Explaining

Another attempt to Explain It All, as anyone who tries to read more than a day or two here will be hit with a lot of jargon that is too useful to lose. Here goes:

Strauss & Howe set up a theory (or model) of history that includes the following structures:

There's a 80-100 year cycle called the Saeculum.  The current ("Millennial") Saeculum started after the end of World War II, and will be concluding in about 10-15 years. 

Within the Saeculum, there are  20-25 year sub-cycles called Turnings. Looking back through history, we see them repeating, in the same order, going back at least 500 years.

1. First Turning - High - exuberance and exceptionalism; conformity and corruption  - most recent: 1946-1963
2. Second Turning - Awakening - spirituality and hope; hypocrisy and disappointment - most recent: 1964-1984
3. Third Turning - Unraveling - freedom and opportunity; uncertainty and fear - 1985-2007?
4. Fourth Turning - Crisis - excitement and creation ; war and destruction; previously 1929-1945, but also our current turning: 2008?-2030?

People born during a given Turning experience many of the same historical events around the same period of their lives, giving them broadly similar outlooks. These cohorts are called Generations, and each is associated with the following Archetypes and Turnings:

Prophet - raised during High - “Boomers” - Current ages: 53-70 years

Nomad - raised during Awakening - “Generation X” - 33-52 years

Hero - raised during Unraveling - mostly “Millennials”  8-32, a few GI Generation > 87 years

Artist - raised during Crisis - “Homelanders” < 8 and “Silent” 71-86 years

The recurring cycles of generations help reinforce and perpetuate the Turnings, and vice-versa. The repeating nature means that we can expect, for example,  a High to begin in the late 2020s, bringing both positives (new exploration!) and negatives (metaphorical (generally) witch hunts. Sooner than that, of course, we can similarly predict a massive war as part of the Crisis. 

But if you are here, you must have known that already.

Bias

Been a while since a proper anti-positive-bias post, so here’s one on previous speculation concerning Total Factor Productivity. I conjectured that it was higher in the 3rd and 4th turning - going along with personal freedom, which peaks in the former and begins decreasing in the latter. 

According to this tome, however, TFP increased massively from the Roaring 20s to World War II. It was still inordinately high until roughly 1973. After that, it was stagnant until 1990. Since then, it has moved higher again, but nothing like the early part of the last century. If anything, in fact, it’s LOWEST during the Third Turning - both 1900-1920 and 1973-1990 are low, and low TFP hangs over onto the Second as well. 

Worth keeping in mind, also, that "1973" can be an indicator of an unusual year when speaking of economics: The year that the oil, uh, crisis happened.  Productivity dropped as people had to figure where they would get gas for their cars....

Tesla

This is a straight financial post, although it does tie to the Total Factor Productivity discussions earlier, plus the Green Power discussion on Predictions.   

Holding Tesla stock is tricky, as it has been solidly up for over a year now - although during that time it went from below 100 to over 200 to below 150 to almost 250 today. My plan is to stick with it because it is positioned to work with several areas of the potential electric car market  

-- Cars. They make cars, sell them for large amounts of money, and have a backlog of people wishing to purchase more. 

-- Batteries. Perhaps the better place to be is in selling batteries that can be used in cars. If those batteries could be usable in ANY car - and there was some protection from others entering what is now a commodity market - it could be a place to make money regardless of who makes the rest of the car. Plus, the ability to do battery swaps automatically could be the equivalent of being Standard Oil in the 21st century.

-- Supercharger : if nothing else, Tesla has a network of (working and in-use) charging stations that could be leveraged to work with future electric cars, regardless of make. Although non-Tesla cars will probably need to pay for the privilege. 

-- Cars 2: Consumer Reports notes the impressive integration between car and computer. Redoing the user interface for cars could be a high margin area if complete cars turn out to be problematic.

The Fourth Turning is a place where fortunes change overnight. Tesla continues to push its brand, its vehicles, and its vision. It looks like a good bet to continue being impressive for some time to come. It’s tempting to go Bear on it, or at least to expect this to be a high-water mark. Not today, though.

Exhortation

Maybe this is all bogus - maybe the Crisis is an example of apophenia, finding patterns in random events. Trying to find an indicator of it ahead of time may be just another hopeless quest, like transmutation or weather prediction. Although the latter isn’t too difficult, at a rough level: In three months it will be hotter than now, three months after that it will be MUCH hotter, three months after that it will cool a lot. 

Perhaps, like the weather, the Crisis is predictable, although maybe not enough to be helpful. We may be able to discern this future event in only vague ways. Clearly, though, it will have to be something where leaders can say "We must attack X" and the response is thunderous applause. Japan, Dixie, the Redcoats... if that speech can't be imagined, it is hard to see it becoming the Crisis. People need to care enough about the issue to support it, there must be supporters able to describe the issue eloquently, it must be possible to describe it as Us versus Them.

A cynic might say this also implies that X can be defeated, or at least that must be the perception. A future of certain painful death without victory will not ever inspire applause of a sufficiently thunderous nature. While Japan and Germany were mighty, the U.S.A. had been preparing in numerous ways for a possible showdown. The Union certainly saw that they had the upper hand over the Confederacy - and the Confederacy came close enough to victory that their hopes could be seen as not excessively optimistic. 

Who could we fight? Who can we beat? The other important question would probably be: Who don’t we like? Answer all three, and you’ll probably know where the Crisis will go.

Airborne

For no reason I can remember, I googled "I wanna be an airborne ranger" the other day. It may have been a random memory of The Breakfast Club, but it is certainly true that one of the Google suggestions was a variation of "What is Bender yelling when he runs down the hall?" The idea that someone has to ask that question makes me think that something about that reference is tied to the time of the film (the early 1980s, 1984 in particular). Do teenage boys NOT know that cadence these days? Is that no longer in use even in the military? 

