Grid

The human mind can hold about 7 items at a time in short-term memory.

That means it should be no problem to keep track of Four Turnings and what they mean.

And for each one, you can easily keep track of seven events - seven particular occurrences during Crisis periods,  another seven during Awakenings, etc.

Which yields straightforward access to [seven times four equals] twenty-eight items of interest.

If those 28 items are in distributed fairly evenly by year, that's enough to hold onto about 500 years of history at once - with gaps that are only a few decades at the most.

And if you can find something district and memorable about those years, you can place most of what happened across that half-millennium period near one of these events.

(Hamlet was written around 1601. This is 13 years after yesterday's entry, 1588, the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. And there is likely some connection, there.)

That can be enough to know what's going on for that whole time. 

Which could be cool.

Some of the years in the grid below link to previous posts. Others will be filled in. A few could change.

To be continued. 

	High	Awakening	Unraveling	Crisis
	First	Second	Third	Fourth
				1492
	1506	1534	1580	1588
	1601	1621	1666	1675
	1692	1741	1752	1779
	1806	1827	1848	1861
	1869	1896	1927	1933
	1947	1974	1994	????

1588

Triumphant in the name of the Holy Catholic church just 100 years earlier, Spain was prepared for another victory, this time over Protestantism.  Henry VIII had split England from the Catholic Church in 1534, in part over his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The King of England may have expected the 26 miles of the English Channel to keep away any invading army. More than that would be needed to hold off the most powerful naval force in the world: the Spanish Armada.

In spring of 1588, Catholic forces decided  to invade England, using ships from Spain and Portugal to protect and transport an invasion force. (That the invasion force was in the Netherlands and was already having difficulties attacking Protestant armies there perhaps should have been considered more carefully.) The 130 ships in the Armada were in sight of England by late July 1588, bristling with cannon and skilled sailors who could move the entire fleet almost as one. They were organized in a crescent formation that made it easy for the Spanish galleons to protect the merchant ships intended for transport.

The English, faced with an invasion and forced re-conversion to Catholicism, had other plans. They had more ships (227, including 34 warships) but fewer cannon  - they were outgunned by 50%. They took advantage of their greater numbers and improved maneuverability. Using the tight crescent formation against the Spanish, they packed eight ships with pitch and other flammable materials, set them on fire, and released them towards the Armada. The Spanish, unable to keep the fire ships away, were forced to cut their anchors and break formation, saving the ships...but not for long.

The next day, the English attacked directly. The English were not particularly successful in destroying ships, but they had a strategic advantage: Anything that kept the Spanish from landing troops was a success. 

Unable to defend where they were or to board the faster English ships, the armada broke apart and was forced to move away from the British fleet. Their only way back to Spain was to head around the northern coast of Great Britain - unfortunately into an unusually bad storm season, and with ships that were generally not well suited to Atlantic weather.   Many wrecked on the northern coast of Great Britain. Although the war continued, the victory here mirrored the eventual result: No foreign power would make England Catholic, and the British Fleet became the most powerful naval force in the world.

Osan

"There are many bars and clubs off base and many base members spend much leisure time at them."

Thus sayeth the wikipedia page for Osan Air Base in South Korea. It is possibly the most exceptional understatement on the entire Internet.

No small number of bases that closed with the ending of the Cold War had a reputation for "leisure time" similar to what Osan still maintains. It is perhaps the last of its kind, however. Which makes it all the more surprising that they had an alcohol-free weekend last month. One ordered by the commander of the 7th Air Force, naturally - it was not a spontaneous or coincidental decision by the troops.  It is being followed up by a regulation against new arrivals drinking alcohol for their first 30 days. Note that many Korea tours are only 12 months long, so that's a significant proportion of possible partying prevented by this promulgation.

It seems relevant to the Crisis, probably because it feels like youngsters being protected from themselves. The article mentions 100 alcohol-related incidents in the last year, including several near-fatalities, so there's enough evidence of alcohol abuse to justify intervention. (In case one massive understatement isn't enough.) Improving performance may be another goal - this sort of "leisure time" can result in problems on the job, too. There appears to be some additional concern about how it might affect relationships with the Koreans, which may be a more important reason. A recent Air Force Times article mentions a broad movement of personnel to the Pacific, indicating a increase in the strategic importance of this base.

A shift in priorities, a move toward protecting Millennials, a need to be better than ever - the Crisis could be behind any of them, or all.

Privacy

Facebook likes it now.

BBC is showing what happens when it can be traded off to produce entertainment (sic)

Russia is offering a bounty for helping eliminate it as an option..

And Forbes thinks it should be the big millennial Cause.

There are people who are trying to be better about it.

It's likely to be a big part of the data wars.

Dogbert joked about about how secretaries have always been power-users of information, but that was over 20 years ago.  Gigabyte drives the size of a toaster were amazingly compact data sources at the time. The Web hadn't been invented, and email was just catching on. Data becomes information, information becomes knowledge, and evidently knowledge really is becoming power. And power flows, as always, along the path of least resistance.

But which way is that?

Cows

An Indian-inflected song on the radio the other day directed some brainwaves to the 1960s musical group The Sacred Cows. This power trio's members aren't Indian - they sound a bit like Cream. It's not clear where they were supposed to be from, and their only available music is a single short video clip. Not that it matters, as they aren't a real musical group. They show up at the end of the 1968 Get Smart episode, The Groovy Guru.



Larry Storch played the eponymous Guru, who is taking advantage of the counterculture to expand the influence that KAOS had on the younger generation. The Sacred Cows were an important part of his mind-control plans, which Max and 99 were able to defeat before the end of the episode.

