Ed Kilgore, one of the few people on the planet older than me, remembers that his conservative Georgia school devoted a whole lot of time to the first Earth Day 43 years ago:
That wouldn’t happen today, for all the talk about union teachers (who don’t, by the way, have collective bargaining rights in states like Georgia) brainwashing children imprisoned in “government schools” instead of being free to attend conservative evangelical madrassas where kids are taught about man’s God-given dominion over the earth. 43 years of progress, eh?
This is true, but as someone who was 7 years old on the first Earth Day, I’ll also note that pollution was a lot more obvious in 1970. Cars had nothing like the pollution controls they had today, power plants belched smoke, there were rivers so polluted that they caught on fire, and this guy was all over the TV crying about the litter in the ditches. In other words, it was so obvious that we were destroying the water and air that even the John Birch types knew that we had to do something about it.
Today, because of the Clean Air Act (which got real regulatory teeth in 1970), the Clean Water Act (1972) and the EPA (1970), the pollution that we do have is essentially invisible. So it’s easier for wingers to deny global warming and piss on Earth Day, because the evidence isn’t as bloody obvious as it was in the 70s.
maurinsky
I was only 5 months old on the first Earth Day, but I remember that Native American who was played by a non-Native American well. When I was in elementary school, we had Ecology as a subject.
cleek
yay Nixon!
aimai
Its funny how knowledge of something changes your view of it. I was 10 in 1970 and I remember being hugely powerfully affected by the image of the “Native American” guy being spattered with the garbage thrown from the passing car. It was iconic, in the truest sense of the word, and it collapsed into itself a dawning (white, child’s) understanding of the entire wrongness of the theft of the continent and its despoiling. Now that I know the actor was actually Sicilian I crack up looking at the picture, its obvious staged qualities and the hokiness of the phony invocation of “Native American” purity and antiquity seem obvious. But it was still a very powerful image.
Wag
@cleek:
When the problem was so obvious that even a craven politial dickhead like Nixon supported workable solutions, that’s when you knew it was bad. I believe that we the envionmental community have been a victims of our success at eliminating most of the visable pollution. It was so much easier when we could point a mountains of litter and smog choked air.
Now? see no evil think no evil
Randy P
Our school heartily embraced the first Earth Day and our class went out to clean up a nearby field… where one of my classmates found evidence of illegal dumping by the school and made a complaint. The school authorities were not amused.
JGabriel
mistermix @ top:
You know, letting your river catch fire could happen to anyone once. Even twice could be a mere coincidence.
But more than three times? Cleveland, that’s just irresponsible.
Wag
@aimai:
I was 9 at the time, and I think we have lost sight of the power of image. Hikiness works. We need to reclaim powerful images from the Right, even if the images are cheap and appeal to the emotions of the LCD voters. We NEED the LCD voters, and have made a huge tactical error for the past many years by appealing to the population as if everyone had a Master’s degree and could be moved by intellectual arguements alone.
Phoebe Jean
it’s invisible because it’s all in china.
Luna Sea
I remember doing a report on pollution for school, with pictures of billowing smokestacks and the latest stats from our very own World Book Encyclopedia set (which my mother bought along with my very first dictionary from a door-to-door salesman). How’s that for old? Still have the dictionary, wish I still had the World Book set.
sb
@Wag: Well said but the problem is people aren’t believing even the simplest of facts (way below masters degree level). When people look you in the eye and say the waters aren’t rising, the glaciers aren’t melting and warming isn’t a problem… I mean, what the hell do you do with that?
It wasn’t tactics that led to our current state of affairs; it was a not insignificant portion of the populace embracing the crazy, which is currently at 11 and rising.
ursine
I teach a law school class on Environmental law, and the fact that pollution was palpable (visible, smellable, etc.) when these laws got going is is one of the first things I talk about. It explains a lot of the legal and political emphasis in how these laws are administered and interpreted over time.
Halteclere
I remember in the ’70’s how the roadsides were covered with trash, and it was not unusual to see people throw the remains of their drive-through meals out the window. I was a kid at the time and made spending money by picking up the aluminum cans.
When I think about it 30+ years later I am sill amazed that society could be changed so much in a decade, such that throwing out trash became a big taboo.
NotMax
Remember Love Canal.
Remember Times Beach.
Cuyahoga River? Randy Newman’s acerbic “Burn On.”