Or yes, perhaps someone was just wondering about the words or history. I may be reading too much into this. I'm going to run with it, though.

To start, it says a bit about Bender that he knows and is singing it. He may be mocking the institutional hierarchy of school by comparing it to the Army. Perhaps he is expecting that this detention will end with that as his only career option. To know the words, he would have been around others who knew it, presumably with some connection to the military   Most likely, that would mean enlisted military, it being  a marching cadence associated with soldiers rather than officers. In 1984, that could mean folks who had been in Vietnam a decade or so before. 

(Teachers at my high school, around that same time, would regale students with dropping-Charlie-out-of-helicopters war stories.  For all I know, they were cribbed from John Kerry, but there it was.)

In the current Millenial army, even a song as relatively tame as this might not be sung. An article in Soldiers Magazine indicates that the Army started toning down off-color cadences in the mid-80s - soon, that is, after Bender was first seen calling this one. Perhaps Do Wa Diddy Diddy is standard, now.

Duration

One of the especially useful properties of Strauss & Howe is that it helps recognize the importance of duration when considering history. Yesterday’s postmentioned a certain fictional period of civil war of twenty years length. It’s hard to comprehend the idea of preparing for war for 20 years, of keeping a critical mass of people in support of the Cause even as the remainder that remembers The Time Before suffers the natural attrition that can be caused by so much time.  (A task even more difficult when no victories occur until the end of that time.) Before S&H, though, trying to make sense of it might not even have come up - might not even have been obvious it was an issue.

When keeping track of history in terms of Turnings and Generations, much time can be spent identifying start or end dates. The year 1968 was important to the Boomer generation, so how old were they when it started? Subtract 1943 (the first Boomer year) from 1968 to get 25 - that’s the oldest possibility.  Which means someone just out of college (or the military), starting a career and maybe a family. At the other end, the youngest Boomers were born in 1960 - they were 8 (1968 minus 1960), old enough to be aware of the news, perhaps not paying attention to it. Plus a good chunk - maybe half, 13-22 year olds - are in high school and college. It quickly becomes second nature to subtract someone’s age from an event date to see when they were born, or to consider the changes that are likely to occur over 20, 40 or 80 years. Alternatively, one may think in terms of terms of Child (minimally aware, easily affected by events), Young Adult (child raising, early career), Midlife (mostly post-child, late career), and Elder (retired or differently active).  Whether depending on mathematics or life events, the difference in effect between a 2 year gap and a 20 year one is more obvious, and the implications clearer.  

Some of this, of course, can be attributed to the effects of advancing age and having a longer outlook on life, from nothing more than the act of living longer. Still, it’s should be a learnable skill. 

Children

Whattaya mean Laertes is a Prophet? He’s a fictional character!

There’s a well-known critical essay called “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth” - well-known for Shakespeare geeks, at least - that mocks the idea of treating Shakespeare’s creations like real people. While the concern is understandable, this sort of analysis can help reveal aspects of these works of art, including why people find them compelling. Ultimately, it’s because good fiction should mimic reality enough to feel real.

We expect people to act in natural ways. “Walking casually” is easily visualized , “walking casually onto the ceiling“ had better be explained.  Someone angered by love, happy with death, or frightened by injustice would seem abnormal, although it would at least be obvious why a reader recognizes such abnormality. A good writer may not even recognize that he is setting up his world in this way, or realize that he is adhering to certain conventions. He may only be trying to make it as realistic as possible.

Other situations, though unnatural, can be more subtle. In "Bullets Over Broadway", co-playwright Cheech says that the play’s audience "know it’s wrong - they may not know why but they KNOW. " He is speaking of a play wherein a psychologist is played by a "horrible" actress who "ruins scenes she's not even IN!" We can infer that the clear impossibility of this actress being a doctor means other events in the play cannot be believed. Similarly, there are generational expectations that can be noticeable when not realistically portrayed. Some of them are more properly historical or sociological:  it’s unlikely that a galaxy-wide war that penetrated to the heart of the government wouldn’t quickly result in an end to hostilities. It’s much less likely for the decisive end to that war to be followed by a civil war that manages to continue for nearly 20 years. The two periods of war are understandable enough on their own - this is the civil war, this is the defensive war - but trying to make sense of the entire scope of history may be one reason the prequel trilogy didn’t do as well in the box office. 

A “real” generational constellation can enhance the believability of a story, in whatever form. Conversely, characters who don’t fit the archetypes relative to each other can make a narrative more difficult to accept. Laertes needs to make sense as his own father’s son, and as someone who has lived in a generally peaceful period - unlike, say, Old Hamlet, who lived in much more dangerous times. To the extent the playwright has been successful at this, we can talk about whether these characters work as Artist, Prophet, Nomad, or Hero.

Laertes

Getting a late start tonight, so I’m going to put together something quickly, the first thing that comes to mind....

Does it make sense that Laertes is a Prophet? We don’t know THAT much about him, really - he’s a student, in Paris, Polonius doesn’t completely trust him to keep the family’s good name, he considers it appropriate to warn Ophelia off of Hamlet,  his sister suspects that he’s doing much of what he’s warning her against, he’s a decent swordsmen - oh yeah, and he gets closer than Hamlet does to being king through raising up the ire of enough people to storm the castle. He also speaks truth to power more directly than Hamlet, demanding an explanation from Claudius about what happened to his father. Both of those are actually pretty good Prophet indicators, particularly considering that he is young - youth being a time when Prophets raise up crowds and speak truth to power.

