUSE he was rebelling wouldn’t fly. Even if you wanted to believe in what he said, there was too much knowledge of where these things lead for the lessons to hold. And Bodhi’s philosophizing is inherently loaded with self-justification:  it’s clear that he’s robbing banks not to change the world, but because he thinks it’s fun.

Following on from my previous posts, an important part of the movie is that young Reactives can’t help but find Awakening ideals appealing, at first. Johnny takes up surfing to infiltrate the local surf scene, quickly falling in with Bodhi’s gang.  Surfing becomes his life, until one professional high point is “I caught my first tube today... Sir.” Bodhi starts to become a spiritual guide, his friends a cult, with surfing their sacrament.

(As I said, sometimes we Reactives can’t help being affected. A few of my friends took up surfing largely because of this movie. )

I’m strongly reminded of Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod through all this. Bodhi chases waves (and other thrills) like Ahab chases the white whale. Ahab has the crew all drink to the death of Moby Dick, and they respond whole-heartedly, excited by the prospect of a legendary quest and associated riches. While the crew’s fervor is diminished by the time the white whale is sighted, they continue to follow Ahab’s leadership, and it leads them where such things go. One could even say that the final shot of Johnny walking away from both Bodhi and the FBI is a cinematic equivalent of Ishmael’s “...and only I have escaped to tell ye.”

Enough on the old. What is going to be needed in the new? If Gerard Butler (1969, Nomad) is supposed to be Bodhi, now, his foil will presumably be a Millennial born in the early 1980s. He’s still the bad guy, although at least that’s more expected with a Reactive role. But the dynamic is ... what, exactly? More precisely, what sort of interaction works between an older bank-robbing extreme sports nut and a younger law-enforcing jock, if the old guy is unbelievable as a spiritual guru and the young guy is unbelievable as a lone wolf?  I’m thinking that the common thread they would have is a distrust of ideals.  While Bodhi might still spout eastern philosophy, it will be more obvious that he doesn’t believe it. That could be contrasted with Johnny’s initial enthusiasm for being part of law enforcement. By the end, it may be seen as just another cult, little different from Bodhi’s gang.  Which may be able to convince Johnny that being part of Team FBI is itself a problem, not a solution.

It’s an option. For that to work, though, the filmmakers will have to commit to a character who knows he’s a fraud. If they try to redo the same Bodhi as Swayze did, it’s likely to fail because Butler wouldn’t be convincing. If you must remake a movie, you need to be aware of what has changed in the interim. 

Reactiveness

That last post - ending as it did  on the likelihood of conservative and even fundamentalist Reactives - started me thinking about how their (our) spiritual lives are affected by the Awakening. Strauss & Howe (Prophets themselves) compare the Reactive response to showing up at the beach on the 5th of July: The fun is over, everyone who was involved is trying to recover, the place is a mess, with garbage both ugly and unsafe scattered around. When “Generations” was published in the early 1990s, that view was similar enough to mine and those around me. 

While growing up, though, kids my age couldn’t help but be influenced by culture and cultural icons that we didn’t yet see through that same cynical lens. I listened to the Beatles, tried to perceive what the Doors had to say, heard Hotel California over and over. If it wasn’t for Led Zeppelin, would Tolkien have been so ubiquitous? Every Heinlein book was promoted as “By the Author of Stranger in a Strange Land” so I was eventually going to end up reading that and being as affected by it as the average flower child. The Starfleet Medical Reference Manual  includes a whole section on psionics and chiropractics, implying - actually, I think it outright SAYS - that the galaxy would be a better place if more people did yoga. There were books on Zen in my (Roman Catholic) high school library, people reading about near-death experiences and studying Jung like he was the most significant head-shrinker out there. (Yeah, fine, so Jung is psychology and not nearly as pseudo-scientific as the rest - his work still seemed to have a strong affinity for Awakening-era mysticism and spirituality. And it may have been in part because of The Police...)