Now the Lord can make you tumble
The Lord can make you turn
The Lord can make you overflow
But the Lord can’t make you burn
Higgs Boson's Mate
Burn On – Randy Newman
gbear
Now it’s our tap water that catches on fire, not our rivers. Mining and gas exploration are still as out of control as anything from the 70’s.
Napoleon
I am almost 52 and grew up in a steel town. When we would visit grandma, who lived near a plan, when we would go to leave sometimes you would find a layer of crap on the car from the plants.
Gin & Tonic
@Halteclere:
FTFY. Travel somewhere outside North America/Western Europe. You’ll be appalled.
Schlemizel
The brain damaged excuse for a human that is my BIL was trying to snark yesterday about global warming because we are having this shitty weather with big snow falls.
Rather than argue with him I just said “You missed saying Al Gore is fat”
I was 18 on the first Earth Day. I was young and stupid and thought we might actually make a difference. We probably have, but not enough of one to matter. We are a dead species walking, its just a matter of when not a matter of if.
Any member of H. Spaien that makes it through the coming mass extinction event will be from some isolated hunter-gatherer tribe that is quick to adapt. More likely some new species will arise in a 100 million years
dnlZ
Ditto vaccination. Ditto safe and available abortion. People forget. Shit happens again.
priscianus jr
@aimai: “Now that I know the actor was actually Sicilian … ”
Sicilians also live on the earth.
His stepson thinks he was pretty cool.
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/04/02/man-called-tree-stepson-iron-eyes-cody-commanding-pow-wow-presence-148485
Cassidy
Reclaiming visuals isn’t worth what it used to be. You could stand outside with graphic pictures of 1st graders with multiple bullet holes in them, blood everywhere, etc. and these fucking anti-American, traitorous, inhuman conservative scum ain’t going to give one shit.
Roger Moore
It’s a classic example of the cycle that Republicans love to exploit. There’s a terrible problem, regulations are proposed to solve it, the regulations work, and then the Republicans come along and claim that the reduction in the problem is proof that the regulations are no longer needed. Look for it, and you’ll see the same basic pattern everywhere.
@Phoebe Jean:
As a resident of the Los Angeles area, I call bullshit. The number of cars in LA- the number one source of our air pollution- has kept growing, even as our air has gotten better. And if anything, increasing trade with China has caused explosive growth at the ports of LA and Long Beach. In spite of the massive growth in the number of cars, trucks, and ships that can potentially contribute to smog, our problems have been getting better, and it’s absolutely because of government regulation.
Frankensteinbeck
The visceral nature of the problem made it a cause célèbre then, but it’s tribalism that stops it from being addressed now. A plurality of America is in full panic mode that their culture is dying. Making common cause with the atheist welfare queen communists on ANYTHING is now screaming anathema.
@Schlemizel:
Don’t give in to dispair, Sir Or Madame As The Case May Be. We’ll be okay. The ozone layer is still there, the rain forests are still there, the Gulf is not a petroleum-choked wasteland and Northern Japan is not an irradiated wasteland. People no longer die from the ‘yellow fog of London’. It’s important to address environmental issues, but rumors of the extinction of the human race are still greatly exaggerated.
SatanicPanic
So what do we do about Republicans? If the rest of us agree to listen to shitty country and laugh at Dane Cook jokes will they calm down? I’m willing to negotiate here.
SFAW
@priscianus jr:
As do wombats, but I don’t think a bag of garbage splattering one would have quite the same effect, marketing-wise.
Randy P
@priscianus jr: Yes but why not cast a Native American as a Native American?
At least now we’re more enlightened, so in the movie version of The Lone Ranger, the Jay Silverheels role is played by… wait, Johnny Depp? In some weird voodoo priest makeup? WTF?
RSA
@Roger Moore:
Preceding this pattern, which can be seen with respect to global climate change, discrimination against gays, and gun control, is that many Republicans will simply deny the existence of a problem until it affects them personally. And sometimes not even then.
weaselone
@Frankensteinbeck:
A plurality of America is in full panic mode that their culture is dying.
Has there ever been a time in this country when that was not true?
Ben Franklin
@weaselone:
‘Only 49 per cent of people now consider climate change a very serious issue – far fewer than at the beginning of the worldwide financial crisis in 2009.’