One question is whether the (presumably) Reactive Polonius could have feasibly spawned a Prophet son. Using the 20th century as an example, a (Boomer) Prophet would have been born in 1943 at the earliest, when a (Lost) Reactive would have been at least 43. Not too likely to be a mother at that age, but being a father is doable, and possible even if an older (perhaps up to 60) Reactive. 

Beyond that, Hamlet appears to be Adaptive, which would mean Laertes is a few years younger.  (Possibly very few: Hamlet could be a late Adaptive, Laertes an early Prophet - might only be a year or two of difference.) There’s not much specifically to suggest or deny that, though, unless you find the earlier descriptors compelling evidence on their own. They appear to be close in age - both are students, after all - and if Ophelia is girlfriend material for Hamlet, one might expect that she and Laertes weren’t born too far apart. (Although Laertes seems more like a big brother than a little one.)

Mitty

In the Los Angeles Times, there was an interview with Ben Stiller about his “Walter Mitty” movie - unless it’s a background piece about the movie that happens to include observations from the director, Mr. Stiller. In any case, it notes that it is an updated version of the story, what today might really be called a “reboot.” I remember reading it in high school and understanding the ideas and themes behind it, so it’s not like there was all that much about it that was really deep or complex: This guy has a life that is excessively normal and not always in a good way, and he escapes from it in elaborate daydreams that make him think he is more than the workaday guy he is. 

Post-S&H, of course, there are additional inferences to make even from what little I remember in detail about it. Some of the details, though, are mixed up thematically and chronologically, which makes a proper generational analysis fraught with pitfalls. If I remember the (1950s) Danny Kaye movie, I’m going to get a different feel for it than from the (1930s?) original stories. I might expect that it is more of a High (Artist-focused, boring present post-war) narrative than a Crisis (crazy present, Civic/Hero-focused) one. And what I remember makes it more of the former, which makes me distrust my expectations from this update.

Nonetheless, the Times’ article refers to it as “a bit like what Falling Down might look like if Michael Douglas had gone to a more redemptive place.” That movie - set in the Unraveling, and as appropriate a metaphor for the entire 20 year period as anything -  is  of a Boomer trying to navigate a world as it changes from one where he is an important cog in the machine to one where he may as well not exist. It’s a tragedy, and I need to examine my Four Stories to determine how to turn them around to work in that context (except for the Artists, of course, for whom I have to figure how comedies work, instead. Two words: Harold and Maude.) I’ll toss out that if moral superiority isn’t enough for the hero to succeed, it’s a tragedy. And that is to some extent just the deal with that movie: D-Fens has some very particular ideas about how the world works, should work, is supposed to work, and he tries to convince those around him of how correct he is, with gunfire where appropriate.  That’s even one of the appealing things about the movie, that he does make such sense and you want the world to work the way he says. 

As for Mitty, of course it needs to be Redemptive: It’s a Reactive doing a Reactive Story.  The original was not: I’d guess that a re-reading will show me someone doing what he can to survive in a Crisis period, while the Danny Kaye one will, in fact, be the Artist story in the High. The same article alludes to the sort of things that you would need to make those stories Redemptive: an earlier sense of hope, a thought of chances missed and potential squandered, the possibility of earning it all back. And it requires that things can change.

Signs

In the postwar era, people liked their signs BIG. There were 30 foot tall donuts, enormous statues holding tires or carpet or buckets of chicken - giant buckets of chicken, for that matter. Huge clowns pushing alcoholic beverages. The Golden Arches started off as actual arches across buildings and the original Bobs Big Boy sign is 70 feet tall - these for hamburger restaurants. Presumably there was a reason this outsized advertisement became popular - and cost effective, one hopes. What might have gone into the economic calculation?

First, it should be acknowledged that the same explanation might not hold for all. The first of the Muffler Men was in 1962, while Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank was built in 1949. They may seem symbolic of the First Turning because they are so big and noticeable, rather than truly being ubiquitous at the time. And several of these examples had predecessors from well before the war. 

Caveats aside, we can note that these are all intended as advertising, with size implying easy visibility from a distance. In the post-war car culture, it also meant that the sign could be seen for a longer time while someone was driving past in a car, and by more people who might not be driving directly by. Branding was likely weakened by the extended wartime allocation of resources away from consumer goods. This meant that smaller shops and chains had an opportunity to increase sales by using more obvious advertising. Further, these signs could have worked to signal better quality - if a firm was successful enough to have a big sign, they must make money and so have good products. Perhaps, too, there was the belief in American superiority, supported by the American victory, that encouraged being the best and biggest whenever possible.

Change

Friends on Facebook recently posted photos of the thoroughly frozen Great Lakes, and also of the great city of Atlanta gridlocked by unexpected snow. This is certainly not sufficient to disprove climate change: Salt and ice can be used to freeze ice cream, but that's because the ice is being melted by the salt. Conversely, the reconstructed climate record shows variability that to this (admittedly) untutored eye could mean this is as natural as the last million years of Milankovitch cycles.  Although I will agree with Dr. Pournelle that running an open-ended experiment in the only atmosphere available should probably be scaled back if feasible.

However. 

None of that matters with regards to the Crisis. The Strauss and Howe model is ultimately sociological, and within it “Perception is Reality” is a tautology.  If there are enough unusual weather events, people will think it is happening and if enough think it is happening, they will expect and support change. Alternatively, if the events are mostly cooling in nature, the previous claims that pronounced “warming” as the main danger will result in people discounting what happens. Hopefully this would only mean the warnings are ignored.  In the worst case, they could be reversed - say, via a revolt against opaque science, wherein only things explainable to the populace are considered worthy of democratic debate. “If you can't explain it simply you don't understand it,” said Einstein .... in a poster I saw at work once ... and Congress has trouble enough with what it does understand. The S&H model predicts only that a Crisis will occur, and that it is due to people reacting to a (perceived) national threat. There’s no guarantee that the “threat” is the most dangerous one, much less that the people will choose the best response.

