Cynicism vs problem-solving - and a coming film about our civil war

“Humorous” columnist Dave Barry just delivered a riff that is stunningly dumb, declaring that 2015 was nothing but bad news. Incredibly insipid dreck, even in the guise of satire. 

For every bad item on  his list there are ten good things.  In part because that is the rough ratio of human beings who have been gradually improving their lives and those of their children, vs. every one whose luck went worse.  Should we attend to the latter?  Sure! But one reason we care is that technology allows us to see suffering everywhere, in images that tweak and tug at human empathy. The same burgeoning technologies that are now empowering the Black Lives Matter Movement. So that, too, is a kind of good news.

It does not matter if cynical snarks are "supposed to be funny."  Maybe you don't remember that excuse by playground bullies but I sure do.  Whatever his intentions, he contributes the generally insane trend of our times -- disparaging even glancing thoughts toward can-do optimism. 

We face horrid problems, not least of which has been the deliberate effort by fanatics in the U.S. to destroy politics and negotiation as a problem solving methodology.  And gloom merchants feed into this vileness, by getting everyone nodding cynically that things are worse, when they are not.

See below where I decrypt how - blatantly - the Koch-Adelson-Saudi-Murdoch schemers seek to spread this poison among even young liberals.

Make no mistake, cynicism is the tool of playground bullies who have attacked enthusiastic problem solvers ever since we each were six years old. The curled lip sneer and shrug of knowing-nihilism. Anyone promoting that attitude does not deserve to claim they are progressive or eager for a better world. Heck, they're not even conservative.  They are lazy bullies.

This is why dogmatics of both the far left and the Entire Right so hate Steven Pinker's clear statistical proof that per capita violence and poverty have been steeply declining across most (not all!) of the world.  A sane person would look at these facts and feel encouraged that a can-do spirit might accomplish so much more.

== Young Sandersites, yay for you! But this is not the Sixties (thank God) ==

Bernie Sanders is a real scrapper.  While I am not in complete tune with all of his proposals, he is saying many things that need saying and he has sparked excitement among millions of smart, young Americans... enthusiasts who really need to listen closely, e,g, when Sanders  finished the generally excellent pre-NH debate with this:

 "It's important to remember, no matter what that we both (he and Clinton) are 100 times better than any of the candidates the Republicans are offering." 

I have a feeling that we older folks are going to need to use that quote a lot to keep the True Believers from taking us off the rails. The over-wrought wing of the Sanders camp takes me back to my own youth in the 1960s... and that's not all good.  Note, Bernie is sane and he will embrace Hillary, either way.  Remember that. And here are a couple more points:

1- Young folks should be trying hard NOT to be like the sanctimony-addicted Baby-Boom generation. We're a bunch of screaming assholes! Have been since the 1960s, refusing even to notice when the stuff we fought for actually worked or came true! 

Gen Ys and Millennials are supposed to be more logical than us cranky boomers. Self-righteous indignation is a drug high that liberals cannot afford.  They are the last continent of sanity on Planet America. And this... is... not...fucking 1968.

2- Just win.  And by that I mean win the Supreme Court and end gerrymandering and limit money in politics, get a sane Congress filled with grownups who appreciate science and who don't pray for the world to end soon. If we get those things, it does not matter which democrat. Sanders? Hillary? A yellow dog? I... don't... care.  (Much.) Just win.

 3- Please, please everyone look up the phrase "agent provocateur." I’ll bet you that a good fraction of the most-shrill voices attacking Hillary are not "pro-Sanders" in real life. 

Think about it. The Koch-Saudi-Adelson-Murdoch PAC money is not doing them much good anymore through TV ads and such, so I betcha they are shifting a lot of it into social media.  Their billions can buy a lot of anonymous and pseudonymous trash-talkers.

They cannot buy Sanders himself. So take Bernie’s word for it, young zealots.  Calm down, fight for your guy. And whether or not he wins the nomination, come out of the convention arm-in-arm. 