As usual, there was no mention of the role of the corporate media as a leading cause of why ‘green fatigue’ has supposedly set in. No mention of the media’s shameful failure to explore root causes of the climate crisis, not least the elite-serving corporate globalisation that has taken humanity to the brink of disaster. Chris Shaw, a social sciences researcher at the University of Sussex, noted on Twitter that nor was there ‘any mention of the work of the merchants of doubt, paid for and acting on the behalf of corporate interests’.
http://medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/726-heading-for-a-different-planet-global-warming-irrefutable-science-and-the-failure-of-journalism.html
SFAW
@SatanicPanic:
Your willingness to sacrifice is noble. However, as you doubtless know, giving in on one or two points will not be seen as “good faith,” but rather as a sign of weakness, and they will continue pushing their “agenda” until all currently-rational humans became as insane as the Rethugs are.
(“Agenda” was in quotation marks, because that word usually implies having some sort of plan. Being against all-things-rational, or all-things-not-right-wing, doesn’t seem to meet that standard.)
Death Panel Truck
Skip Sally Quinn and go to the 3:52 mark. Narrated by the great William Conrad.
“People start pollution. People can stop it.”
cleek
@weaselone:
i’d be willing to bet that there’s never been a time in all of human history when some people weren’t afraid that their culture was dying. it’s essentially the core of social conservatism – people want things to be the way they are because the unknown is scary.
maya
Remember 1070 well. The last straw was the mess leftover by the hippies after Woodstock, the year before the first Earth Day which should have told us something about human nature. They and their children and grandchildren are now part of the big problem wrecking the environment here in Nor Cal with pot growing effluent polluting the rivers and siphoning those same rivers dry for their grows. Keep that in mind if any of you like to mellow out on NorCal’s chief export.
Randy Newman needs to update his repertoire – Toke On?
handsmile
On days when I’m feeling just a little too chipper (as a dysthymic, such days come seldom), I’ll read something from the Guardian’s “Environment” section or visit the website of 350.org, the environmental advocacy group founded by Bill McKibben. That invariably helps to recalibrate mood.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment
http://350.org/
Or here’s McKibben’s essay, “Some Like It Hot” from the current issue of NYRB in which he addresses recent reports on climate change issued by the World Bank, the National Reseach Council, and Daedalus magazine:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/may/09/some-like-it-hot/
Throughout the world – even here in the land of the free – there’s less and less of the grass for the damned kids to get off of.
ETA: maya: A gentleman never speaks of a woman’s age, but I must say I’m impressed with your memory.
artem1s
@JGabriel:
no, not even close to a coincidence. I have seen footage of marketing videos of the era that boasted about Cleveland’s manufacturing friendly ‘atmosphere’ featuring smokestacks belching smoke. Historically we are the cradle of robber barons who fled the city when it got too nasty to live in anymore. The famed Millionaire’s row on Euclid Avenue was right in the fall out zone of the steel mills and eventually they all went to Pittsburgh or NY and left their mess behind for the poors to clean up.
Very nice PBS documentary was produced in 2008. Unfortunately can’t find a link to it. Just a clip here…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmIRtKEYPBU&noredirect=1
While the Cuyahoga had its problems, Lake Erie was arguably in worse shape. Because it is so shallow, it acts as sort of a canary in the coal mine for the rest of the Great Lakes. In just a few years the city, county and state became a leader in developing waterway cleanup techniques.
Last year the Western Reserve Rowing Association hosted the US Nationals Masters Headrace on the river. People from all over the country were impressed by the boat house and loved the crooked river course. One of the judges who was from Sacramento was completely unaware of the history of the river. I sail the lake in the summer and have to say we are lucky to have it and most residents see our metro parks and waterways as one of our most valuable assets rather than just a resource to be used and thrown away.
Things are very, very different now. Unfortunately the state GOP has done quite a bit of damage to the state EPA. Hopefully we will be able to avoid turning the whole state back into a sewer while King John is ruling downstate.
Bruce S
My comments keep getting eaten, but long story short 1970 was a year before the Powell Memo to the Chamber of Commerce targeting Nader, campus activism, etc. triggered a long march by the Right that created Heritage, CATO, etc. and culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan. !970 was still the world of “the 60s”, which had to be stopped…and was.
Thymezone
I had no idea that the indian guy in those commercials was Ed Kilgore.
raven
I’m sure you are all aware that it is Confederate Memorial Day here and the Georgia State Government is closed.
Eric S
Born in 1971. I grew up with the littering commercials. I remember them making me profoundly sad.