For future Prophet generations, let me recommend holding off on demanding immediate change unless the facts are incontrovertible. (Not necessary, of course, for moral claims, as they are normally undecidable - and besides, you wouldn’t listen in that case anyway.) That will help avoid people ignoring ALL early wild claims when SOME of them are proven false. Jenner proved that vaccination worked in 1796 but it took until 1979 for enough support to eradicate smallpox. Roosevelt held off until the Japanese themselves revealed their expansionist aims. It might seem like another second will be too late. Unless you are sure, though, that early pronouncement may do more harm than good.

W

“Refusals” was supposed to be the 2/14 post - I must have missed the button or something, because I realized today that it was only a draft, not a post. As far as I’m concerned, though, technical issues don’t count for whether I’m keeping up with a-post-a-day. 

The more I find out about The Great War, the more the players match up with our current Crisis. I recently read how Theodore Roosevelt was a big fan of the Kaiser and was supportive during his presidency. A few years later, the Kaiser was suddenly a huge threat who had to be neutralized. And that "suddenly" was during Woodrow Wilson's presidency, only a few years later. Wilson was elected in no small part because he pledged to keep the U.S. out of the war and focus on domestic issues. 

That lasted - despite other incentives - until the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat with the loss of nearly 1200 lives. As far as the Germans and British were concerned, the Great War had been going on several years, and it was early in the conflict that the Germans made clear that British coastal areas were part of the war zone. The United States and its people may have been less aware of this declaration, which didn’t make them any less forgiving of the resulting deaths of Americans.  The United States entered the war on the 

Which means the broad parallels are:

Kaiser Wilhelm == Saddam Hussein

Woodrow Wilson == George W. Bush

German War Zone declaration == Osama Bin Laden’s Fatwas

Sinking of the Lusitania == 9/11

Conspiracy theories == Truthers

World War I == Iraq War

There are problems, of course - what parallels match exactly, in these exercises. Hussein's lack of involvement in 9/11 is a significant contrast with the Germans re: Lusitania. Roosevelt is a fine parallel with Reagan, as they are both Republicans (like Bush), but Wilson was a Democrat.   Much of it works well, though.

What World War II is in this progression is left as an exercise for the reader.

Refusals

The Peoplemover was one of the Disneyland attractions created as part of the 1967 Tomorrowland update. It went through some changes over time until people lost interest in  what was simply an automated tour of Tomorrowland. A while after it was closed down,  the Peoplemover tracks were updated with an attraction called Rocket Rods. Except for the updated vehicles, it was little more than a faster moving Peoplemover. Evidently, a number of design flaws and related maintenance problems resulted in it being closed after only a few years.

The Peoplemover loading area was reused for Rocket Rods, with an extended queue that took over the Circlevision 360 theater. Among the films showed for the amusement of waiting guests was a montage of “futuristic” transportation concepts: land ferries that took on dozens of cars for unified transport, variations of trains and boats and planes, all the sort of concepts that are clearly from the postwar (First Turning) era. And none of which are in use now, or even being seriously considered.

All of which came to mind with regards to the idea that freedom to create is the driver behind the Third and Fourth turnings, that it explains not only the Total Factor Productivity increase but the “gold rush” pattern of the Third and possibly the ultimate form of the Fourth’s Peak. These transportation concepts, on the other hand, mostly didn’t ever make it off paper. And looking at it in terms of the Saeculum, one can imagine the disconnect when trying to suggest setting up these relatively wacky ideas. It’s 1951 (say), and the bright young proposer is pitching this Land Ferry concept. Only a few years after the end of the War, the target of the pitch (let’s say it’s General Motors) is trying to take advantage of built up demand on products (cars, say) that recently became available for purchase outside the government. 

(By the end of WWII, GM still had full-page ads in Life and other magazines - not to sell cars so much as explain WHY they weren’t currently selling cars. Those ads extolled the benefits GM motors gave to (for example) the Sherman tank, kept the brand in front of consumers, and assured people that the lack of any new GM cars was “Only for the duration.”)

Our smart cookie talks about the Land Ferry. His manager looks at the opportunity for expansion from the built-up postwar demand, the improvements to existing products that can be implemented with recently-new technology, the competition to be expected for those opportunities and the related need to focus on what is currently available for sale. There would also be consideration of  current cash flows, possibly not being enough to keep the company going now that government subsidies aren’t around - and who is going to pay for implementing this, anyway?   Probably also a bit concerning whether this sort of free-thinking is such a good idea - maybe now should be about consensus, working as a team to find what to do next and how. The expected response is going to be “Let’s hold off - let’s take care of the money on the table before sawing the table into all-new pieces.” Repeat and repeat again, and those radical ideas are shut down before they can get anywhere. At least until enough people are annoyed by the effort to keep the status quo pure that they start to rebel - and so the Awakening returns again.

Humor

In The Little Golden Book “The Good Humor Man,” we see the title character go out into the world, doing only what he was sent to do: Deliver ice cream.  He succeeds, and so much more.

When he arrives, people come out, leaving their work behind. He pulls in everyone, from boys and girls to mommies and daddies. He walks among the working class at the garage and the construction site, helps the elderly in the  name of Grandma Griggs.  He saves Johnny Slowpokes puppy, and brings together Johnny Slowpoke and Dick Griggs. 