Like The Way to Eden, which was broadcast about a year later, the screenwriters were GI Generation who evidently wanted to make some comment about what was happening in the world around them. Unlike that Star Trek episode, though, there doesn't appear to be much more being said than "Kids these days are getting brainwashed and they don't even know it!" Not a very deep message, granting  that Get Smart was not known for being a cerebral show. Although they did include some musical references that made it clear they were paying attention. (Based on those, in fact, the assertion that "The Sacred Cows" were a parody of "The Grateful Dead" seems very unlikely.)

Both episodes do have a leader who is using the young people for his own purposes, and which they might not completely support if they knew. Perhaps that is a subtle indicator of how many people saw the events of the late 1960s.

Manhattan

Manhattan premieres Sunday -  yet another 20th century period piece television series, in this case about people in Los Alamos during World War II.

The success of Mad Men kicked them off, evidently. It started off with similar First Turning shows:

• Pan Am - International stewardesses when that was a big deal
• Magic City - Miami casinos
• Mob City - 1947 Los Angeles
• The Playboy Club - Well, yeah. Chicago, if it matters.

Most of them haven't done especially well - these all started in or after 2011 and only Mob City is still around. There's also Masters of Sex, although based on minimal viewing it appears to be more about the sex researchers themselves than an exploration of their era. (Although looking at them is going to be a lot about their era in any case.)

The  Americans is a notable Second Turning series - although Mad Men has been solidly there for the last few seasons, and the recently launched Halt and Catch Fire is from the same period.  It's also notable for not being about "the Sixties," which is a default 2T story location, unless the focus is on Nixon. Looking at the early Eighties - The Americans starts soon after  Reagan's inauguration - the traces could still be seen in reactions to what was seen as nuclear brinksmanship. The Day After and Special Bulletin; protests about cruise missiles and Pershing IIs; Nuclear-Free Zones: All were objections to the status quo based on articles of personal belief... and were effectively obsolete by the end of the decade. 

Manhattan is different in that it in the Fourth Turning. One could count Band of Brothers as the first 20th Century 4T television series, although it's about the military in a war, which has been very well-explored. The people working on the atomic bomb were exceptional, but they would have had to deal with the Crisis in a way similar to others who weren't in war zones.What folks on the home front were doing hasn't been shown - a (non-documentary) television example doesn't come to mind at all, in fact. 

Hopefully, it will be good and there will be more like it.  Well-done examples might be very helpful to us in this Crisis, here.

Russia

Tragic and unfortunate as the Ukrainian situation is, the possibility that the United States could get seriously involved is still remote. The Los Angeles Times had an editorial today that invoked the Cold War as a reason on its own for why the U.S. should let these distant countries handle their own problems.

Still, seeing a headline that calls out Russia in general and Putin in particular as the reason Europe is weak can give one pause. It gives a reason, a Problem to be Solved, that might turn out to be convincing: We need to remove dangerous men who are in power!

There aren't any generational or cyclical reasons keeping this from being The Cause of the Peak of the Crisis. If anything they are straightforward political ones involving standard questions of self-interest. Are they threatening us or a close ally? Do we have national interests directly involved? If problems do come up, can we fight - and if we fight will we win? While the Russia & Ukraine crisis fails all three of these basic tests, that might not even matter if an important problem (as above) is identified to be solved.

Triumph

A 75-year "longitudinal study" of Harvard students was published as  "Triumphs of Experience." A number of results are given as unequivocal truths, despite the evident limits of the method:

• Harvard students - higher intelligence, mostly upper class 
• Classes of 1942-1944 (mostly) - so almost all graduating into World War 2
• All male

For purposes here, that second one is likely to be the most telling. Assuming no prodigies graduating before the age of 20, they are all GI Generation. One article mentions that the group includes a president - easy enough to guess which Harvard GI that is. Many probably did end up going to war. And as such, it is not surprising that alcoholism was a significant problem - along with smoking.

They were normal when I picked them. It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up.  

-- Arlie Bock, who began the study

Maybe, Arlie, but the war probably didn't help.

Looking further through the descriptions of the subjects, there are stories that sound like they could be Nomads as easily as Heroes. While several are described in successes that only Heroes could have, one falls down drunk and dies, and another suddenly "retires" after having has trouble at work. When it reaches conclusions in favor of love and companionship, though, it seems reasonable that there are nuggets of wisdom.

Mostly, though, it's difficult to accept any of the results as being broadly applicable, considering the narrow period of time the subjects represent.  They wouldn't know what it was to be completely dependent on others during the Depression, or fighting back against the status quo years after the big War was over. Although it's worth predicting that this study could reflect the Millennials out there, who can expect a similar life cycle.

Years

A previous post concluded that Pride and Prejudice is a Crisis novel that occurs in the late 18th century, during the wars happening around that time. In addition to the tone of the story and the ubiquitous redcoats, it was first drafted in 1797 when Napoleon was traversing Europe.

It turns out, though, that a search for "pride and prejudice timeline" has most scholarship accepting it as being 1811-1812. (Why search for "pride and prejudice timeline"? Because it's clear the novel occurs over about a year.) This matches the timing of the revisions done, before its publication in 1813.

And happens to be when Napoleon was again on the march. Although this time with rather less success than before.

California

While there aren't necessarily a lot of apocalyptic books to go with the movies and television shows, they are out there. (And yes, The Leftovers was a book before it was on TV.) Still, Edan Lepucki's California seems rather tame. Although since it's being featured in an article about the future of the apocalypse needing to be more imaginative, perhaps it's not a huge surprise.

