Does anyone besides me feel that the US is in a state of psychic distemper?
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Does anyone besides me feel that the US is in a state of psychic distemper?
Hey, Psychic Distemper is the name of the Tumblr site I've been haunting lately.Quote:
Originally Posted by hamdasl
I remember seeing a piece on a subliminal magazine ad featuring a fifth of booze, and a glass of ice, and if you blew up the tumbler of ice you saw that they had inserted fuzzy subliminal images of demons writhing in pain!!!!! If you were turning the pages of the magazine, your mind's eye retained the image, and I guess the theory was the next time you went to the liquor store, seeking a HELL of a time, you'd reach for that bottle of booze off the shelf.
-In other words, the Republican Convention was about scaring people over to their side.
Listen, Hillary and Tim Kaine will put the Country in safe hands, believe me.
What I am wondering right now is what a RogerAilesless Fox News is going to look like. Rupert Murdock is off getting a chubby with Mick Jagger's old wife, and while Ailes got him a ton of money, he is on record as saying about Roger Ailes-
"He actually believes that stuff"
Now Murdock's sons are in charge, and they may actually change the face of American Politics more than the Koch Bros,
Fox has the highest ratings, but they get all OLD people, and advertizers with big money don't want their products shown to old codgers who are set in their ways, they want young impressionable minds who are deciding on Bud or Miller, not Trump or Clinton.
The REAL STORY. behind the scenes, is really bubbling right now.
Did the Republican Convention really warn about the Danger of Pornography to the nation?????????
Why are the Koch Bros sitting on their money???
I actually remember when Walter Conkrite delivered THE NEWS, determined by the weight and relevance of the story.
Americans have been brainwashed, and in my mind, Fox News and Conservative Radio are directly responsible.
The World and Life is always a Blessing and a curse,
the psychic melee you're seeing now is because the TRUTH + five dollars = $5.00 to most guys calling the shots.
I would say it’s suffering from political distemper (which is redundant, since an archaic meaning of ‘distemper’ is ‘political disorder’) - psychic, I’m not so sure about. There’s a certain amount of political conflict built into the system of balances - otherwise they wouldn’t balance. I thinks the conception of the founders was that having three branches of government at odds with each other would force opposing political perspectives to converge on a practical compromise in order to resolve issues of law, policy and governance. Since Newt Gingrich’s first government shutdown, the GOP has declared that ‘compromise’ a dirty word and is not to be tolerated. The Tea Baggers continued this tradition during Obama’s tenure. That why nothing gets done. Should that tiny fisted demagogue running for president actually take power in November, I fear that resistance to compromise will be necessary for the survival of the nation.
Yes, it is being worked on at the highest levels. There are many hands involved and a lot of blame to go around for screwing the ether up this bad.
I don't know what a 'psychic distemper' is and a lot will depend on how people perceive the US, whether they are part of it or, like me, an outsider.
Historians sometimes use the concept of a 'long decade' or a 'long century' to get over the numerical problem that can identify a phase which doesn't neatly fall into 10 or 100 years but may be close enough. I would therefore like to suggest a 'long decade' of distemper in the US that went roughly from 1963-1979 and has within it two mini-phases: 1963-72, and 1972-79.
What happened in this 'long decade' is that the US came to terms with the contradiction between Constitutional freedom and segregation in all its forms, transformed 'the personal is political' into 'identity politics' that became law in the 1970s (Roe-v-Wade on abortion being the most controversial), but in the process opened up or exposed divisions in US society that remain constant today.
If the first phase was dominated by Civil Rights and the protest movement, the second phase was dominated by Vietnam, Watergate and the sense in the 1970s that the US government -at local as well as national level- was incompetent or mired in corruption and blatant lies. Nothing was going right, from the decline of heavy industry in the domestic economy, crime making city streets dangerous places to walk especially at night, to foreign policy where across the decade the US lost allies to revolutions in Ethiopia, Iran and Afghanistan at a time when 'detente' was exposed as a sham and the final exit from Vietnam, though part of the Paris Peace Agreement, was seen as a humiliation crowned by the entry of the North Vietnamese army into Saigon, with the hostage crisis in Tehran a terrible burden.
By contrast, Ronald Reagan's Morning in America campaign offered sunshine and hope in contrast to what had gone before, though I think the damage that was done by the Nixon Presidency was partially offset by the Carter Presidency which in addition to restoring honesty and dignity to the office of the President, also had to deal with the worst aspects of the quadruple rise in oil prices which hammered both US industry and gasoline prices and with it, anyone driving a vehicle which is most Americans. Carter also presided over the Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt, an achievement that cannot be set aside.
It is hard to resurrect the bitterness of those divisions in this 'long decade', over riots in the cities, civil rights and Vietnam, and it is no accident that it was in this 'long decade' that the 'Moral Majority' and Evangelical Christians who thought they saw their cherished world coming to an end began their fightback, and the 'southern Democrats' abandoned that party to become Republicans. I think in comparison the US although still a divided society, or more accurately a network of divided societies, is a calmer place than it was in the 1970s, and I say that even with the tone of politics as it is today, but I remain convinced that there was more bitterness and division in the 1960s and 1970s than there is now.
Maybe , it's to much led in the tubes.