Where does he fit? He does fit in best as a Prophet as someone who is inherently Right. He is not himself Redeemed, not does he succeed only through sacrifice or teamwork. He succeeds by pulling people together and showing them what’s going on around them. While he’s not the most exceptional Christ figure ever, the narrative does work in that direction. 

Creation

That Total Factor Productivity thing is looking more interesting each day - especially on a day when fusion has been successful in a lab. A BIG lab, but a lab nonetheless. Folks have been working on the (controlled) fusion problem since at least the first hydrogen bomb, yet it took until the crisis itself to have this success. Fission, it’s worth considering, was successful not too many months after Pearl Harbor - a lot of technological improvement over the course of 30 years. Much of that improvement did occur during the Great Depression and the first year of the war, including the first nuclear reaction, the discovery of the neutron, and the determination that some reactions were evidently generating energy from fission. Looking with a similar view over the last few years, we’ve seen smartphones become ubiquitous, solar cells blossoming from rooftops, LED light bulbs that are unexpectedly energy-efficient, and electric cars which are only uncommon rather than unusual. 

It does seem as if we might be in a burst of technological breakthroughs that are simply being overshadowed by darker economic and political news. As mentioned before, the technological difference between 1935 and 1950 is surprisingly evident, in everything from clothing styles to automotive tech. Even with the improvements previously noted, there is not THAT much difference between today and 1999 - and much of the difference that there is can be seen as easily over the last 5 or 8 years (i.e. since the start of the Fourth Turning.)

Accepting for a moment that this phenomenon is real, can Strauss & Howe explain it? What about the Fourth Turning might inspire such an unexpected boon? In S&H, the expectation is that the Fourth is about survival rather than improvement, so what’s going on? If it is really happening, it seems likely that this is related to the cycle of personal freedom, which begins increasing during the Awakening and peaks around the start of the Crisis. Which is to say, during the 3rd and 4th Turnings, innovation and self-improvement are ascendent over maturation and hierarchical improvement. A lot of exciting things happen at once as creative types expand on their view of the world, with actions that influence more creative activities. Clearly that happened during the Internet boom - Amazon and eBay and Paypal come to mind - but it stopped after the dot-com crash....didn’t it? Maybe not. Perhaps the innovation slowed as capital exited businesses, but it didn’t stop the launch of the iPod a little over a year later, which led into iTunes Store and the iPhone and the iPad in quick succession. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram; SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity;  SpaceShipOne and the Deepsea Challenger - innovation may have become so ubiquitous that its continuation isn’t obvious. If so, we can expect it to become less prevalent - it may be doing so already - as the forces of history encourage use of existing technology over the invention of new.

Synthococcus

In the generally reviled Star Trek episode The Way to Eden, the leader of the Space Hippies is revealed to carry a deadly illness. Referred to as Synthococcus Novae - new artificial spherical bacterium - it is explained as an outgrowth of Starfleet’s “asceptic, sterilized civilization.” It’s the reason Doctor Sevrin cannot continue on his search for the mythical planet of Eden. Virulent and deadly, it would kill inhabitants of any sufficiently un-advanced world he found.  Nonetheless, he insists on continuing his quest, though the Enterprise and Captain Kirk himself stand in the way, since he believes only such a world - disconnected from the modern technology that spawned his infection - can cure him of it. 

Doctor Sevrin is evidently a psychopath, so taking his views as truthful might be ill advised. Still, he rails against the modern artificial hell that has infected him. Is it too obvious that this is metaphorical, that he complains about this "sickness" when it is really the society he hates, wishes to change or at least leave behind? Watching it recently, I was actually impressed with how decent a reading of the counterculture it was. Note that logical, rational Spock is the one able to connect with the group. The implication is that it can’t be all gobbledygook if he understands it. While old GIs like Roddenberry and Heinemann (the screenwriter) couldn't help but be shocked at these crazy kids, they still granted some credence to the idea that even a "perfect" society will have people who don't fit, that there are problems enough to keep any society from being perfect, and that it may be completely logical to want to go somewhere else. It may be my projection of Strauss & Howe’s model onto it, but for a GI view of the time it's not as unreasonable as it might seem on first viewing. Probably because at this late date the clothes don't seem as much like a mockery of that time and those people. 

All of which comes to mind when seeing the lengths to which we sterilize ourselves these days. Hand wipes, diaper wipes, pacifier wipes. Antibiotic soap - as if it wasn’t anti-bacterial to begin with.   There are sterilizer stations by the doors at work - hand underneath gets a squirt of alcohol-infused soapy lotion. People have elaborate rituals when leaving the bathroom to account for other people not washing as well as they might prefer. While I’m not the sort of person blithely to lick a doorknob, to steal a phrase, the yearning for absolute cleanliness always has me expecting an outbreak of synthococcus any day now.

Of course, if you actually were a World War II G.I. you probably saw no problem at all with cleanliness in the extreme. There were probably tales you knew about how washing your hands twice a day saved your life from dysentery, typhoid, tetanus, and diarrhea. When something has direct survival advantages, it gets strongly selected for. And maybe here in the Crisis, every little survival advantage helps.

Timing

If you had Predicted a few years ago that the Crisis would be about environmental issues in general and climate change in particular, you might have Planned to purchase green stocks - solar power, wave power, various profit pools regarding electric cars. If you waited until last year to do this, it may have worked out well. If you did that around, say, 2010, you may already be reconsidering the value of your predictions.  

It may yet be true, though, that you were right. There are cases to be made that militant Islam has already been  defeated, and that the REAL danger to the nation is to be found in ocean level rise, extreme weather, invasive species, et cetera. With the additional note that militant Islam gets much of its money from fossil fuels, so a blow against one strikes the other as well. Beyond the prediction and the plan, there is another factor that will affect how effective your actions might be.