The description given there sounds only slightly worse than the California of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. There, nation-states franchise out sections of suburbia as places where the American Dream still lives, while occasional raiders from a huge floating agglomeration of humanity in the middle of the Pacific Ocean keep life far too interesting.  California has earthquakes, a few suicide bombers, a trek to the north of the state - not fun, nothing anyone would looking forward to, but not like having to deal with a sociopathic Inuit Aleut who has a nuke wired to his brain in a new twist on Mutual Assured Destruction. And Snow Crash is dystopic more than post-apocalyptic, a scarier world on balance but one where plenty of people appear to lead reasonably happy lives.

Maybe it's true that our end-of-the-world scenarios need some work. Or maybe the end of the world is close enough already that improvements are not necessary.

Investment

An article on Slate talks about why Venture Capitalists own Silicon Valley.

One item for blame: Lack of government investment, compared to the 50s and 60s.That is, during the post-war First Turning, when the government does public works, infrastructure investment (following on from the previous war, usually), and exploration.

(Hearing about STEM education these days sounds a lot like the need for engineers and mathematicians after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik.)

Later in that article, a Marc Andreesen tweet responds to this with the idea that there are big things happening while the media is paying attention to the consumer side. And then notes that he is one of the guys whose mid-1990s dot-com era was built on that post-war infrastructure investment.  (His particular addition, Mosiac, was part of government research at Urbana-Champaign.)

We're coming back around, of course. The article ends with the line about learning from history or repeating it - which is what these cycles of history are about, anyway. The Crisis will inspire significant investment, the High will support further research, and perhaps around 2070 we will see something that changes the world like the Web did in the 1990s.

On a side note, it probably is the case that avoiding advertising would help spur innovation.  For both Google and Facebook, it was clear that they were going to make money from advertising. Holding off while possible allowed other options to come into focus before they became ONLY about advertising. Facebook was able to leverage their user base into a platform for multi-player games. Google was able to start Android and make a difference in mobile phones. And both were able to become more about data than about advertising - Google because what people search for says who they are, and Facebook because people innocently tell them everything at the same time they tell their friends.

Tammy

As a film about a Nomad, Tammy includes the expected Redemption pattern, in confirming that she has real and definite flaws, which she eventually reduces. This makes it a helpful example of why being in sync with its generational story may not be enough.  

While the first scene has Tammy making a significant mistake while driving - one that really could have been deadly - there isn't a good indication of the source of that mistake. Particularly since it is then undermined by the other difficulties Tammy has that day, which may or may not be indicative of this same problem. Does she have a bad boss, or is she really a bad employee? Is her husband a jerk, or has she pushed him away?

Okay, fair enough to say that her husband is a jerk either way - is that the only reason the marriage has trouble?

Films that show a life falling apart may suggest that Fate has intervened, and that this is happening because of bad luck or simply because that's the starting point. In this case, though, the Old and Wise Prophet tells Tammy (and the audience) her flaw late in the film - rather late, indeed, to do anything about it within the film. While  the effects of her life are shown, the actions that brought her there are not. This effectively excludes character flaws that the film could show her overcoming. Instead, the audience is unsure whether to root for her withstanding what life is throwing at her, or to demand that she change her self-destructive behavior.

One can imagine a prologue to help with this by showing an earlier point in her life, after the problem was noticeable but before it caused the issues shown - perhaps a high school vignette:

• Tammy is a plump but popular good-natured girl who manages to have a choice of dates for the prom.
• Her Boomer grandmother  - not yet an obvious alcoholic - gives her advice like "Have a good time all the time - that is what life is all about!"
• Her doting father shows up with the Toyota Corolla as a birthday or graduation present, commenting how it will last as long as she takes care of it.
• Lenore is shown with her small but respectable pet store, with Susanne uncertain of her future but interested in following where Lenore is going.
• Just before prom, she decides to go with the handsome-if-dim Greg rather than a previously promised guy with better career prospects (maybe Keith, the fast-food manager, although that would have its own issues).
• Could be fun to have Your Love as representative of Greg and Midnight Rider as the other guy.
• Events at prom reveal and reinforce that she has a problem taking responsibility, even if it appears at first that she still has a chance for a good life. And then cut...

At which point the current start of the movie could pick up, with Tammy driving that same Toyota 15-20 years later. She's playing Your Love, which meant so much those years before... and we're off, seeing that she hasn't grown, still doing much what she did at the start. And with a clue as to what her nearly-fatal flaw is.

This would match well with a Nomad life, as graduating into the often-prosperous Unraveling can fool people into believing that an upward trajectory is inevitable. (Even if an individual's trajectory is not increasing as well as everyone's.) It might even be the case that Tammy is a female Willy Loman, albeit one who hasn't done quite as well as he had at this point in life.  Like him, she bought into expectations when she was younger, didn't update them as she grew older, and was being beat up by middle age amid the storm of the Crisis. It's not clear, indeed, that Tammy would have survived even as well as Loman - he made it to his 60s, she was heading toward a similar meltdown early in her 40s. Tammy was fortunate enough to have the wise Lenore available, while some of her life was still left to be saved.

Purge

I was surprised to learn some of the actual details behind the universe of the franchise of The Purge.  Two movies so far, one released this weekend, are based on the premise that a once-a-year Purge allows any criminal activity to go unpunished.  In the first movie, Ethan Hawke and his family have to endure a siege of his home during the Purge. (Home invasion movies appear to be all the rage, too, which can be reasonably considered a sign of the Crisis.)

It's worth noting - as has happened with other end-of-the-world movies - that it is set in the 2020s, which is to say at the peak of the Crisis as predicted by Strauss & Howe. A previous post noted that it appears writers appear to set dystopias roughly when when they don't expect to be alive, 80-100 years after their birth year. In this case, the writer/director was born in 1969, so this is earlier than that indicator says. Perhaps he was going along with the crowd, perhaps he's a Strauss&Howe fan.