As a tangent, a few weeks ago I was walking home and a couple of young women came out of a local liquor store. One had just purchased cigarettes. She peeled the cellophane off and dropped in on the ground. That was followed by the foil seal on the inside. I know the filters from her smoked cigarettes would end up on the ground next. I had a passing thought, as the rate of smoking has come down has this contributed in some way to the reduction in littering?
Rex Everything
If you look back at the 10 or 12 years preceding the Reagan era, it’s astonishing how liberal, even Leftist, popular culture was. And nobody minded. The real Reagan Revolution, his real legacy, was the introduction of a jingoistic myth about American greatness that only half the country couldn’t (can’t) swallow.
Mnemosyne
@Randy P:
Nobody knew until near the end of his life that he wasn’t a real Native American, because the guy went all in. He married a Native American woman, adopted two sons who were Dakota-Maricopa, came out strongly in favor of civil rights for Native Americans, etc. He didn’t just play an “Indian” in movies and TV, he really tried to live the life.
Also, Johnny Depp has claimed that he has Native American ancestry for a long time, though I don’t think he’s ever presented actual proof. From surface appearances, his claim is at least a little more plausible than Elizabeth Warren’s.
LanceThruster
I’m getting kicked out of my vanpool because I repeatedly requested them to switch the climate control to recirculate because concentrated diesel fumes make me physically ill (which in a Ford product is only in the MAX AIR setting – though you can still set the tempurature to anything you want). I took to wearing a surgeon’s mask for those times certain drivers who would not comply. They are all xians who have asked me on several occasions to attend their church with them (which I politely declained). They know I’m an atheist and treat it like something that needs to be “cured.”
Happy Earth Day.
Michele C
@Roger Moore: You make me remember when my mother was a teacher (she’s been retired a while now). The kids would be doing badly on the tests. Someone would notice that some kids needed specific kinds of help (special education, reading, speech therapy, whatever). They’d get enough funding for her to work helping those kids. Those kids would get better test scores. They’d take away the money. Over and over and over again.
LanceThruster
@Eric S:
In my 25+ years of commuting to downtown LA, I noticed that at every offramp stop, it was the preferred dumping ground of most people’s car ashtrays.
I haz a sad.
:-(
gene108
Stephen Colbert put the need for continuing to enforce environmental laws very succinctly: once you clean something up, you never need to clean it again because dishes never need to be washed again, ditto with clothes, etc.
Can’t find the clip, but it was very good.
Bruce S
@Rex Everything:
“If you look back at the 10 or 12 years preceding the Reagan era, it’s astonishing how liberal, even Leftist, popular culture was. And nobody minded…”
They minded – reference the Powell Memo, circa 1971, which was a founding document of the “Reagan Revolution.” There was a well-funded, well-coordinated, quite sophisticated ideological backlash carefully brewed that gave us a GOP in which Nixon looks like an f-ing liberal. They minded quite a bit and took some highly effective action to turn things around.
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: I’m 1/32 Ogala Sioux, but I’m also half-Jewish, so trying to predict where my (almost) black hair came from is anyone’s guess. I do rebound from and tolerate sunburns well though.
Mnemosyne
@Rex Everything:
G loves his old 1970s TV shows and it’s really striking how much of an effort they made to keep the casts interracial. Compare the original “Battlestar Galactica” with the remake and it’s pretty astonishing to see them go from a cast that was at least 60/40 white to black actors to the almost entirely lily-white cast of the remake. There were a lot more black extras and small character parts given to black actors.
If they remade “Barney Miller” today, do you think they would have both an African-American and a Korean detective as main characters, or would one of them have to go so as not to have “too many” minority characters?
Cris (without an H)
You are very old.
GregB
It’s like Judge Scalia says, we don’t need the Voting Rights Act because it works.
It’s the same moronic strain that argues that the EPA can be dissolved because the Cuyahuga aint burning anymore.
LanceThruster
@Michele C:
Special needs are seen as a drain and not an opportunity to help others achieve at the levels they’re capable of.
“You are the result of 3.8 billion years of evolutionary success.
ACT LIKE IT.”
mtraven
It is in places without an EPA, like capitalist paradise Beijing.
aimai
@Wag:
I’m not objecting–either to the use of a sicilian as an Indian (though one might call it just another insult and form of objectification) or to the hokiness. I’m just observing the fact that contemplating an image after 40 some years has a different effect one one than seeing it, as a child, uncritically. I heard a pretty good NPR piece yesterday about the also now iconic Dorothea Lange photo of the depression era mother which made the point that the picture quickly became both iconic and then emptied of specific meaning (the phrase used was an “empty signifier”) which could be filled up, borrowed, parodied, and explored in ways totally separate from its original subject or original object.
