Highs

The addition of 1968 to The Grid means five hundred years of history is complete for two Turnings, the Awakening plus the Crisis. Hopefully the descriptions make each year memorable for at least one reason. 

Five hundred years, two Turnings, each repeating every 90-100 years, has resulted in twelve specific years showing up on The Grid. There are roughly 40 years between successive dates. Someone who can keep track of these 12 events should, on average, be able to identify an interesting historical marker within 20 years of any other date of interest. (Similarly, the birthday of anyone reading this can be found no more than 20 years from one of the recent dates  - the worst case being 1988, 20 years from both 2008 and 1968.) Knowing when Crisis (4T) and Awakenings (2T)  happen should give some general idea of the state of the nation at that time.  At least, they should give some indication of whether the country is working together or flying apart.

As the other two Turnings are completed, that distance will be reduced even more.

The next section to be done here is the First Turning. It's also known as the High, in part because of the exuberance felt by those who were directly involved in the great victories of the Fourth Turning. As the Crisis winds down, a nation that is no longer interested in war is still supporting a substantial governmental infrastructure.  In the absence of external conflict, this is used to support alternative nation building efforts, such as exploration and infrastructure. Remarkable feats are attempted - towering monuments, exploration across vast empty areas, flights into space. The concentration of resources, however, also enables corruption - which, it will probably be realized,  often stretches back to the Crisis period. And there may be efforts to continue the equivalent of war by other means in the form of attacks on perceived enemies of the state - witch hunts, metaphorical or actual. 

First Turnings can also be a view into the path that countries take between the Crisis and the Awakening. The first one, for example, is in 1506: 14 years after the Reconquista, 18 years before Henry the Eighth's break with the church - but only 9 before Martin Luther started the Reformation. One of Luther's specific complaints can itself be traced to this very event....

Kaiser

Because it makes last week's post about Indigenous People's Day even better. 

Not a bad time to mention that the list of Strauss  & Howe-inspired sites was missing an important one: David Kaiser's History Unfolding. His post for this week goes over five possible Crisis catalysts suggested in the book The Fourth Turning. Spoiler alert: All but one have nearly happened in one form or another. "Communicable disease pandemic leads to National Guard Mobilization" is number 4.

The one that didn't? A constitutional crisis instigated by a near-bankrupt state appropriating federal income tax payments. So there's that to look forward to.

B-52s

The National Broadcasting Company - soon to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Lorne Michaels Productions - has been showing "Vintage SNL" in the 10:00 slot on the last few Saturday nights. These have been significant, if not classic, episodes from past seasons. The first was Richard Pryor hosting in the first season. The second was Steve Martin hosting with The Blues Brothers performing. Last night was Alec Baldwin's first time hosting, on April 20, 1990 - Earth Day - with the B-52s performing.

The B-52s had recently been at the top of the charts with "Love Shack," a good-time party anthem. This episode had them performing less-known singles, including the title track, from the same album.  It was a surprising contrast with their previous appearance on SNL, only 10 years before, which had been as unnerving as any other new group that showed up in those first years of Saturday Night. 

• Discordant keyboards - in one case played literally on a toy piano. 
• Female vocalists with caterwauling vocals and bouffant hairdos that had been out of fashion for years.
• Half the band falling to the ground, as if struck dead, at the bridge of Rock Lobster
• Speaking of which: A song about a beach party and the dangerous ocean life nearby. Or something.
• And one about "All sixteen dances" - like the Hippogriff, the Escalator, and the Aqua-Velva.
• Surf music undertones, but definitely not the Beach Boys.
• Nor punk nor rock nor blues nor anything really that was heard before. 
• Plus cowbell. Seriously. Played front-and-center by Fred Schneider.

And all this in two songs comprising less than 8 minutes of performance time.