Not in love with Clinton? Fine! Shift your attention to local Congressional and state assembly races! That is where the real difference can be made by young activists.  Change Congress and your state house!  That is the only way that some of Bernie's reforms will happen.

== What gets in the way of problem-solving? ==

 In many ways, our rationality is stunted by the fact that we remain "prisoners of our evolutionary past," as Rich Shenkman argues in his new book, Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics. We are swayed as much by emotions and gut instincts as reasoned analysis of information - with a brain wired back in the depths of the Stone Age. 

Returning to our starting theme...

In "11 Reasons Why 2015 Was a Great Year for Humanity," political economist Angus Hervey marvels that, "We re living through the most astonishing period of human progress in history. And nobody's telling us about it. Hervey notes advances in universal education, access to clean water, and progress in the battles against disease, hunger, poverty and childhood mortality, concluding, "It's easy to be cynical and maintain that nothing is ever getting better. The empirical evidence flatly contradicts this view; looking at what we've already achieved as a species should give us confidence going forward into the future."

Indeed, 2015 was far and away the best year for human exploration of space and the cosmos?  Better than the lamented 1960s yet the taxpayers who funded it all, with pennies, seem unaware. Of that or the myriad other fields where rapid advances are accelerating, and this despite a clearcut and open War on Science, declared by the far-left and the Entire Right.

There is good news and bad.  And the good will not reduce our felt need to save the world. We enlightenment moderate-pragmatists who believe in can-do problem solving, in negotiation and progress must (I'm afraid) become militant. 

Our enemy is not left or right or radical Islam but the underlying hatred of hope that propels so many of the cynical whiner-bullies out there, who would rather wallow in declarations of despair than lift themselves up to cooperate/compete/negotiate/innovate and actually help.

== Militia Spirit? ==

This coming Matthew McConaughey film (watch the trailer) is based on the true story of a county in the deep south that stayed loyal to the Union in the Civil War -- poor white farmers and escaped slaves who rejected the propaganda that they should sacrifice everything for plantation lord aristocrats.

I first learned about the Free State of Jones from Ken Burns's wonderful CIVIL WAR series, where it's revealed that every state in the Olde Confederacy -- except traitor-to-the-bone South Carolina -- saw whole regiments of volunteers march north to fight for their true country -- America -- keeping oaths that they had sworn, instead of breaking their word, just because the slave-holders lost an election.  Indeed, there were loyal counties and swathes of territory flying the stars and stripes all through the South....

... just as there are sincere American conservatives, today, who reject the tsunami of Fox propaganda that they should hate their own, freely-elected government, and kowtow to the new feudal oligarchy that has hijacked the Republican party. The "job-creator" caste of Koch-Adelson-Murdoch-Romney aristos who are fomenting phase 8 of the American Civil War and re-igniting the class conflict that we thought our parents, in the Greatest Generation had ended, at long last.

Will this film rouse sane white conservatives to reject the New Confederacy?  Or will they view it as a call to start militias, on any excuse at all?  And I have to wonder... is anyone in southern Oregon - where I set The Postman - re-reading my book about where this militia "spirit" eventually leads?

I am not the only one aware that we’ve entered a new phase of the American Civil War... While Blue America clings to notions of negotiation, the red-gray portions have long known and participated in re-igniting this 200 year old, recurring national sickness.  And now it is no longer easily-dismissed whackos talking about turning it violent. A former Republican Congressman talks about rekindling the Civil War.

== a lagniappe ==

And finally, a crackpot side-issue I keep returning to. Some lunacies span the entire global community.  One of them is the world’s insistence on supporting the chaotic and deadly-failed city of Mogadishu as the essential core of a united Somalia.  While the last 5 years has seen some progress in expelling the Al Shabbab terror group and restoring basic order, at this rate Mogadishu might be open for real national business by 2060, perhaps.  Meanwhile, the northern 1/3 of Somalia… the historically independent Somaliland … has been flourishing in peace for two decades, despite receiving almost no help from abroad. Hey, here's an idea. Start building south from there.