Which is to say, we didn’t - we couldn’t - reject everything about the Awakening, at least not while we were in the middle of it. We had to work our way through it like everyone else. Eventually, though, we started to realize that not everything was as deep as it had seemed. Chiropractors are unlikely to be standard personnel on 23rd century spacecraft. Reading “The Lord of the Rings” doesn’t clarify the lyrics of “Misty Mountain Hop” (or “Stairway to Heaven,” for that matter.) Jim Morrison’s lyrics could be brilliant, or might simply be the end result of too much acid. Your next-elders in the generational cycle will quite naturally end up being the source of your music and media, at least until your generation matures enough to create their own. Coincidentally, the early 1990s was about when exactly that began: There were Reactive writers like Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis; Jane’s Addiction, Guns and Roses, Nirvana on the music side; Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Jon Favreau a few years later.  That’s when it became easier - more natural and obvious - to mock the excesses of the Consciousness Revolution.  

Zelazny

“A Rose for Ecclesiastes” was my introduction to Roger Zelazny. It was one of the many great stories in the excellent Science Fiction Hall of Fame collection I received for Christmas a while back.  I have since read (and generally purchased) almost everything he wrote, moving through “Nine Princes in Amber” through the rest of that series (and its sequels), on to  “Creatures of Light and Darkness,” “Isle of the Dead,” and “Lord of Light,” continuing through “The Doors of his Face The Lamps of His Mouth” and other stories in that and other collections. 

There usually isn’t Crisis-fodder anywhere, now that I think of it: While his protagonists may be in serious trouble, the universe around them usually isn’t changing all that much.  There are exceptions: Mahasamatman’s attempts to overthrow Heaven naturally are, uh, disruptive, although one could argue that he is instigating Awakenings. Corwin ends up attacking Amber, the Center of All, and ends up with the fate of all existence in the balance. Usually, though, the main character is in a relatively stable locale, even if it is in the aftermath of a recognizable Crisis (“This Immortal” refers to the Three Days which destroyed civilization on Earth). 

Zelazny was born in 1937, an Artist, and his characters’ worldviews often reflect that place in history. “Ecclesiastes,” in particular, is narrated by an explorer on Mars - not the usual sort, though, not whom you might expect to be sent to Mars on the first or even tenth exploratory journey. While Gallinger’s main talent is in linguistics, his fame is as a poet. He goes to Mars, which is inhabited by a race more ancient than humanity, in order to learn their tongue and their poetry. He succeeds, although that’s not really what the story is about...

My particular interest is a description of Gallinger’s relationship with his father. A fire-and-brimstone preacher,  he encouraged Gallinger’s language talents as a way to understand the Word “like in the original” (e.g. Hebrew and Aramaic). On the face of it, that seems a little unlikely, at least if you expect that the Poet must be an Artist (Adaptive) and the Preacher a Prophet (Idealist).  Since the order of generations is Artist then Prophet, it follows that a Prophet father could only have an Artist son in his 50s or 60s. (The youngest Prophet in 1937, for example, would have been born in 1882 and turning 55 years old.) It’s worth considering, also, that Reactives tend to be more conservative, as they react to the tumult of the Awakening by seeking out stability. The father’s “fundamentalist vigor” could be traced to that source instead. 

Great

Because it's the Feast of the Epiphany (tangential as that may be): Why is Herod “The Great”?

Surviving through the Crisis precipitated by Caesar’s assassination, he still was the sort of person who gives Reactives our bad name.  Christians know him for attempting to kill the infant “King of the Jews” by massacring two-year-old boys in the area. He was a client king for the Romans, which you would think would make him less than appealing to those who trace their heritage to Judea. And while he managed to keep the peace during his lifetime, it seems that he took whatever steps he could to stay on the right side of whoever was in charge in Rome - to the point of eliminating his own family members when needed.  Still, you don’t hear him referred to as “Herod the Cruel” or “Herod the Politically Nimble” or “Herod the Dangerously Unhinged.” 

In the tradition of post-Crisis Highs, he initiated some significant public works: Caesarea, Masada, rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. This can be a way to garner a good name for yourself. Maybe his sons, who took over after Herod’s death, were such a step backward that he was “the Great” by comparison. Or maybe he really was a savvy enough ruler that the other issues were considered relatively unimportant infractions. Which is, in fact, another way that Reactives make their names.