(There's a quote in the movie, "Home again home again, jiggity-jig," that was also in Blade Runner, set in 2019, suggesting an intentional reference to that time.)

It's surprising that The Purge was set up to handle (in-universe)  the scourge of homelessness. Coming as it did in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, the marketing (at least) suggested that it was more about keeping people equal, by force if necessary.  That is, if you are a jerk, you're in trouble when the Purge comes - in more trouble if you are a rich jerk.

The article goes on to talk about some of the tricky legal aspects of it. Most of them are matters of timing: What if I make a threat to kill someone before the Purge starts? What if I shoot someone but they don't die until after the Purge ends? What happens before the police get back?

The simplest answer would seem to be: What happens in the Purge stays in the Purge, what happens outside is not the Purge.  This would avoid massive criminal conspiracies (organized before the purge, they are still criminal) and ensure that people don't let effects go on outside the purge, helping to stop activity on time (you don't shoot anyone at 6:59, because if he dies at 7:01...) Prosecutors might feel justified in strictly enforcing the timing, as well, and going after anyone who flaunts the timing in the slightest.

Missiles

Some educated if possibly out-of-date notes on shooting down aircraft:

• The former Soviet Union had an air defense system covering the entire country from Riga to Crimea to Khazakhstan to Sakhalin. 
• Francis Gary Powers was shot down while flying over the Soviet Union in a U-2, two to three times higher than commercial aircraft fly. The missile that brought him down was the SA-2 (Guideline). Considering that was in 1960, it was 1950s technology. The Buk system used to attack MH17 is about 50 years more advanced. The answer to the question "How difficult is it to shoot down a commercial airliner"  is "Not difficult in the slightest if using modern military equipment."
• Northrup Grumman chose yesterday to run a full page ad in the Los Angeles Times on the 25th anniversary of the first B-2 (Spirit) stealth bomber flight. When procured and designed, it was intended to penetrate that country-wide air defense system. Doing The Math, the first flight was in mid-1989. Tienanmen Square has been a month before, Hungary had already opened their section of the Iron Curtain, the fall of the Wall was four months away. When requests for operational squadrons of B-2s was made, its original mission - evade Soviet air defense missiles and fighters for deep interdiction strikes - was effectively obsolete. 

• KAL 007 was shot down by a SU-15 ( Flagon) which was old if not obsolete even at that time. The Soviets were likely trying to hide their full air defense capabilities, particularly if they suspected the U.S. had set the plane up as part of an intelligence gathering mission. 
• Regardless of how the United States says it identified the MH17 shootdown, it will be attempting to hide its more useful intelligence assets and capabilities. Automated missile launch detection has been a known capability for a long time, so it may be put forth as the source - even if SIGINT, covert operations, or other options were actually used. 

Shootdown

Previously on the Ukraine:

• In January, they were clearly in their Awakening as they root out corruption and try to remake their government. (Yes to the latter, maybe not 100% to the former.)
• In March, the Crimea was being a problem, but wasn't going to turn into a major issue. (Which it hasn't,except as it has led to larger problems.)
• In March two days later, things were looking worse, but it still wasn't going to be a problem. (Ditto.)
• In May, some comparisons to the Axis Powers, but by all indications the U.S. was not about to get involved. And it didn't.

Today, there is the shoot down of Malaysia Flight 17 (Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur) over the Ukraine, which is getting some people riled up about responses.  However, unless the Dutch or Malaysians are willing to invade on that pretext, it is unlikely to be enough to convince any country to step into this mess. The Russians are powerful enough to hold back any direct military response, and they haven't been concerned about . If the U.S. wasn't going to get involved in KAL 007 - in which a literal government Representative was killed - there's no chance of it happening today.

Which doesn't mean it won't make a difference. It's only because it is indeed happening here in the Fourth that anyone has any actual concerns over What's Next. More likely, this is the peak of this crisis, the point where the antagonists realize that they have much more to lose than to win.  Flight 007 was years before the end of the Cold War, but in its own way it showed a chink in Soviet armor, of insecurity and fallibility and willful gamesmanship in a dangerous world. A few years later, the guided missile cruiser Vincennes shot down an Iranian Air passenger flight. Although there's no definite link except the timing, it did seem as if it gave both sides an excuse to end the Iran-Iraq war. Perhaps something similar will happen here.

Ranking

Entertainment Weekly puts the two Captain America films at the top of its list of Marvel Cinematic Universe films.

Is it because they are inherently awesome? Because they have great action sequences? Or because they are the Hero films and that's what people want?

The Avengers (#3) is the real  Crisis situation,  and Iron Man (#4, with Iron Man 3 at #5) is a total Nomad tale.  Continuing through the list, the stories become less certain - Hulk is a Nomad forced to be a Hero, Thor is a Hero made up like a Nomad - so they don't work as well.

Thinking of those, it might be less that Captain America is a Hero and more that he is allowed to be one. By being true to the character, the story comes through better than in some of the others.

Leftovers

The Leftovers are a reminder that it's not only movies that have tapped into the Crisis. This HBO series shows a post-9/11 world of something that looked a lot like the Rapture. Instead of leaving behind the literally damned, the people remaining only feel like they are the most unfortunate of history. It could be called survivor's guilt, except that nobody knows whether those taken should be envied or pitied. And that's where it starts.

Damon Lindehof is showrunner, which makes sense since Lost was an early (2004) example  of this the-world-is-ending-we-think genre. A few people from there then showed up in Flashforward, in which the titular event had a similar feel to what happens in The Leftovers.