Rejection of Tomorrow

I keep seeing and hearing cynics sigh about how far we have "fallen." The disease is rampant, on both right and left. The striking thing to me is the inanity of cliches, like: "Isn't it a shame that our wisdom has not kept pace with technology?" This nonsense is spouted amid the greatest transformation of diversity, inclusion, acceptance, re-evaluation and tolerance in the history of our species! At no other time were so many hoary/awful assumptions - about race-gender and so on - pilloried by light and scrutiny! 

And if that is not ADVANCEMENT of our souls, I do not know what would be.

I go into this here: 2001: A Space Odyssey: Shining Light on How Far We've Come.

In pointing this out, I do not call for complacency. These trends - expanding our horizons of worry, exploration, concern, inclusion and so on - are the core essence of my life, in activism, science and science fiction. But it is important to note that this progress was not achieved by radical polemicists and cynics, who deny that we have already made great progress. 

It was propelled by science, which examined and demolished old taken-for-granted assumptions. It was propelled by millions who mixed idealism with pragmatism... the realization of the stupidity of wasting human potential by limiting options for women and minorities, for example. 

Some claim that we must let our wisdom catch up with advances in technology, suggesting that we would be better off if we slowed or suppressed changes in technology. I disagree -- I believe that technology has not yet caught up with our wisdom..

Indeed, there is no greater enemy of further progress than the cynics who declare that great progress HAS NOT ALREADY HAPPENED. 

Political correctness is not the driver of progress, but an unpleasant waste product of progress, unavoidable but to be navigated with high boots, while helping the best civilization in human history to get... and note this phrase... even-better.

See also my earlier posting: Who is worse? Those who think progress will be easy? Or those who deny progress at all?

==Future Primitive==

There are delightful moments when everything comes together: either you find a person who is right a lot and has expanded your horizons re: what’s possible… or you find the opposite extreme: a sublime rationalizer who induces stunned amazement at his universal wrongness, opening your eyes to the true diversity of the species we belong-to.

Here is an article  -- Why Do the Anarcho-Primitivists Want to Abolish Civilization -- about an anarcho-primitivist… once a confidant of the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski… who makes statement after statement that is not only retro-nostalgic, but absolutely, provably and universally false.

George Dvorsky writes, “Philosopher John Zerzan wants you to get rid of all your technology — your car, your mobile phone, your computer, your appliances — the whole lot. In his perfect world, you'd be stripped off all your technological creature comforts, reduced to a lifestyle that harkens back to when our hunter-gatherer ancestors romped around the African plains.”

Dvorsky does a good job leading Zerzan onto limb after limb, where Zerzan then saws them himself. Alas, George does not ask “what is the carrying capacity of the Earth in hunter gatherers?" That would have exposed Zeran’s prescription for what it is — a call for the death of billions.

And yes, as a LONG RANGE goal, convincing billions to have so few children that we equilibrate at a few hundred thousand, or a few millions, who superficially are hunter-gatherers but are augmented by science and background tools so that they avoid the true tormented and horrific life that our pre-agriculture ancestors *actually* lived? Well, that at least is something that could be argued, in a science fictional sort of way. (See the final episode of Battlestar Galactica). Wrongheaded, but nowhere near as much as Zeran.

Indeed, in my Brightness Reef Trilogy, I posit a strong reason why several galactic races might deliberately choose this path, diving into every-more primitive states in order to achieve a type of redemption. I do not refuse to contemplate such ideas! I just like them to be contemplated well and with sincere willingness to tradeoff reality-grounded ideas… not bizarrely reality-detached wish fantasies.

The important lesson here is that the crazy far right may be our biggest problem, today, with its campaign to restore the feudalism that oppressed 99% of our ancestors since agriculture. (There is a sub-movement on that side that openly seeks a return to lordship-rule). But retro-troglodytic-nostalgism also includes some who might be called “leftist,” who want the other kinds of oppression that preceded agriculture.

