The peacoat is back in style, after all these years. I feel suddenly youthful.
Navy peacoats — and all manner of surplus military clothing — were trendy in the immediate post-hippie era of the early 1970s. I found mine at — where else — an Army-Navy surplus store. It was the cool place to shop.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My peacoat was dark blue-black and had authentic Navy anchor buttons. It was solid wool and it wore like iron. Continue reading
“Boston Tea Party.” Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
My working title for this post was “Non-Shooting Civil War In America.” I thought that might be over the top, if only by a little.
I don’t see immediate danger of violent civil war in America, but I think today’s U.S. government shutdown is collapse by premeditated sabotage by political failure. In other words, our regular political process for resolving differences has failed. Moreover, the failure is not accidental; it’s intentional. Congress, especially, has failed big time.
(Note: This essay was written in 2009 as a WordPress “page.” It’s become buried and hard to find, so I thought it time to republish it properly as a “post,” complete with categories and tags.)
MY PARENTS were born in 1920, which seems now to be in a different historical era. They were children in the Roaring ’20s, teenagers through the Great Depression, young adults at the beginning of World War II.
They are the Greatest Generation. They put off everything to fight the war. Then the boys came home — the ones who survived — and started making up for lost time. They attended college in greater numbers than ever before, under the GI Bill, married and bought brand new ticky-tacky houses with VA loans. And they had children. Did they ever.
The Greatest Generation shared hardship, service, accomplishment, victory. Then they settled down and didn’t look back much. As they had devoted themselves to country in the 1940s, they devoted themselves to work and family in the 1950s and 1960s. They created my generation.
We’re the Baby Boomer generation. We are NOT the greatest, not even close, as Garrison Keeler wryly observed.
THINGS LOST– AMERICA WENT FROM FAMILY DINNER TO FAST FOOD IN ONE GENERATION. –John Hayden photo
We have shared history from the 1950s — polio shots and “duck and cover.” The children of the 50s and 60s grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, with an awareness of unseen nuclear danger in the world, as well as a gradual awakening to inequality in America.
Though others see us as a monolithic cohort, the Boomer generation was divided in the 1960s and early 1970s by different, even opposite experiences. Many of us went to college, and many did not. We went to Vietnam, or we opposed the war (some did both).
The country cracked apart, during the 1960s, along social and economic lines. First the Civil Rights Movement, then the Vietnam War and the Peace Movement. The divide deepened and hardened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Make love not war. Don’t trust anyone over 30. Continue reading
Here’s a succinct post that nearly says it all about Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and history!
Please read “Margaret Thatcher’s dead and I want to cry” by Katy Evans-Bush at “Baroque in Hackney.” It might be the most important blog post you’ll read this year.
MARGARET THATCHER. (Photo via Baroque in Hackney)
It’s a moving and honest essay on the death of a “rich tyrant.” It’s also a scathing indictment of a certain type of aristocratic leadership, and of the political and economic systems that empower and protect such leadership.
I believe Ms. Evans-Bush’s analysis is not limited to Margaret Thatcher. Didn’t Ronald Reagan represent the same harsh policies, but with a kinder, smiling face and a charming personality?
(Photo credit: Images_of_Money)
“As we return once again to our regularly scheduled program of ‘Crisis And Impasse,’ let’s take a moment to consider the following heretical idea: We have no debt problem.”
That’s the take-your-breath-away lead to a commentary by Zachary Karabell on the business section front of today’s Washington Post. Karabell gives a concise overview of the American debt debate from the time of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson through William Jennings Bryan and the long-running confrontation over the gold standard, up to the present day. Continue reading
U.S. 2012 ELECTION RESULTS, BLUE STATES FOR OBAMA, RED STATES FOR ROMNEY. FLORIDA, THE LAST STATE TO BE DECIDED, WENT BLUE. (Map via Wikipedia)
“This is the America that Obama will govern in his second term: A place divided not only by ideology, race and class but also by the very perception of reality. . . . The president who spoke ambitiously at his first inauguration about uniting America instead arrives at his second with the country further divided.” — Eli Saslow, The Washington Post, Jan. 20, 2013
Note: This post was published in 2013 following the 2012 presidential election. It seems more relevant than ever as America prepares for the 2016 presidential election.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
That sums up America in the decade leading up to the Civil War, as described in “Team Of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s history of Abraham Lincoln and the politicians, abolitionists, generals, and ordinary people of his era. The similarities between the present time and the decade before the Civil War are striking and frightening. Continue reading
Windshield on a 1959 Edsel Corsair. (Photo via Wikipedia)
WINTER WITHOUT FROST — I’ve seen frost on the windshield only once so far this winter. When I was a kid, we had frost on the windshields nearly every winter morning. Folks had to scrape off the ice and let the engine warm up for five minutes before they could leave for work. (I can hear college students wondering, “Warm up the engine?”)
I live now in the warmest part of Maryland, a mid-Atlantic state with moderate temperatures. But truth is, we used to have ice skating around here. — John
(Photo credit: ~jjjohn~)
“It’s a terrific idea: a home-town saint for the Occupy Wall Street era.” — The New Yorker
Liberals, progressives, radicals: Take heart!
DOROTHY DAY (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We knew it all along, but now Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan agrees. Dorothy Day is a candidate for sainthood!
NYC radical journalist Dorothy Day (1897-1980), co-founder of The Catholic Worker newspaper and a nationwide movement of “hospitality houses” serving the homeless, the hungry, and the poor, has been a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church since 2000. Now she even has the support, appropriately enough, of the archbishop of New York.
Fox News is already comparing the Petraeus Affair to Watergate. White House paralysis is gleefully anticipated at Fox, just days after the election. What did the president know, and when did he know it?
To what can we compare the misadventures of Gen. David H. Petraeus, director of the CIA, no less, and Paula Broadwell, his esteemed biographer from Harvard (and herself a former Army officer)?
Living Simply And Still On The Grid 