Consider from a future where your prediction is right: what ELSE had to go right for you to survive, succeed, exceed expectations? First, as seen, you had to predict your best choices. Would any green stock have worked? Clearly not: Plenty have gone bankrupt even since 2010, while a few have done remarkably well.  The latter ones, we could expect, would have other important features: A fine product, a well-defended strategic , an excellent management team - and preferably all three. Which comes back, again, to not only predicting but planning well. 

It may be less obvious that you also need to execute them at the correct time. Considering that as well, it really is a part of planning, too. (And possibly the important part for these Predictions.) For projects in, say, a workplace setting, timing is often not an issue: you do them as soon as you can, you check if they have a positive present value, you depend on them having a similar value a few months ahead or behind  the day you put your money down. It might be that most planning here has the profile of an investment, where the present value can change radically, dependent not only the What is that you are doing, but the When.

Parallels

Back to Predictions for a moment, and the concept of parallels in other Saeculums - how, really, should parallels be counted? It’s easy to match any single event with another single event 80 years later, but that doesn’t prove much. It’s difficult to do so with even two events across time, and aligning three is a matter of interpretation more than analysis. What good does it do, then, to assert that “9/11 was the Lusitania of our age,” if you can’t make the 2008 financial crisis line up with 1929 stock market crash?

The necessary conclusion, then, is that you can’t depend on these parallels for predictive purposes, at least not in any precise way. In temporal comparisons you MIGHT be able to suggest that a deadly incident will precede the outbreak of major hostilities by 20 years, plus or minus 8. The causal relationships will be weaker still: Even if you can say that the Deadly Incident “caused” the bank crash - and most of the time you can’t - the usefulness of that “cause” in identifying future “causes” will get confounded by the possibility that the next parallel might not involve a bank at all.   

There’s probably a place for statistical analysis when looking into Turnings. It probably will require looking intensively at the last 600 years - enough time to get a proper statistical size going. And there will probably be some false starts, either from critics who won’t identify the important events  or from proponents who will infect the data with their own points of view. It seems like the next big step in this direction will need to be some effective categorization of the days and years going back to 1400 or thereabouts. 

Planning

If one wants to make predictions, the likely reason is to be able to plan. The two don’t always work well together, though. The French predicted correctly that there would be another invasion from the northeast, eventually. Their plans didn’t anticipate correctly how it would work, and the Maginot line has become equivalent to “well-planned failure.” 

And the same could happen here. The Next War could begin with pre-positioned nuclear warheads taking out the hearts of a dozen cities. Or with a massive cyberattack eliminating technological support and lines of communication. Or with a direct and deadly attack with a strategic impact that is actually quite limited - but which steels everyone’s resolve. Any of those could happen with any of the predictions posted. 

If you were a civilian in the United States during World War 2, you were probably never in any direct danger from the combat and bombings happening around the world. If you were in the North during the Civil War, your eventual victory was all but assured - the Union was rich enough to start work on the Transcontinental Railroad, a significant long-term investment, while the war was still raging. There’s no guarantee, though, that those minimally affected in these last two Crises will again be the lucky ones. To start, it depends on how you define the intersection of those two sets. Non-Southern Americans? Nuclear attacks might disproportionately target the North. Affluent non-farmers? Cities are the expected target in the first case above, and are going to be more affected than rural areas by the second. It’s easy to discuss the possibilities dispassionately if you don’t expect to be affected, based on previous cycles, but it’s important to remember that the hardest part of predictions is, always, the future.

I’m reminded, in fact, of The Planning Fallacy - that people can’t actually plan well at all. The usual cases cited are for the expected completion date and (where applicable) cost of completing a given project. Estimators will tend to be optimistic, expecting that everything will go as well as it possibly can. “As well as possible” is at the end of the standard distribution, of course, not in the center, so the usual result is cost and time overruns - compared to the estimate, anyway. Here, the variable isn’t time or cost (per se) but some variant of “how likely is it that you will be one of the minimally impacted?” For my plans, I’m assuming that’s close to 100% - maybe some wartime inconveniences but no battles in my backyard. Which is hopelessly optimistic for anyone who does believe the Crisis is inevitable.

Possibilities

Easy enough - or not - to find echoes of the Crisis in what happens every day. The most interesting part - as in , of most interest - is the possibility of predicting what happens next. The big Next, that is. The peak of the Crisis. Which, by all previous indications, is likely to be a War. Not Iraq, or Kuwait, or Eldorado Canyon, or Vietnam nor Korea. One that inherits all resources it can and remakes the world. What will it be?

Predictions should start from some basic assumptions, say:

• It needs to fit the Crisis criteria in terms of impact and focus. Naturally.
• It should be possible to see parallels from previous Saeculums (Saeculae?), not only in the peak itself, but in how the threads leading there occurred.
• Roots of the peak should be visible in the Awakening, as The Liberator was for the Civil War. Perhaps not that obvious, but should be identifiable by,say, now.
• As the potential starting point for the peak approaches, the list of options should become shorter. Some possibilities will no longer evoke “Crisis” events, others will not have time to ripen by the latest possible peak dates

Not that I would start from these to identify peak candidates, usually. I look at what is happening in the world, try to see what could occur over the next 10 years, and assess from there. A wide-cast net would yield the following (with clever nicknames of my own devising):

1. The Last Crusade: In response to ongoing terrorism and threats, the U.S. and other countries begin a campaign of eradication aimed at militant Islam. 
2. Civil War II: Federal interference in personal and/or state matters results in threats of secession, which are handled by a Federal government unwilling to buckle on its own principles. 
3. The China Syndrome: The polite diplomatics of the current U.S.-China political reality falls apart - perhaps over Taiwan, perhaps trade issues. (“Made in China” is a problem for some people, even now....)