Both retro movements are crazy. Their common theme is rejection of tomorrow. But the enlightenment civilization that brought us science and wealth and education and positive sum games... and especially the much-smarter-than-us kids who might weigh the evidence better than we can -- is still the only way that humanity might choose to navigate the difficult path ahead.

==Denying Science==

Continuing re the march of the paranoids... In Stop Pretending That Liberals are Just As Anti-Science as Conservatives, Chris Mooney does service by cataloging in great detail the gone-mad American right’s War on Science. Here, he (on Mother Jones) attempts to prove that the American left is not “just as bad as the right” in reviling science. Mooney both succeeds and fails. On his side of the ledger...

(1) Yes, the crazy-wing of the left is smaller (though it include examples like Mr. Zeran), and...

(2) The flakiest types on the left have only picked a few topics, for example, GMOs and anti-vaccination. Most have not joined an across-the-board hatred of science, and...

(3) In each of those campaigns, there appear to be just as many conservatives.

Where Mooney stumbles is in trying to soft-pedal the blatant fact that America’s far-left does contain some anti-science tendencies. 

You can find one root source in the left’s bastion — several hundred university soft-studies departments, where mutant versions of that intellectual disease -- post-modernism -- still metastacize and thrive. Sure, that's a small sliver of American life, but an important one and a realm wherein their cult is just as horrifically loony and anti-future and conspiratorial as any corporate boardroom or Tea Party cult cell! If you have ever spent substantial time on campus, you know the lesson these infestations prove…

...that dogmatic bullies will gather, wherever they can get away with it. And then find rationalized incantations to justify their bullying.

(Especially irksome is the way so many (not all!) university literature and English departments have been reflexively hateful toward science fiction, the one branch of literature for which Americans should be most proud. This is starting to shift. But recent attempts to undermine a crown jewel — The University of California at Riverside’s Eaton SF Collection — serve as case in point.)

Two books that delve further into this subject: The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, as well as Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell (of the excellent science blogging site, Science 2.0)

Let me reiterate — there is no comparison of MAGNITUDE between the very-far-left’s little islands of cranky, highly specific, anti-future science hating… and the vastly, vastly larger and more deadly-to-us-all madness that has taken over the entire American right. Go ahead and read Chris Mooney’s article!

Just remember to keep a wary eye on your allies.

Is There Such a Thing as Progress?

= Dare we dream of a world free of poverty by 2030? =

In this interview, ex imam Ahmed Akkari, one of the main denouncing voices during the 2005 crisis about Denmark Mohammed cartoons, explains how study of enlightenment thinkers lead to reconsidering his stances on freedom of expression and secular societies. 

Indeed. We've spoken before of the evidence shown by Harvard Prof Steven Pinker that percapita violence rates have been plummeting, (on average) since 1945.  Now… here is yet more news that shatters pat nostrums of both the right and the left.  In April, the Development Committee of the World Bank set the goal of ending extreme poverty by the year 2030.  Sound naive and delusional? Jeffrey Sachs in the NY Times shows a strong case that this goal can (roughly) be met and indeed is being met.

"According to the World Bank’s scorecard, the proportion of households in developing countries below the extreme-poverty line (now measured as $1.25 per person per day at international prices) has declined sharply, from 52 percent in 1980, to 43 percent in 1990, 34 percent in 1999, and 21 percent in 2010. Even sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the most recalcitrant poverty, is finally experiencing a notable decline, from 58 percent in 1999 to 49 percent in 2010."

Sachs shows that "…anti-market sentiment is no friend of poverty reduction. But neither is free-market fundamentalism. Economic growth and poverty reduction can’t be achieved by free markets alone. Disease control, public education, the promotion of new science and technology, and protection of the natural environment are public functions that must align with private market forces." In other words, the much-maligned Mixed-Approach that we inherited from the Greatest Generation turns out to have been exactly right, all along.  Read the article by Sachs.  

It supplements Steven Pinker's work and shows what we might still accomplish, if vigorous, pragmatic, non-dogmatic ambition and goodwill take hold ...  if we thwart the grouches and cynics whose dyspeptic and demoralizing grumbles make them by far the worst enemies of humanity and Planet Earth.