There's also Defiance, a different sort of post-apocalyptic world: What starts as an unintentional alien invasion turns into an accidentally trashed Earth with scattered pockets of survivors. St. Louis, Missouri, is the site of one such area where aliens and humans manage to get along...well enough, anyway.

For anyone willing to ponder what might have been, take a look at The Remnants. Screenwriter John August (Go, Big Fish, Corpse Bride) spent his time during the 2007 WGA strike working on a web series. (Evidently that didn't violate the Pencils Down rule, as a web series wasn't covered by the union contract. Or something.) Only about 12 minutes but it's good, and definitely the starting point of a Crisis series.

Plus there's Under the Dome, The Last Ship, The Whispers, Falling Skies ... All of these are of these are from the last 10 years, many of them are currently in production. Click through any of those on IMDB and another one or two Crisis series will appear.

Someone - several someones, in fact - recognize the appeal of the end times.

Manic

The guy who invented the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" would like to give it a rest.

Here are some thoughts on it, just in case his dream comes true.

First - because hey, this is all about history except for the part about math - let's note that his article was written in 2007. That places it on one edge or another of the Crisis, since everyone is sure this Turning started by 2008  -- even if some were convinced by 2005.  And since the author is concerned about reductive contextualizing, it could be said that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is all about embracing a fantasy that can't possible actually happen - just like we are all doing before the Crisis when we expected to change the world or make a million when that dot-com went public. And that it therefore is an excellent marker of the start of the Crisis or end of the Unraveling, the point where everyone realized what was slipping away.

Taking a look at the list of sixteen Manic Pixie Dream Girls, and breaking their movies down by years and Turnings, we find that

• Three are between 2005 and 2008 
• Six are solidly in the Third Turning (1984 - 2004)
• Four are in the Second Turning (1964-1984)
• Two are in the First Turning (The Apartment in 1960, Breakfast at Tiffany's  in 1961)
• One (Bringing Up Baby, 1938) is in the previous Fourth Turning.

Which actually supports the above off-the-cuff assertion. Although it could also be recency bias, as the counts decrease logarithmically going back in time - maybe the authors naturally happened to remember recent movies.

Although one could instead note that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl isn't a fantasy. She's the embodiment of what almost every guy has gone through. She's too attractive, way out of your league. Every minute with her is like stepping into an animated forest with chirping birds and friendly rabbits. Her very existence cheers you up, makes you happy, reminds you why it's worthwhile to be alive. She's quirky and different and not at all what you expect, and that's one reason why you think she's so great.

In other words, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is what it means to be in love. Any guy falling in love with any girl is going to recognize the feeling of finding that too-pretty, too-fun, too-exciting girl that he can't believe he has a chance with. And maybe it doesn't always work out, but it's clear that there's a common enough feeling there to make it resonate.

Even if Elizabethtown wasn't that great.

Edge

When Master Sergeant Farrell started talking about combat as the path to redemption , it was clear what sort of movie Edge of Tomorrow was going to be. We have Tom Cruise (GenX, 1961), as Lieutenant Colonel Cage, a PR flack for whom the military is a way to handle reality during a Crisis. He attempts to blackmail a general and ends up in an untenable position, one that starts bad and then gets worse.

(And although the movie was well done, it did seem a little odd to have a 53-year-old Light Colonel being bossed around by a nearly 60-year-old Master Sergeant, and them bantering about bachelor parties as an excuse for Cruise's situation. Although both actors do look fine, actually - believable, even.)

It turns out to be perfectly natural for this particular fellow to be in this part of the battle.

Which manages to set the scene very well for a redemptive arc - the usual one for Nomad stories, that is. We have someone who is emphatically not a Hero, is the kind of "people person" mocked in Jerry Maguire, and whose reaction to a dangerous assignment is to do anything to run away. (Not that it helps him to try.)

As the story continues, he improves in the directions that were lacking earlier. He recognizes what he needs to do to actually be on people's good sides. He sees that he has to do his duty, because everything depends on it. And he becomes brave enough to take on the missions he needs to. 

Still, he is not required to be a full Hero, as he is not called upon to make a  sacrifice. One could say that the redemptive arc means sacrificing the old self in favor of the new one. That's not the same, though, as Katniss giving up the one she loves or Hiccup losing a limb. The weakness of the ending may come down to the incompleteness of the arc, whether the very minimal redemption or the lack of sacrifice. If Cage had been more of a jerk, learning to be brave might have been sufficient. It could have been set up that he had to be even more brave, so the depth of his redemption was clearer. There were options for enforcing a sacrifice, too. It could have been that the circumstances of the time looping meant only one of the two main characters could survive. Maybe the final battle could have left a mark, some reminder of what he (or she, or both) had been through. Either way - fuller redemption or heroic sacrifice - could have helped the ending. 

Although it's still a fine movie, and well worth seeing. 

Progressive

"Come Sail Away" always yields a reaction.

Today's reaction was having to come up with a word describing Styx. The word that came up was "progressive" which is an accurate if not precise word for that group. Their music includes some of the attributes that are used in progressive rock - concept albums and the use of synthesizers - although they are evidently considered more of a straightforward mid-Seventies rock band.

That term is so far out of date now, though, that using it is likely to engender confusion with progressive politics. And that term, too, is so old it's new again: the Progressive Era was a late 19th century period of political tumult. In Strauss & Howe terms, it was the Awakening after the Civil War, and lasted from 1886 through 1908.  However it is in current use for a particular package of political goals on the left side of the political spectrum, many of which are inherited from the Progressive era. And interestingly enough, some of those appear to coincide with progressive rock. Wikipedia mentions social commentary,  ecology and spiritual themes as being common lyrical themes, and the appearance of this style of music in the middle of the Awakening indicates that there is a connection.