Roses

On New Year’s Day, for years and years, local independent television station KTLA has been broadcasting the Tournament of Roses parade. This year, in the hours before the live broadcast, the station replayed the 1984 and 1994 parades.  The more I watched of the 1994 one, the more I realized how much happened that year:

• There are no websites mentioned or associated with any of the floats or companies. The World Wide Web was around in 1994, but still very new.
• One float celebrated the upcoming World Cup, which was to open on June 17. Unfortunately upstaged by O.J. Simpson’s slow-motion LAPD chase. (And evidently that’s not all that happened that day.)
• For the first time, Disney had a float in the parade, promoting Mickey’s Toontown at Disneyland. It had been opened barely a year before, five years after the release of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”
• A few weeks later, the Northridge Earthquake would rock Southern California, affecting areas as distant as Santa Monica, Santa Clarita, and Anaheim.

Which events, interesting as I find them, aren't necessarily tied to the Crisis, although these items of interest seem so innocent compared to events in more recent years.

Buffoons

I’d previously mentioned how I consider Polonius to be a Reactive, even though the “traditional portrayal” of him “as a sycophantic buffoon” isn’t what you expect from the “practical ... Nomad archetype.”  It’s not at all unusual to see Reactives portrayed as having a practical bent without being especially intelligent or wise. If we take Willy Loman as being 63 in 1949 (the first year the play was produced) he’s a solid Lost generation born during the Progressive era who obviously hasn’t quite managed his career optimally. Michael Scott from “The Office” is a great salesman who keeps making mistakes that could easily be career-ending.  Bert Cooper is an icon of success and stability for the various “Mad Men” advertising agencies, while also being the crazy old guy  that nobody quite gets. Huckleberry Finn manages to get himself and Jim well down the Mississippi, although he is not only uneducated but resists attempts at education.  Liz Lemon, while a successful show-runner, is on the edge of buffoonery, and most of her writers and friends are well beyond where a portrayal of Polonius might go. 

There can be a fine line between a practical ability always to land on your feet and being so successful where you are that you can’t adapt when changes happen. And if you are a Reactive, the big changes will be occurring late in life, making adaptation that much harder.  Which, I’d say, is what happens to both Loman and Polonius, both of whom appear to meet their tragic fates a few years after the Crisis. They both seem to be trying to continue earlier successes using out-of-date processes - it has become common for Polonius’ “To thine own self be true” speech to be treated as platitudes for a previous generation, mocked by Ophelia and Laertes.Ultimately they are tripped up by believing the world where they grew up is the world they still inhabit, trusting that the system will protect them, as it has before. They are treated as fools in their respective plays largely because they don’t recognize how much has changed.

Hobbits

Was reading about how Guillermo del Toro was looking at Tolkien’s World War I experiences because he thought they would give insight into “The Hobbit.” It seems clear to me that, just as “The Lord of the Rings” is a full-on Crisis story, “The Hobbit” is very much a Third Turning story. Bilbo Baggins may be a reluctant adventurer, but an adventure is what he has - one in pursuit of treasure, no less. His only companions are the dwarves who have hired him, not as a hero but as a “burglar.” (One could say that is the primary skill of Indiana Jones, as well.) He returns to Bag End with his weapon Sting, a suit of mithril-mail, and settles down with his well-earned riches into the habits of a modest gentleman. 

By comparison, Frodo is immediately aware of the significant danger of his quest, making him even less interested in heroics for their own sake. His departure is with friends Merry, Pippin and Sam, a group that eventually joins the Fellowship that adds five other traveling companions. Before the quest is complete, war has enveloped the entire land. (Compare this with the “Battle” that ends the Hobbit: while intense, it affects a comparatively tiny region of Middle-Earth.)  Fighting ends only when the destruction of the Ring ensures that victory is complete and absolute - and incidentally changes the world irrevocably. Even the Shire has to play its part, being ravaged by Sharkey before it is Scoured and rebuilt. Unlike Bilbo’s relaxed retirement, Frodo is unable to leave behind the travails he endured, at least not until he sails completely away from the land where they occurred.

Unionization

Today I went to see the floats from the 125th Tournament of Roses Parade. I took the Metro Red Line from North Hollywood to end-of-the-line at Union Station, then the Gold Line from there to end-of-the-line at Sierra Madre Villa. It wasn’t until the trip back that I realized I was heading through UNION Station. The architectural style uses southwest motifs and the occasional Arts & Crafts detail, which made me expect that it was an early 1900 design. That UNION, though ... Either it comes from the Union Pacific Railroad, named in the early 1860s to represent its source in the non-Confederate United States, or it is directly referencing that same political entity for similar reasons. 