As President John F. Kennedy said: “The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were and ask, why not?"

== And even rougher (deserved) treatment for cynics ==

The always acerbic, clever and sometimes on-target David Wong uses his modernized CRACKED site to deliver some truly eye-opening rants, slapping the reader with wake-up! calls.  In this case, he provides: 7 Reasons the World Looks Worse Than It Really Is. Some of them even ones I haven't mentioned before.

For example: "You can hate the greed and cutthroat competition of capitalism, but before that it was the much-worse feudalism. You can say that communism was never given a chance because countries like Russia and China were taken over by crazy assholes, but you have to understand that susceptibility to crazy assholes will always be one of the fundamental weaknesses of that system. You have to give credit to the people who worked hard to make things less bad today." 

And: "This is why I've grown to find cynicism so frustrating -- cynicism doesn't cause inaction. The desire for inaction causes cynicism. And so you fight to defend your cynicism tooth and nail."

Alas he ignores the MAIN reasons for nostalgic cynicism!

(1) The alluring romanticism of look-backward  worldviews which dominated nearly all human societies, perceiving some lost golden age in the past, instead of a human-built one in our future.

(2) The tendency of the political right to deny that human improvability is possible and urgently necessary and hence worth paying taxes to pursue.

(3) The tendency on the political left to demand lots of (necessary) improvement, but only with chiding, never encouragement, angrily denouncing any admission that lots of progress has already happened, because that admission might "reduce the perceived urgency to improve and do more reform." (A presumption that is as loony as anything at Fox.

But heck, while you're at it, check out The 5 Ugly Lessons Hiding in Every Superhero Movie.

This is a frequent theme of mine. One that I will elaborate more upon... next posting.

== Poking at sacred cows ==

This riff attempts to make excuses for Robert E. Lee's loss at Gettysburg, on cartographic grounds: Lee's ill-fated combat decisions and ultimate defeat likely stemmed from bad reconnaissance reports, his forces spread too thinly across 7 miles, and an inability to see the more compact and elevated Union forces, according to geographers and cartographers who synthesized old maps, text and data into a digital model of the three-day Pennsylvania battle in 1863. "We know that Confederate General Robert E. Lee was virtually blind at Gettysburg," Anne Kelly Knowles, a geography professor at Middlebury College, wrote in the article accompanying the interactive map on smithsonianmag.com.

There is a problem with that excuse… it is just as easily applicable to almost all of the Union commanders Lee defeated during the previous two years.  The problem was a general one… in several senses of that word.  Hence, applying it to make excuses just for Lee is disingenuous. In fact, Lee collapsed every time he tried to take on the vastly more difficult job of strategic attack that his much derided opponents faced. Generals McDowell, McClellan, Rosecrans, Halleck and so on, had to maneuver vast, invading armies and their supply chains through poorly mapped territory with almost nonexistent communications.  Inevitably, one wing or another became exposed for an aggressive defender to pounce-upon.

Lee's admitted brilliance was less a factor than historical circumstance and the transient effects of technology in the 1860s. These combined to offer huge advantages to agile and aggressive defense, Lee's specialty as he recklessly chewed at the flanks of his lumbering opponents.  But at Antietem and Gettysburg, he was the one attempting to coordinate a strategic advance.  And in those cases, Lee's approach -- charge at anything you see that's blue -- was  more crudely ill-conceived and reliant on luck than the advances of Rosecrans, Grant, Sherman, or even Halleck and Pope. Indeed, he was spectacularly fortunate, in both cases, that he did not face an aggressive Lee-type on the Union side. In fact, his lucky stars saved him at both battles.