Ramones

August, 1974. Washington D.C. An entire country watches as Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the United States, step as aboard a waiting helicopter and vacates the White house. News of the Nixon resignation fills newspaper pages and television and radio broadcasts the world over. From this moment forward, politics will never again be the same.

August, 1974. New York City. Scattered Bowery residents pay little notice as four young men from Forest Hills, Queens, enter a small club called CBGB in Manhattan's Lower East Side... All of their songs are very loud, very short, and very fast. In fact, the only thing separating them are the bass player's shouts of "1-2-3-4" during the milliseconds in which they stop...Their first public performance draws no attention from newspapers, radio, or television and, in point of fact, is witnessed by a grand total of five warm bodies - six if you count the bartender's dog. No matter. From this moment forward, rock & roll will never again be the same.

Thus sayeth the cover of the 1988 LP of Ramones Mania, in a notable confluence of the artistic and the political. This would be called a greatest-hits compilation if the Ramones had had any real hits in their career. The songs are, still, very loud and short and fast. Although a "long-playing" LP has space for about 40 minutes of music, the first record (of two) contains 16 songs - all but one are under three minutes in length, with three under two minutes.

And the last of those four young men has passed away. Drummer Tommy Ramone died at the age of 65, not quite 40 years after that CBGB gig.

Strauss & Howe identify the peak of that Awakening with Nixon's resignation in August 1974. In 11 short years since Kennedy's assassination, there had been the Gulf of Tonkin, a wider war, a summer of love, a long hot violent 1968, the inauguration of Kennedy's bitter rival, men on the moon, Kent State, a break-in, an oil shock, and much more. 

In music alone there was the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, with their continued influence through their break-up in 1970 ; Jimi and Janis and Mister Mojo Risin; Altamont and Woodstock and The Newport Pop Festival, and The Dark Side of the Moon.  And with the Ramones came punk, and everything changed again. 

The inside sleeve of Ramones Mania continues the history of the band with the following from Joey Ramone:

In 1974, there was nothing to listen to anymore. Everything was tenth generation Led Zeppelin or tenth-generation Elton John, or overproduced, or just junk. Everything was long jams, long guitar solos. We missed songs that were short and exciting and ... good!

The Ramones, while influential, didn't grow musically. The above succinctly describes their musical goals.  This meant that their later songs sound much like their early songs, giving people little incentive to continue following them. They successfully rebelled against the status quo, however, and will be missed.

Addendum

Concerning yesterday's post:

The Wikipedia page for Kantor showed up in a search for "civil wars best years of our lives."  (The actual goal of the search was "Is there a Civil War equivalent to that movie/story," although it did not yield anything like that.)

It turns out that, about ten years after writing the novel behind The Best Years of Our Lives, Kantor wrote  about Andersonville, the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. (Kantor was inspired in part by being at the liberation of Buchenwald.) The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956. While it's not quite a Civil War equivalent, it does appear to share the theme of ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances.

Kantor

When using this method of viewing history, math becomes important. Math tells you what age people were when important events happened, helps keep track of where in their life they were.

This came up during a search for more information  on The Best Years of Our Lives, which led to the writer of the original novel, MacKinlay Kantor. The movie won Best Picture in 1947, after being released in 1946, that being only a year after the war ended.  Anyone paying attention to how the cycles work should notice that, with the war over, the next Turning would be a First turning, which means an exuberant population post-Crisis ... and witch hunts.

Which makes it easier still to remember that 1947 was also the year the Hollywood Ten were before Congress. And that makes one wonder about some of the not-especially-subtle subtext, of children sympathetic to the fate of the enemy or a businessman showing the line between have and have-not. It seemed possible that, while perhaps not a Communist, the author was sympathetic. (Although one should consider that the screenplay was not written by him.)

And then it turns out that, whatever else he might have considered, he acted as a front for Dalton Trumbo - one of the Hollywood Ten - allowing his name to be on a screenplay and passing the payment along.

Renters

For those who came in late, the deal was that housing prices collapsed when it became clear that many mortgages were not worth the paper the contract was written on. Sometimes that was because the paper was divided among multiple investors in a way that meant nobody was actually the owner of the loan obligation. Usually, though, it was because mortgages were being approved for people who didn't have the ability to pay them, with the expectation that the eventual increase in the price of the mortgaged property would eventually make the person a better risk. Which in retrospect is a very shaky base upon which to build a significant part of the economy.

Fortunately, other shakier aspects were invented and implemented that made this the least troublesome part of the situation. For example, imagine taking that risky loan, bundling it with other risky loans, selling part of the proceeds from mortgage payment as a low-risk/low-yield bond, and part as a high-risk/high-yield bond. And then imagine having bond underwriters rubber-stamp the entire bond issue without any effective way to stand behind their claim, so that when the risks came due and none of the bond-holders were paid, the possible responses were variations on "Sucks to be you."

And from such humble beginnings came a vast whirlpool of loss that took away a huge amount of equity, earnings, and available money.

And then people started thinking "Hey, there are some really cheap houses out there - we should get us one!" And those people who had money started doing just that, purchasing houses not to live in nor flip, but to manage as rental properties. And then to sell bonds backed by the proceeds from the rentals....What could possibly go wrong with that?