For the first, the parallels are with Germany in World War I (9/11 being the equivelent of the Lusitania) and the roots are in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution. The second is obviously expecting the Civil War to be refought, with roots that can be seen in Goldwater running for President, Reagan being elected 16 years later, and anti-establishment rhetoric of the 1960s. For the third, China appears to be the only country that could seriously challenge U.S. warfighting capabilities, fulfilling that main requirement of matching up with the Crisis criteria.

The above are the most likely I can see.There are others (the China one, but with Russia, say). I’m open to alternative opinions.

Transformers

So maybe it was a big deal....

Four senators, all Democrats, high-profile types: The Majority Leader, Al Franken, Feinstein from California, Wyden from Oregon, all saying that the power grid has to be better protected and federal regulators have to do what they can - what they are authorized by Congress to do - in support of that goal. For a change, it’s something the government can do that isn’t overtly intrusive into everyone’s daily lives. Difficult not to oppose it, for that reason. Still, there’s a undercurrent of political will here - the all-Democrat sponsorship, the insistence on federal regulation under current law, the avoidance of calls-to-action by ordinary people - that raises a suspicion that this is about more than doing The People’s Work for The People.

In fact, it keeps raising comparisons to Benghazi, where not calling it a terrorist attack is bad, but saying what it really IS could be worse. By escalating, these Senators are ensuring that someone is paying attention to whatever it is, inoculating the President against blowback if something bad does happen - by extension, ensuring that Democrats as a whole don’t get blamed and making them soft on matters of national security. If it turns out that the perpetrators are dangerous but inept, they haven’t wasted any political capital. And if it is a problem, why, they’ve done what they should do.

Rebels

“Rebels,” from the fine Tom Petty album Southern Accents, was on the radio this morning. It’s a celebration of being from the South, of identifying with the grey-wearing rebels who, still, are part of folklore and mythology 150 years later. Which doesn’t mean there aren’t downsides to that legacy:

Even before my father’s father they

Called us all rebels

Burned down the cornfields

Left our cities leveled - I can

Still feel the eyes of those 

Blue-bellied devils....

It’s great to sing along with even if you don’t identify with the South or the Civil War. Perhaps because its tone of self-loathing is a Reactive reflex. Or the imagery of the set pieces in each verse - mostly about an unpleasant breakup - is what a guy too often feels and remembers from how relationships ended in the past, whether 20 minutes ago or 20 years. None of which explains the similar feeling evoked by the title track, a simple acoustic-sounding ballad that doubles down on what that side of Mason-Dixon means.

There’s a southern accent

Where I come from

The young-uns call it country

The Yankees call it dumb...

There are scenes in “The Last Waltz” where a Confederate flag is proudly displayed, with neither irony or racism intended. Not exactly a surprise for a group known for “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” That was only a few years before Southern Accents, which was released in 1985. (Like many of Tom Petty’s albums with the Heartbreakers, it was recorded at Sound City, right about halfway between Rumours and Nevermind.) These days, though, the idea of invoking the South, much less the Confederacy, seems almost shocking. (It probably shows up, still, in country music, not that I’ve been paying attention to what happens there. Or popular music, either, really.) 

Which is ultimately more about history, the passage of time, and the changes wrought thereby. In 2044 and 2054, no doubt, people will look at some of today’s innocent scrawls or pictures or short-form videos and ask with barely disguised shock, “Do they even realize what they are doing, there?”

Terrorizing

When is a terror attack not really a terror attack? One possibility is that it’s not at all terrifying. For example, there was an attack on a Bay Area electrical substation last April, evidently done in a “military fashion ... quickly and professionally.” The goal was to “take down the electrical grid.” Unfortunately, I have to use these quotes because when such a goal is completely unsuccessful it’s too difficult to paraphrase them effectively.

The practical outcome was the cutting of fiber-optic lines, damage t transformers, and an oil leak. Plus an article almost 10 months later that it was terrorism (according to this one guy). Nothing about it appears to be a hallmark of Al Qaeda, so the question could be “What sort of terrorists are they, and do we need to be afraid of them?”

Maybe we do - could have been a proof of concept, might have been folks who are going to learn from their mistakes and try again. Could even be that this is what Al Qaeda is down to: a few potshots at electrical equipment that’s out in the open and unprotect-able. 

Or could be outside the scope of the Crisis. Just because it is happening at this point in history doesn’t make it definitely a part. There’s nothing about it obviously related to the generational constellation, it’s not driving folks together and doesn’t inspire much in unified thought and action. The only part that might match is the “response to a perceived thread,” but if nobody even saw it as terrorism, it’s probably not much of a threat.

Modernism

At a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert a few years ago, there was a “new music” selection, one receiving its premier that night. Not bad, really, but didn’t seem very new - not a lot different from the “modern” music in a 1983 Music Appreciation class. Inspired the thought “Why does all this so-called modern music sound 60 years old?”

Anyone paying attention here, of course, is going to know why. Or have their suspicions, anyway. Like, “Radical ideas were proposed in reaction to the post-war High, and haven’t been revisited since.” (Or at least not newly radical enough to matter...)

Which is all a response to a Los Angeles Times gallery of television consoles which, despite being described as appropriate for an “update” to one’s current setup. mostly look like they’re from the 1960s.  Not all of them, I suppose, but the second one is tagged in my mind as “Don Draper’s filing cabinet,” followed by “Don Draper’s Manhattan apartment’s stereo cabinet,” and (after skipping the Arts & Crafts inspired/Progressive era update) “Don Draper’s office sideboard and liquor cabinet.” (Although Don and his friends really have more of a cart than a cabinet in their offices.)