== TWEETABLES! ==

Some wisdom on reality vs. perception:  http://www.viruscomix.com/page528.html

An anthem for geek girls! http://www.dvice.com/2013-7-26/video-day-anthem-geek-girls

DARPA's next Robotics Challenge. Challengers will deal with a complex search-and-rescue scenario.  http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/Default.aspx

A fascinating look at how dolphins react to mirrors! http://bit.ly/15C1O8q

Okay this is cool music appreciation:  90 theramins doing Beethoven's 9th. http://bit.ly/1bj7N4g 

http://

Sweet and moving, from SMBC. http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3088#comic

And this lovely lecture-tribute-perfomance to Gershwin.  http://www.youtube.com/embed/w-nznS0FXKc?feature=player_detailpage

From The Onion: a naive and irresponsible father refuses to create castle-bunkers to protect his family against the looming apocalypse!  http://onion.com/1fS0nVb

Kewl chance to put your life -- and time -- in perspective. http://bit.ly/1hbR7t2 

And talk about perspective!  A camera strapped to an eagle's back. http://bit.ly/19NT5vB

How we survived the sixties I'll never know. It is the biggest evidence for alien or heavenly intervention.   http://n.pr/1hbQVtA 

http://n.pr/1hbQVtA

== Recommended ==

UCLA Prof Gregory Stock was one of the earliest of the modern wave of scientists promoting what became known as "transhumanism" or improvement of the human species.  Now he has come out with an interesting new "Book of Questions" -- which is what the title suggests, a series of posers, puzzlers, and cringe-worthy shit-disturbers… the sort that you raise once-per-evening at a dinner party or discussion group or the work-lunch room, to get some lively passions raised.  

Sample some at thebookofquestions.com

== And … ==

Can you believe the web browser is 20 years old? Or that MOSAIC took the world by storm ONLY 20 years ago? Either way, it makes you blink, just to imagine the world of back-then.  Have a look back via Frank Catalano's brilliant essay about the things we used to take for granted.

Finally - a teaser for folks in Arizona:  How do we fit in a universe that's unveiling itself in confounding ways? Might we share the cosmos with other intelligent beings, or are we alone in the vastness of space? Could the universe be a Matrix-like simulation?

I’ll be giving the Shoemaker Memorial Lecture about "Humanity’s Place in a Very Strange Universe" at Arizona State University’s BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, in Tempe, on Oct. 1 at 7 pm. Free, and open to the public, with a book signing afterward.  Click here to RSVP. 

Next day I'll speak at ASU's Center for Science & Imagination: Science Fiction and the Future of Journalism at 1:45 pm; Sign up at EventBrite. 

Was 1957 America Better Than Today? (An Outright Rant!)

All right... this forwarded mass email put me into fill-tilt, bellowing rant mode!  It's a reaction to one of those email circulars that our crazy uncles keep sending us - you know the kind, offering vast, sweeping, counter-factual assertions in lieu of evidence, logic or even common sense, all in order to justify hating half of their fellow citizens. I generally ignore them, but this one is wildly popular among millions of "values" Americans who have been talked into hating tomorrow. It needs an answer.

So read on only if you're in a mood for pyrotechnics!

======     ======     ======

Nostalgia is for cretins.  America was built by men and women who dreamed and built. Who believed - and believe - in progress. Who forgo the sick drug of hate and negotiate solutions.

By people who respect skill and knowledge and the folks who have them.

America was not built by fellows like the author of this maudlin paean to yesteryear: This article, 1957 vs. 2010  by someone who claims to have witnessed "how far our nation has declined socially, morally and spiritually…" proceeding to list  scenarios such as: "Billy breaks a window in his neighbor’s car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt."


Let's follow along this one comparison between 1957 and 2010:

"1957 – Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college and becomes a successful businessman.

2010 – Billy’s dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy is removed to foster care and joins a gang. The state psychologist is told by Billy’s sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy’s mom has an affair with the psychologist."

But go ahead and read this spectacular feat of tendentious-nostalgia* and temporal myopia.  You'll laugh... when you're not crying.