On this Earth Day show, however, they were more clearly a regular pop group. They were certainly more polished, less dangerous.  While some of the change in perception is due to looking back 24 years, a glance at Rock Lobster or Dance This Mess Around in 1980 shows how seriously unexpected they had made themselves. Compared to that, the 1990 version seems tamer, more a part of the world - normal, even.

Whereas, looking at that first performance, it really is, even now, seriously weird. 

Protectiveness

This Atlantic article on letting kids do more on their own is making the social media rounds. For anyone following along here, it's not at all surprising that kids today are overprotected. It's a prediction that Strauss & Howe made when they first published Generations over twenty years ago.

...during the Crisis eras at the other end of the cycle, the constellation produces the opposite form of nurture: the suffocating overprotection of Adaptive children.  

Generations, William Strauss & Neil Howe, 1992, page 99

"Constellation" here refers to a particular pattern of generational types that signals a particular Turning. Adaptive generations are those raised during a Crisis / Fourth Turning - Strauss & Howe later started referring to them as the Artist archetype.  In other words, this says that children raised during the Fourth Turning end up extremely over-protected, by parents and society.

And here we are, in the Fourth Turning, with children so over-protected that they aren't allowed to go to the corner store on their own.

When looking at how similar events recurred over time, one of the drivers Strauss & Howe noted was the change in child nurturing over the course of the 90-some years of each Saeculum. When generations like the Baby Boomers were young, in post-war eras, parenting was becoming less protective - they were given more freedom to do what they wanted to do  For Millennials, on the other hand, the trend was toward more protection. Right now, as in other Crisis periods, the tendency is to protect children, as much as possible, from everything that is happening. Which makes sense, during these crazy times.

Generations also noted that parents tend to raise their children in the opposite way in which they and their generational peers were raised: Boomers raised Millennials with increasing protection, for example, whereas as the GI Generation raised Boomers with decreasing protection. There are limits to how over- or under-protective parents can be of their children, so at some point the cycle peaks and reverses. This cycle then affects how people are raised and grow up during each Turning, reinforcing the overall generational cycle.

Incidentally, being aware of this doesn't make it any easier to avoid being a hovering, safety-obsessed parent in the current Turning. It does make it easier to see those actions happening without judging either oneself, or someone who is a little more or less over the line. Simply being different from 40 years ago doesn't make the desire to be safety-obsessed incorrect. If something goes wrong during the Crisis, after all, it can be a much bigger problem than back then.

Or maybe it just feels that way.

Although there is that California family in Ken Burns' The War that was trying to decide if they should move back. In the summer of 1941. From near Luzon, in the Philippines. Which would be taken over by the Empire of Japan a few short months later. Which would eventually lead to the two daughters making a game out of seeing how far they could push their fingers into their bellies. Caution can be a good thing.

Is this "free-range children" concept a good idea, then? It seems like nostalgia as much as anything: We did it this way, why can't our own kids? The tendency to over-protect is rational, though, in a dangerous time.  Then again, parenting these days is rather beyond what Strauss & Howe described as "the last time" in the late 1930s and early 1940s - and we aren't even to the peak of the Crisis yet. Maybe relaxing a little bit is in everyone's best interest.

Business

Looks like one of those days when nobody has good news.

A guy who just left a job managing hundreds of billions of dollars in bonds says things aren't going to get better.

The crazy things happening in the markets aren't going to get any saner, either.

Elon Musk brings out a new and improved electric automobile - zero to sixty in 3.2 seconds and it's a FOUR DOOR SEDAN - and the stock takes a beating as a result. Evidently the announcement didn't meet expectations, even though they also mentioned built-in autopilot functions.

Not nearly as bad as GTAT, which in the last year has been offered a deal to produce sapphire for Apple, which made its stock price skyrocket based on predictions it would be used in the iPhone 6, which turned out to have standard glass instead, which caused the stock price to level out for a couple of weeks - at least until the company announced on Monday it was declaring bankruptcy. Price dropped 90% in a few minutes, 1.5 billion in market cap erased. The company claims they are trying to get back to their core business, which is making sapphire furnaces, not sapphire.