Well, now we know. And if we didn't know, we might have guessed. The article mentions

• For this to work, the rental properties actually have to be managed. Which isn't a core competency of these investors.
• It's not easy to predict vacancy rates for these properties well enough to know what the appropriate repayments on the bonds should be. Which means someone is going to lose money, which decreases the value of the bonds, which spirals downward from there.
• Finding creditworthy renters, who would be the ones actually generating the cash being passed along,  can be difficult (see "core competency," above).

And one might also consider the following

• Individuals with excess cash purchasing houses to rent them means fewer people who want to live in the houses can afford to buy, which distorts pricing.
• The scheme is not dissimilar to the mortgage - based process that caused the original meltdown, which turned out well.

An additional problem is that this probably has supported housing prices, and now they probably will start falling again. Where things will go from there...we'll find out.

Reactions

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) is good, but long - almost three hours. The first hour, all on its own, is about three men returning to their hometown of Boone City, then finding each other again after each is differently disappointed by their reception.  While the film is not a documentary, it can feel like a historical document, showing how people perceived the world right after World War II had ended.  Some of the observations seem shockingly prescient - one person comments about the likelihood of a postwar recession. (There were two within five years of the end of the war, one before the movie was released, one after.) Other observations of note from that first hour:

• Warplanes on the ground, built too late to take on the Axis powers, "from the factory to the scrap heap."
• Myrna Loy's husband looks like her previous co-star William Powell.
• Two references to the possibility of global thermonuclear war, and this three years before the Soviets succeeded in their nuclear program.
• A teenage son being brought up as a good Adaptive, talking about the Japanese as fellow humans rather than enemies, and wondering about the dangers of the new atomic world. (And also not too keen on accepting war trophies from his father.)
• It was clear that the Captain Derry was going to have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, almost as soon as he was seen sleeping.

There's a Harry Potter Fan Fiction that seems like it might have been inspired by this. Amends, or Truth and Reconciliation, considers what would really have happened to a group of teenagers in a war, fighting and tortured and in some cases committing war crimes in response to the actions of a terrible foe. Short answer: Everyone has PTSD, presenting in different ways. Harry is withdrawn, Ron becomes aggressive, Ginny turns into a mean drunk, Hermione exhibits accidental magic (sometimes in her sleep) and Draco has...performance issues. (All the Weasleys take what Lucius Malfoy did to 11-year-old Ginny very personally, as well.)  There's also Hermione's debt to Gringott's, her work at the ministry to pay it off, Neville working with war orphans at Hogwarts...The post-war isn't ever what's expected. 

(Fair warning 1: The fanfic has some sexual content. Fair warning 2: It is not complete and may not ever be - it has not been updated in some years.)

Guardians

17 minute social media preview of Guardians of the Galaxy. Clearly Marvel is a little worried about it - and probably with good reason. It looks like a perfectly amusing popcorn flick well suited to the summer. But perhaps not to winter. 

The Guardians are a rag tag bunch of criminals and ne'er-do-wells - the bit of cinema shown had them being sent to prison as a group:

• A living weapon who is universally disliked.   
• A tough-talking raccoon and his helpful, uh, Groot. 
• A guy who is evidently a child of the 70s with some abandonment issues, alleviated with personal totems ("Hooked on a Feeling ... is MINE!!") 
• And there meeting Drax the Destroyer, a charming fellow. 

Nomads, that is -- literal as well as the Strauss and Howe definition.

They have been placed, however, in a Heroic movie in a Crisis. Which will likely be a tough sell.

In this construction - used previously with regards to Captain America and others -  Nomad movies are about Redemption. Nomads are bad people who need to improve themselves, make themselves better, show the world that they don't have to be the bad guys. It's a simple enough arc if you are starting from bad - where else is there to go?  Hero movies are simpler still: Be Heroic. Which means they are already mostly Good, with little or no redemption needed. Heroes do the right thing, they win by working with their friends, and they usually are called upon to sacrifice, at least a little and sometimes a lot.

Here in the Crisis, there are plenty of Nomad movies that do well. Generation X are Nomads, after all, and still buy plenty of tickets. The Hobbit, Iron Man, The Dark Night, Django... The Hero movies, though, seem to be the face of popular culture: The Hunger Games, Twilight, arguably 12 Years a Slave. Where does that leave Guardians? Straddling a difficult line, with characters too bad for straight Heroics, and a narrative too clearly requiring Heroes. 

There's one point where the Guardians are breaking out of prison. They are surrounded by guards who are not especially cruel, much less evil - the first one shown is played by John C. Reilly, so how bad could they be? When Our Heroes take out several of them in ways that clearly aren't going to be just flesh wounds, it can be cringe-inducing: They're just guards, doing their job, don't hurt them! Bad people don't have a problem with that, of course, but that makes it harder for them to be Heroes. And that is likely to make it harder for them to be as appealing as they should be.

There is some room for Redemption, at least - Gamora seems a likely candidate. And Star-lord wants to be a hero. Perhaps a way down that fine line will be found.

Cuyahoga

This is where we walked, swam, hunted, danced, sang.
Take a picture here
Take a souvenir.

The R.E.M. song "Cuyahoga" is about the famously flammable Cuyahoga river, and to a lesser extent about the Native Americans in that same area and across the United States.

In the Pacific Northwest, the above words seem even more apt, perhaps because in many areas one can still imagine the Chinook and others coming down to the mighty Columbia, hunting deer in the forest, heading out to the slough to gather clams and oysters, or onto canoes to pursue fish and whale.

Considering it that way, though, requires setting aside the much more cynical perception of the original area: A place where people lived their lives, a world of beauty deserving of photographs and souvenirs for anyone fortunate enough to see it. At least until it became so polluted that it could catch on fire, at which point pictures and souvenirs are very much beside the point. And quickly thoughts return to the mouth of the Columbia, thousands of miles away, whence Lewis and Clark came, reaching across a continent.