In fact, let me be honest and admit - two of these little tales, about how America had some simpler, more earthy aspects in 1957, resonate with  parts of me that are  - well - kinda conservative at-heart... in the old-better way William F. Buckley meant it. Still, most of this "1957" screed is drooling imbecility. Scenarios 6, 7, & 8 are sick fantasies concocted by a stupid, nasty mind that makes the lefty-flake PC correctoids look positively sane.

Oh, but I was inspired! So, with the other guy's list of time-comparisons in mind (in fairness - do peruse his versions), try on these additional contrasts between 1957 and 2010.

Hmmm let's see.

1957: Gracie (age 13) is raped by her stepfather. Shamed into keeping silent, she's guilt tripped for "asking for it." (Her eventual shrink, a Freudian, tells her she imagined it all.)

2011: Gracie has a black belt. Sucker is never going to attack a woman again. And just to make sure, she goes public. (Oh, and Freudians are extinct, thank God.)

1957: Thomas attends a segregated school without textbooks, heat or windows. Or hope. Every media message tells him he is destined to be a servant.

2011: Thomas attends Caltech. He carries no handicaps of preconception because of his race.  We all benefit from his research.

1957: Jimmy is a "four-eyes" who loves science. He is bullied, harassed, buggered and tormented. Everybody shrugs. "boys will be boys."

(I was there, in 1957. I fought back, really well. But I saw other boys crushed, pulverized, even driven to suicide.)

2011: In most middle class areas, severe physical bullying is almost nonexistent.  Today Jimmy is the CEO of a software company, making life better for everybody. Geeks and nerds are cool.  And whoever wrote that "fights were honorable" in 1957 can screw himself. I was there. Some fights were like that, I recall. But the other kind - pure, vicious terrorism - were far more common. (Only jerks who used to be bullies are nostalgic for those "good old days.")

1957: Gracie's rape turns into a pregnancy that will ruin her life. Or she goes to a back alley abortionist. Dies in agony.

2011:  Rates of teen sex, teen pregnancy, abortion, STDs, early marriage, and domestic violence are far LOWER in Blue America than they were in 1957. Divorce rates are higher, because women are empowered... but in Blue America even divorce is tipping downward, along with steeply-falling crime.

Rates for all of these things -- ALL of them -- are much higher in other parts of America - the parts that scream at us how much more "moral" their "values" are.  (It's plain statistical fact. And any nostalgia junkie can choke on it.)

One could go on and on, showing a thousand ways that THINGS ARE VASTLY BETTER today in the 21st Century! Indeed, shouldn't they be? Didn't those wise moms and dads of 1957 work damned hard to help make a better world?

Don't we praise them by admitting they succeeded? Don't we insult them by sneering that they failed? Think about that! Which of us here is deep-down more respectful to folks of earlier days? And which of us insults them as failures? 

== Not everything is better ==

But to be fair... I admit that some things today are worse today than they were in 1957!  Here are a few examples.

1957: Thalidomide babies are born armless. The bald eagle almost vanishes. Unregulated, toxins leak into waterways like Love Canal. Lakes are dying everywhere. School kids cry because the air hurts to breathe. Polio so terrifies parents that they keep children locked inside during summer, forbidding them from going to the public pool. (I remember it all.)

But in 1957 wise and good people dream of an era when scientists can help us all figure out what substances work and which ones do harm. Following 1957's Sputnik scare, all Americans think scientists are wonderful! Soon, Jonas Salk is the most popular man in America.

2011: Ungrateful imbeciles rage against science, following radio  ignoramuses into snits against vaccination, economics, meteorology, evolution, medicine and biology. Science has made terrific progress and we know tons more! Blue America keeps getting healthier and living longer. It's an age of real wonders and American science literacy is second only to Japan's.

But meanwhile, there's another America - that keeps smoking and shovels down pork rinds, while self-righteously screeching that liberals are ordering them what to eat -- (a damned lie).  And they die young.

And the War Against Science  (and every other profession that knows stuff -- like journalists, teachers, doctors, professors, civil servants, attorneys and skilled labor) rages on. Yep, some things are much worse.