One can imagine the original discussion:

Apple: We hear you guys make sapphire.
GTAT: We do - we sell these furnaces, which can be used to make lots of sapphire.
A: We don't really want furnaces. We would like you to make the sapphire, too.
G: We sell the furnaces, see?
A: This is very hush hush, we want to limit who we're dealing with. Here's a half-billion dollar loan to get it done.
G: In that case.... yes, we DO make sapphire ... how difficult can it be?

Pretty difficult, evidently.

Well, that's why we call it the Crisis, not the Marshmallow Sundae Superstar Great Fun Time.

1968

 I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. 

On April 3, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was in Memphis,Tennessee in support of a strike of sanitation workers.  He gave a speech that spoke of the efforts in support of the strike, and what would be necessary, and what they would do together to succeed. He also touched on the state of the civil rights movement and how much further there was to go.

He referred to The Promised Land at the start of the speech, musing on possible times and places he might have wanted to see. When he returns there at the end, as well, it's to consider the escape of the Israelites from slavery, and the fate of their leader, Moses. Many years after leaving Egypt behind, Moses is allowed to see the endpoint of the journey, across the River Jordan, but God does not allow him to enter.

The speech finishes with a lyric from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which had been based originally on the song John Brown's Body, and which itself ends with a call to die so others may be free.

For mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

They were the last words Dr. Martin Luther King spoke in public.

Early the next morning, while outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, King was struck by a single rifle bullet. He was pronounced dead at 7:05 in the evening. Robert Kennedy, on the presidential campaign trail in Indianapolis, would give a short but sincere speech acknowledging the possible reactions to the tragic events of the day. It was one of the few times he mentioned  his brother's death four and a half years earlier.  James Earl Ray confessed to the killing after a worldwide manhunt captured him two months later. (He would later recant the confession and unsuccessfully attempt to get a trial by jury.) The sanitation worker's strike would be resolved in the worker's favor, including recognition of their union.

King was buried in Atlanta, and his gravestone bears the line from an old spiritual, one he used to end his best known speech, not quite five years previous:

Free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty, I'm Free at last.

Indigenous

Seattle and Minneapolis are calling this coming Monday "Indigenous Peoples Day."

Which isn't necessarily a problem. Even if it does imply that Europeans were the only bad people in the world, that those here carry this blood guilt to this day - unto the 7th generation of the 7th generation or thereabouts - there's no reason not to look at it from the other side of the discovery of the continents of the Americas. Especially since Columbus didn't really know what he had done. (If you ever wondered why it's North and South America, it's because Amerigo Vespucci was the first one to realize that they weren't really in Asia.)

In any case, that new name is probably a better name than "Sorry we inadvertently spread diseases we hardly noticed - spread in ways that wouldn't be accepted for nearly four hundred years - that decimated the population until people didn't even know this place was once thickly populated" Day. The people who came to the New World didn't realize they were bring deadly infectious agents, and wouldn't have been able to stop them if they'd tried. P.J. O' Rourke put it well when he noted that the outcome would have been very much the same if the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria could have been commanded by Jimmy Carter, the Dalai Lama, and Bono.

Certainly many of the early explorers were unpleasant people, who might have rejoiced in the gifts of Providence if they had realized how their victories were happening. (They probably did rejoice and praise God, actually: Pizzaro and Cortez were storming through the New World in the 1520s, at the height of the Protestant Reformation, which appears to have inspired them to be more Catholic than ever.) Many of the indigenous would have been quite as unpleasant, given the chance. It had only been about 60 years before Columbus that the Mexica had revived what a Christopher Lee film would lovingly refer to as an "Old Religion," with human sacrifice to ensure the sun would rise each morning.  If Cortez hadn't been able to overcome them, he would likely have ended with his heart exposed to the glory of the Sun God Huitzilopochtli.

 (Whether that would be an advantage or not is left as an exercise for the reader.)