It’s like seeing houses listed as “Mid-century Modern,” being as that’s Mid-LAST-Century, post-war reactions to conformity and safe choices. Or so I’ve heard. It seems so conformist and safe itself, smooth, simple ... intentionally soulless. Presumably in contrast to frilly Victorian, naturalist Craftsman, Colonial Revival with white picket fencing. Sixty years later, it seems perfectly suited to be the inspiration for the next wave of reactions. The ones which can be expected by 2030 or so, if they haven't started already. 

Famous

Does Almost Famous work for my theory of generational stories? If the idea is that a writer naturally writes from the point of view of his or her generation, and further if a story is semi-autobiographical, it should work well. Although Cameron Crowe seems to get my generation very well....

The Prophet story - Cameron Crowe and his alter ego William Miller being Boomers, born in the late 1950s -  is

• There are good guys and bad guys, and the good guys win.
• The good guy wins through sheer moral superiority

William Miller doesn’t redeem himself, or win because of working with his friends, or sacrifice much of notice (unless you want to count his virginity). His “final battle” is aboard the plane, where he accuses the members of Stillwater - and Russell Hammond in particular - of hypocrisy for removing Penny Lane from the tour.  (A very Prophet thing to do: Shouting Truth to power.) He Wins, even if the Bad Guys aren't as clearly defined as they might be elsewhere.

It works, then: Cameron Crowe’s movie fits the Prophet story.

Hoffman

At a charity silent auction today we bid on a lot that included a dozen lollipops and an animated figurine of Alvin (well, one of the Chipmunks) that plays their “Christmas Song.” My son thinks has been playing it over and over and over since we unwrapped it. Which had me thinking about Almost Famous and considering watching it tonight...

It’s on now. Actually the extended “Untitled” version, which inspired some scrambling for the remote because it doesn’t have audio over the Dreamworks bumper. All to relive my initial introduction to Philip Seymour Hoffman,  whom I previously called “one of Gen X's most celebrated actors.” Which might not be clear if you follow that link, since I intentionally left his name out in order to avoid spoilers for Catching Fire. I have since been informed that it was actually perfectly well telegraphed that he was manipulating the events there, so it’s not nearly as much of a spoiler as I thought.

The man is dead of a drug overdose tonight. I’m shocked and dismayed, and clearly haven’t been paying attention to his life, since evidently he’s been in and out of rehab since graduating from NYU in 1989. And I’m not paying attention to what I write, either, as it practically goes without saying that Mister Most Celebrated would end up burning out - that seems to be What We Do.

And, sure, it’s not like GenX invented drug overdoses or dying too young. We do seem to be the group that burns out at the peak, more than fading away.

Here’s what I remember of him, though, after that great portrayal of Lester Bangs in Almost Famous:

• The attendant in Magnolia. Don’t quite remember anything about it, but remembered him.
• Gust Avrakotos, the guy “working hard” on an Afghanistan strategy in Charlie Wilson’s War, and later pointing out what a big mistake was being made by not following up 
• And of course the aforementioned darkly manipulative Plutarch Heavensbee in Catching Fire

One of the cool things about Untitled is that you get more of Lester, complaining about everything about Rock and Roll in 1973. “Take drugs?” “No.” “Smart kid...”

Daily

Yesterday was one full month of daily posts. All were written as described in the post on January 1, and it appears to be working well enough. Two days come to mind that weren’t as well done as preferred. The rest are adequate at least, and a few manage to still be interesting all these weeks later.

(Although I have a couple of pre-written posts in case I really needed a day off, I wanted to avoid doing that until at least a month had passed - if you can’t get through 31 days, after all, what hope is there for 365. )

Looking back over this long eventful month, it has involved

• A look at Benghazi - although more about how reactions to it are indicative of the shrillness of national discourse
• A couple of days talking about Captain America - as a movie, as a character in a movie, as a story, and all of them together.
• A few more days on other movies  - including Point Break - from a generational standpoint
• One day of trying to explain how this theory works, and another that looks just at the Crisis itself to see what it proposes, followed by an exercise showing how useful it was to know what to actually look for.
• Musings on what it means to be a Reactive, and an Xer in particular.

Lessons to date include

• It actually is difficult to write like this every day - sometimes inspiration takes a while to strike, others it simply isn’t there.
• It is also not simple to have a relevant Crisis-related post every day related to current events, even if current events are defined as “Since World War II, and even that’s okay if there’s a chance for an enlightening contrast.” Some days, the Crisis doesn't show in the news.
• Without a limit on how much time to spend on finding an appropriate topic, this could take all night. (2 hours is a fine one, going forward, although I’d prefer to start writing when I sit down and be done 30 minutes later, leaving a few minutes for finding Wikipedia links.)
• Having a definite list of items to relate to The Crisis is very helpful in deciding whether a given event has any relation. It’s otherwise easy to say “blah blah blah Millennials therefore Crisis blah.” (Which is not only weak but unlikely to be true.)

As long as I can find some time to write on the subject, though, having a post a day is doable. And I'm enjoying it.

China

Yesterday’s P.J. quote was about China, for those of you who haven’t memorized his books. And it is a possibility. A few months before 9/11, the biggest foreign policy issue of Bush IIs short-at-the-time political career was in China. An EP-3 doing surveillance off the coast actually landed in their target country....we could end up discovering that THAT was the really significant event of the year. 

But I doubt it.

Could China turn into a threat to this nation’s very survival? In the next ten years? It has benefited, certainly, from the U.S. relaxing trade regulations, and there are reactions - by some folks and for particular issues -  when China is in the news. It doesn’t seem enough to end up as a war or more significant Crisis, any time soon.