1957: The greatest enemy of freedom and enterprise is Soviet Communism. A terrible threat and an evil empire! Democratic president Truman establishes NATO, the Marshall Plan and containment as national policy. Republican president Eisenhower maintains consistency and establishes a tradition of consensus negotiation between parties. Disparities of income and wealth (among whites) are at the lowest point in all of human history. The rich pay a lot of taxes, yet still have plenty to invest in the most vibrant capitalism of all time. Under Rooseveltian tax rates and regulation, the middle class grows by leaps and bounds.

Yes, there are Joe McCarthys on the right. But there are also Buckleys and Goldwaters who love science and intellect and negotiation and the kind of respectful argument that features - above all - curiosity and an eagerness to learn. Likewise, liberals and democrats utterly reject communism. Extremism is dumb. Moderation is in.

2011: Communism is gone and the far left is a joke. The greatest enemy of free enterprise is a cabal of 500 billionaires who appoint each other to director boards, protect each other and vote each other mega compensation packages, no matter how poorly the company does. They combine to take over American politics through secret slush funds and to finance culture war. Anyone who complains is pushing "class war."

The nation is sucked into a decade of trillion dollar quagmire wars of attrition in Asia -- but for the first time in our nation's history the rich refuse to help pay for a desperate military struggle. The nation is deliberately ripped by Culture War, weakening us worse than anything has since the Civil War.

1957: This was the time of the Greatest Generation that struggled against depression and fascism and saved the world. Also, they admired and adored Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Sure, some of them avowed that government meddling and regulation and even tax rates might have gone too far! But they were willing to start tweaking them down, incrementally, while admitting that FDR left America so vastly better off that no leader in human history ever had such a track record.

In the 1950s, even at high Rooseveltean tax rates (and some say because of them), we had three things at once, a booming, rapidly rising middle class, the lowest disparity in wealth between the rich and middle class in history (among white males), and a hugely entrepreneurial, skyrocketing capitalism, creating so much wealth that we could afford to start thinking about other things, like health and the environment and social justice.

2011:  For decades, the right has demonized the most beloved president in American history, who was adored by the men and women who this "1957" jerk claims to have been so wise, back in the 1950s!  Think about that, while I repeat it.  The moms and dads whom he calls wondrously smart and earthy and wise - they loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For most of them, the only acceptable Republican was Dwight David Eisenhower - a wonderful, decent and moderate man who believed in negotiating with democrats, not demonizing them.

Now? After spending 30 years tearing down everything FDR built, what have the rightists achieved?  A rapidly plummeting middle class, the highest disparity in wealth between rich and middle class in a hundred years, and the near destruction of entrepreneurial capitalism, under the crushing weight of monopolies. And still they rage against levels of regulation that are absurdly low, by the standards of 1957!

OKAY, SOME THINGS ARE WORSE. I admit it.

On the other hand... I must recall that in 1957 there were vastly more awful voices on the crazy right than the jerk who wrote this "comparison." Men who fulminated against Martin Luther King and desegregation, instead of claiming (as Glenn Beck does today) that "we invented civil rights and Dr. King was one of us!"

Men who called it a commie plot to assert that cars made smog.  Who screeched that only communists thought that tobacco caused disease. Jerks who helped cancer-causing companies to lie about it for an entire generation. Men who promised to get us off the habit of wastefully suckling the teat of foreign oil states... only to do everything in their power to keep us hooked.

Yes, 1957 was a better time...for crazies. But we still have plenty of those, and they are trying hard to catch up to the good old days.

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* Fascinating recent (and relevant) science: People who are better at memory, and especially telling the difference between true memories and imagined ones, seem to have a better-developed fold at the front of the brain called the paracingulate sulcus (PCS). This brain variation is present in roughly half of the normal population. It’s one of the last structural folds to develop before birth, so it varies greatly in size between individuals in the healthy population. Researchers discovered that adults whose MRI scans indicated an absence of the PCS were significantly less accurate on memory tasks than people with a prominent PCS on at least one side of the brain.  If verified, a stunning and important finding.
But well, that's science.

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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