Deadline

Have you ever been unaware of an important deadline that your boss really cared about, and had to ask for some assistance at the very last minute?

Fear not, you are not the only person to whom this has happened.  One of the worst cases has to be this one, which additionally happened while the boss was off on an important business trip:

The reason for this haste is that I was informed only yesterday that, weather permitting, it is likely that the weapon will be used as early as August 1st, Pacific Ocean Time, which as you know is a good many hours ahead of Washington time.

The memo was sent on July 31, 1945. The time is not given, but 9AM in the morning in Washington would be about 1AM in Japan, so technically it was already late. It was in this way that Henry Stimson, Secretary of War,  asked his boss, President Harry S Truman, to confirm the copy for an enclosed press release to be used when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.

Truman was still in Potsdam, finishing up the final Big Three conference. It was a few days after the Potsdam Declaration threatening Japan with total destruction, so Truman certainly had some idea of the timing involved. Little Boy had been delivered by the USS Indianapolis, and the bombing orders, with four potential targets, were already issued.

In any case, the bomb was not dropped until the following Monday, August 6. While it had to be a little embarrassing for Stimson, it's also the case that a lot was happening that week.  Even though earth-shattering events might be all around us, we're still human.

Lost

The Lifecourse site has Generation X as the only living Nomad generation. That didn’t seem right - surely the oldest living American was born before 1900. And that turns out to be the case. She just turned 115 last week.

Born May 23, 1899, Jeralean Talley is a member of the Lost Generation (born 1883-1900).  It was tempting to complain about their exclusion as a a living Nomad generation, if she is still around. However, it appears that no males remain from that cohort: The oldest man alive today was born in 1903. Time marches on.

139

As followup to yesterday's Maytime post:

A local Boy Scout troop in Sherman Oaks is using the same number as a troop that was in Studio City   until fairly recently, and had been around for quite a while. Which makes it look like the previous troop went under and the number was recycled. As with Maytime, it seems as if that troop may have been a product of the previous High, and unable to stay relevant as the Unraveling came its way.

It turns out, though, that the troop is considered a continuous successor to that "other" troop, which was organized in 1952 by Mr. Richard Campbell.  As such, it recently celebrated its sixty year anniversary. The relocation might still indicate that something changed fairly recently, or that the influx of new Millennial values made it more able to continue as a going concern.

Bonus item: Searching for earlier information on the troop led to an article on the 1996 funeral of one of the original troop leaders. Colonel Rhodes Dawson had a 100th Birthday Celebration on Earth Day 1990, which is to say almost exactly 26 years ago. Which, if doing the math from that article hadn't made clear, meant he was born in 1890 - solidly in the Lost Generation. And even without using math, reading the article makes it clearer yet what a Nomad looks like, all the way through the grumpy-old-man archetype appropriate for the last decades of his life.

It is certainly true that this generational view of history has a way to go before being mainstream. It also needs to have a good answer to the perception that "predictions" made are a variation of cold reading: making vague assertions, ignoring the failures and overstating the successes. Still, Colonel Dawson so perfectly lands in the predicted archetype that it seems certain such an answer will be available eventually.

Uncivilization

Paul Kingsnorth sounds, at first, like one of many not-quite-Prophets from the ranks of Nomads.

"Crisis" keeps showing up in how he sees the world (four times in this article). He gets active in environmental movements - a plan to build new highways across England is specifically mentioned - gets arrested, is completely ready to be at the forefront of it all.

And then...

He sets up the Dark Mountain project. It is, for lack of a better word, anti-activism. Don't worry about the environment, he says. You can't save it. It's time to start mourning the losses that cannot be avoided, and to prepare for dealing with a changed world. Not nihilistic, necessarily, but certainly practical: What can be done, really?

"...what all these movements are doing, is selling people a false premise. They’re saying, ‘If we take these actions, we will be able to achieve this goal.’ And if you can’t, and you know that, then you’re lying to people."

It's not the direction one might expect. Which makes it potentially more worthwhile to consider. Even if another path is eventually chosen.  A very Reactive point of view.

Bonus Nomad: Reference is made to poet Robinson Jeffers, who was particularly active in the 1930s and 1940s with works that reflected the larger world of Nature. (That is, about the same point in the last Saeculum.) He built a stone tower overlooking the Pacific to inspire his writing. Born in 1887, he is   - no surprise -  of the (previous Nomad archetype) Lost Generation.

Screaming

I think I'm gonna be the balding virile type, you know, as opposed to say, the um distinguished gray, for instance, you know, unless I'm neither of those two. Unless I'm one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism. Woody Allen (or Alvy Singer....), Annie Hall

There are times when the biggest concern about blogging is how soon the witty posts are going to devolve into screaming about socialism. And if anyone would then be able to tell the difference.

When Annie Hall came out in 1977, an older man like the one Mr. Allen fears becoming could easily be in his late 70s - which is to say, born in 1900 or earlier, solid Lost Generation. Which is less about being an acquiantance of Hemingway than a contemporary, growing up when Williams Jennings Bryant was traveling the country to speak to adoring crowds;  old enough to fight in The Great War, but a little too old by the time WWII came around; ending up in a world that didn't quite fit them after the fighting stopped. Similar folks are seen in popular culture all around the postwar era. Mr. Wilson, Mrs. Porter, Statler & Waldorf: Grumpy, cynical, virtually -  sometimes literally - yelling at the kids to get off their lawn.

And that phrase - "You kids, get off my lawn!" - is a popular enough sentiment among my generation, meant ironically or not. The Lost were the previous generation of the Reactive archetype - previous to GenX, that is - and we can expect to follow in their footsteps.

Math

Folks following this model of history can often find themselves making unexpected mathematical jumps. Like a reaction to this headline:

Indiana Jones? FBI finds thousands of artifacts in 91-year-old's home

The natural reaction for everyone, of course, is to say “Indiana Jones? He can’t be 91 - he’s Lost Generation, born late 19th century, the youngest of which anywhere is 113 years old by now. A 91-year-old was born in 1923 or 1924 - that’s GI Generation, and nearly at the end of it as well.”

For those who didn’t realize when Indiana Jones was born, there are a couple of ways to identify his birthdate, some rougher than others. The first movie gives a date of 1936. If Jones didn’t look like he was in his late 30s/early 40s, one could infer that from his holding a professorship. Either way, that has him born in the 1890s. (Or you could check Harrison Ford’s birthdate, see that the movie came out in 1981, and calculate from there - but folks get cast in movies for different reasons than being the correct age.) Mostly, though - like other 1930s serial heroes - Indiana Jones is a classic Reactive/Nomad: Living in interesting times, self-sufficient, pragmatic - and with morally questionable attributes, as noted by both Marion and Belloq.

For those who didn’t realize it MATTERED when he was born...well, yes, it’s fundamental to the model. The primary concept is that people alive during a particular time are all affected by events during that time, and the specific effects are dependent on what stage of life they are in. Young adults - who can take direct action with regards to a Crisis (for example) -  will react differently than children, who are subject to the actions of others.  The different generations can be completely reduced to people born during specific timespans. 

Whether all people in a generation really match the archetypes is a different question.  It works for him, though: With a (clearly Missionary Generation) father focused - quite literally - on the Holy Grail, Indiana rebels via an archeological career that does not require a spiritual component. We see him with ancient pagan idols, neolithic tombs, Egyptian hieroglyphics, but neither the Ark nor any of the other relics he later pursues are artifacts of his religion - if any. He is only trying to save the world.