It's almost insane that President Jefferson would send them from the shore of the Atlantic to seek out the Pacific. Perhaps no more insane, though, than placing other Americans atop rockets to send them to the moon (And Our Rockets Always Blow Up). It may merely take that never-say-die, We Can Do It attitude.(Although it probably helps if it's spread among enough people to keep it going when the temptation to stop is strong.) Maybe at some point there will be people trying to justify using Cuyahoga as a perfect tribute to those first lunar pioneers.

Weddings

For some items of interest, it can be more difficult than usual to tell whether they indicate an overall trend, a short-term change, or a particular person's view of the world. Some people prefer traditional weddings that are major events, while others want smaller gatherings.  It did seem as if Princess Diana's wedding in 1981 made an impact on Generation X brides-to-be. Suddenly, having a fairytale wedding, perfectly executed, seemed desirable again, after some decades of assault by various opponents of tradition.

(Although hardly ironclad evidence, a similar boom in weddings in the previous Third Turning was indicated by a 1925 Saturday Evening Post article, Purveyors to the Bride. It mentioned weddings doubled in price compared to a decade earlier. Brides magazine was first published in 1934, in part because the market was seen as "Depression-proof."  The original Father of the Bride, however, is several years later, in 1950, so not a Third Turning event, although the 1991 remake could be seen that way.)

There was a wedding today that was not like Diana's. It was held in a converted barn that was used for both the ceremony and the reception - and, for that matter, a Fourth of July pre-wedding celebration yesterday.  Rough-hewn wood with LED chandeliers, events held there support an educational program covering nutrition, environmental issues, and other related subjects.  Dinner was buffet style, organic, vegetarian options, and no small part grown by the bride and groom. Although it gave some indication of being set up on a budget, it was noted as one of the best wedding meals ever by those present. The ceremony itself was short and non-denominational, with everyone in attendance holding hands at the start, a song from the bride's sister, and vows written by the bride and groom.

So, is this the new Millennial style of celebrating nuptials? The inevitable result of a shrinking economy - and if so, is it inevitable because nobody has money or because conspicuous consumption is becoming passé? Or is this simply one couple's particular style, indicating their specific priorities and preferences? The continued popularity of reality programs such as Bridezillas and Say Yes to the Dress suggest that the first possibility isn't exactly likely. There still seem to be plenty of people who want that traditional fairy tale wedding, as large as they can afford. That less money may be available for such an expenditure seems possible, though, which would make this a short-term trend. It may simply take a while to see what is really happening in this area.

Patriotism

It would be great to have a solid Fourth of July post about a significant attribute of either this particular Independence Day, or how the Crisis affected today and also the original one.. Alas, there is not anything obviously worth noting about this 238th anniversary, or worth comparing, either. 

There is a worthwhile article in the New York Times about patriotism, in particular with regard to Millennials. It uses Strauss & Howe terms for generational cohorts, although not quite their definitions. Generation X would be birth years in 1961-1981, which means ages 33-53. The article uses 33-49 i.e. those born starting in 1964. 

There's also this bit about the #merica hashtag on Twitter, which is superficially ironic. Except that it's not actually used in an ironic sense at all. Millennial users of the hashtag treat it quite earnestly. There's clearly something patriotic stirring for Millennials, even if they don't always call it the same thing. 

Immigration

Strauss & Howe give immigration opposition as consistent indicator of previous Fourth Turnings. Whatever the problem is, having new people entering the country was not going to help fix it. During World War II, Japanese and Italian and Germans were restricted, while during the Civil War the Irish were a problem.Whether or not it's a major problem this time around, it's at least making a difference in how people see the government.

Immigration issues have been around for much of the last 80 years. Is there any reason to think this current situation is worse, or even different? To start, there are protests, and they are being treated as part of the problem. (As opposed to being, for example, superfluous or irrelevant.) There is also the question of whether the President can choose how to handle immigration, given conflicting or unclear laws. Beyond those, there is the fundamental difficulty of dealing with women and children who are in a rough situation, where there doesn't seem to be any good resolution. There does appear to be enough happening here to attribute to the Turning, even if it's not clear which way it will fall - in favor of restrictions applying to this new group, or with them being treated as similar arrivals and not being granted any sort of special status.

Connectivity

A previous post mentions the possibility that ubiquitous connectivity may become something to be avoided, that people may start to consider it as something to give up. The thought was that the Awakening would manifest in part as a rejection of previous values, and that the question would be on what is rejected.

It may be showing up sooner than that. 

Disappointment

Cape Disappointment in Washington is named after a fur trader's minor disappointment in 1788: He was unable to find a way up the Columbia River. Still, it was a difficult problem for him, and far be it from people in the modern era to discount it simply because it's not a modern sort of disappointment.

The lighthouse there was completed in 1856, after a number of difficulties including the loss of a ship that was carrying the building supplies - on the very bar that the lighthouse was intended to help. It was one of several lighthouses approved by Congress for the West Coast,  most of them in the recently added state of California. When the Civil War started five years later, additional fortifications and guns were placed there

This would place it in the Third Turning, not normally a major period for government investment. Then again, options for the Transcontinental Railroad were under investigation at this same time. The total cost of these lighthouses was relatively minor. Perhaps it all goes together: The entrepreneurs pushing for the railroad needed safe passage for ships in order to deliver materials needed. Particularly those on the west coast, who would eventually be required to acquire their resources (e.g. steel for tracks) from within the United States. This necessitated purchases in the Eastern United States followed by water transport to the western construction sites. Getting some government assistance for projects like this is not at all unusual.