We easily ignore the very definite references used in so many place names around us, all the time. The floats themselves were at Victory Park, not to be confused with Memorial Park (one of the stops on the Gold Line), nor with Victory Boulevard (significant enough to be the San Fernando Valley’s shout-out in Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.”). I would not be at all surprised to find that all three represent completely different wars. I doubt they are related to the war that Union Station gets its name from, though: Besides California being a Free state, there was little enough that happened here which would be worth memorializing. The name of Union Station is a reminder, though, that the war was different in kind from others of that century, and important enough to be worth naming the primary terminus of railways from across the continent. You weren’t to forget, it appears, that it was the Union, together, that made it all possible. 

And sometimes .. you would be completely wrong. In this case, “Union” has nothing to do with the war: It’s a generic term for a station owned jointly by several railway companies that share expenses for a single terminus. The one in Los Angeles actually opened in May 1939 - coincidentally, just a couple of months after the publication of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” - and was one of the last such built. While we’re at it “Memorial Park” actually was dedicated, in 1906,  to the defenders of the Union. Victory Park refers to World War II, while Victory Boulevard was given that name after World War I.

Redirect

I have been adding entries to this blog sporadically for a while. Often, they have been what I can pull together in 20 minutes or less - the period of time between entering the subway and leaving it on my daily commute - as that was often all of the writing time I had in the day. And it was an interesting challenge, to see if one could populate a blog in such a way. As seen, the answer is “Sorta.” It was a good way to use that time, when I managed it.  It’s not a lot of time, though,  to pull a thought together, hash out the implications, write it down and fix misspellings and be left with something worth the posting.

Another issue is that there is too much pressure to reconsider, rewrite, redo. “Do I really want to post this? Is it Important Enough for what I Should Be Saying? Have I Properly Attributed Everything I Say?” That, too, keeps one from posting as often as one could. Which is my real reason for heading in a new direction, here: I’m going to post once a day. If I don’t have much to say, I won’t say much. If it turns out to be a stupid prediction/observation/intuition, it’s stupid. If I can do it every day, though, at least one or two items should be good enough for, well, a part-timer’s blog.

With that in mind, I’m also going to expand my vision a bit, to other topics related to Strauss & Howe that I find of interest. This might include

• News, predictions, and intuitions related to The Crisis as it unfolds, as before
• Ways of describing how this theory of history works (without churning up opaque jargon) and ways of making it useful
• Applying the theory to the arts - primarily literature and movies, although I made an accurate architectural prediction once - to see what insights it can give
• And anything related to Strauss & Howe’s books and predictions

Because you don’t jump into this sort of thing without a good running start, I’ve been practicing this daily writing thing for a little while now. Some of those previously written items are likely to end up here at some point, in which case I will copy and paste and leave them without any guilt.  Today, though, everything recent is too apocalyptic and negative to be appropriate at the start of the year. I’m making a new start, I want it to flow organically - and I don’t want to drag us down into the muck already....so here’s what I have.

There is a lot to be said about the recently released “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” - enough that I expect I will come back to it a few times. One is that it doesn't seem to quite fit in our time, right now, this Crisis.  This Slate story mentions that it was in development for about 20 years, and that the initiating event of the film - the closing of Life magazine - happened “over a decade ago.” (That depends how you count it: Wikipedia says it lived on until 2007 as a supplement, although its last proper issue was May 2000.) In any case, there was certainly the feeling that it was a pre-Crisis movie: The worst-case scenario is that your company gets taken over and you are unemployed as a result? Not a terrorist attack or a complete meltdown of the financial system or a hurricane smashing into the city? 

It seriously reminded me of a Saturday Night Live parody of Rankin Bass animations from a  few months after 9/11. The old Burl Ives-voiced snowman tries to convince the audience about the danger from the villains, including an abominable snow monster, before giving up in the face of recent real-life dangers of terrorism. “Oh, we’re so scared of some crappy abominable snow monster” is about what I wanted to say to Ben Stiller at various points.