Rex Everything
@Bruce S: Well sure, they minded. That’s not what I meant.
PeakVT
@Eric S: While the smoking rate has come way down, there are still plenty of smokers, and plenty of smokers who throw cigarette butts out of their car windows, which then blow into my tree lawn. /grump
However, these days the majority of litter I pick up out front is either food wrappers or blowing paper from recycling bins. I see very few cans and bottles because VT has a bottle bill and the local scavengers are pretty industrious.
Rex Everything
@Mnemosyne: Definitely true. Hell yes. People were making a good faith effort back then, in a lot of ways. And to some extent that attitude is gone.
When I was in grade school, in the early 80s, our teacher always played us the “Free To Be You & Me” record. It wasn’t thought of as a liberal record or a feminist record, it was just a record. We though it was kind of dorky. But today, in a lot of the country, they’d probably try to fire a teacher for it, if not string her up.
aimai
@Mnemosyne:
Can we stop pretending that the smearing of Elizabeth Warren on this subject was anything but a right wing refusal to grasp native american history? There has been lots of intermarriage, and intermarriage that was not recorded as intermarriage as people were trying to pass out of the native american community and the laws that bound people defined as officially native american to a second class position in their communities. There are tons of people in this country–the Melungeon, for example–who fought not to be recorded as native american or african american. These were disfavored and even dangerous statuses.
If you looked at Elizabeth Warren’s grandfather’s picture you’d see a guy who absolutely looks sterotypically native american. He married a white woman and their children look white. There are plenty of people among the Mashpee who look African American. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a claim to both Native American ancestry and Native American ethnic identity.
maya
@raven: Son, I saay, son, isn’t Georgia Confederate Day April 26th? I’d bet General Hood’s left arm stump on it.
Everyone will meet up at General Joseph E. Johnston’s outhouse for the opening ceremonies.
SFAW
@Yutsano:
I thought you looked familiar …
Seanly
We have made a lot of strides in the United States, but the world’s carbon emissions and rampant pollution like in China and over-fishing don’t bode well for the planet.
I worry about what kind of a world my toddler nephew will inherit.
It is going to take cooperative and strong international action to literally save the planet from us. Unfortunately, I don’t see there being any chance of such an accord coming together in time.
Actually, maybe saying “save the planet” is wrong. What we want to do is retain some semblance of our current climate and civilization. The Earth and some form of life will continue despite our best efforts.
maya
@Cris (without an H): Not only am I old, I started working on Wall Street 1969. Ever here of E.F. Hutton? Now go back and play in your butt-free sandbox, kiddies. And no fighting.
Randy P
@Rex Everything: Perhaps the kids didn’t think of it that way, but when we were playing that record for our kids in the 80s there was no question in our minds it was all about liberalism and feminism and hippy values. That was the whole point.
I’m sure your teacher was also aware that a record teaching that girls could be doctors, or didn’t have to marry, or boys could cry or play with dolls, or that mommies didn’t necessarily enjoy housework, was pushing liberal vales.
Redshirt
@PeakVT: Same here. Go to a state without returnable deposits and you’ll see cans and bottles as litter.
Ergo, all litter should have a returnable deposit. Butts, food wrappers, newspapers, all of it. Pay by weight. Our entire nation would get cleaned up in a few years.
Also want to add the Indian – not an Indian – commercial really impacted me as a youth as well.
GregB
@maya:
We are all listening now.
The Moar You Know
@Wag: That there is called “populism”, and Democrats run from it as if it were a Starbucks that’s just run out of soy milk.
That will cost us dearly.
SatanicPanic
@SFAW: That’s true. As soon as I agree to start finding Dane Cook funny they’ll start demanding I laugh at Dennis Miller and Gallagher as well.
The Moar You Know
@Mnemosyne: Warren may have been burned the same way I was: by a crazy parent who told us a series of deliberate lies about our ancestry. I was told I was part native. I look it. Dark, very little body hair, the whole deal.
Got DNA tested a couple of years ago. There’s ancestry from all parts of the world except for – take a guess – the New World. If there’s one thing I’m absolutely not, it’s native.
Roger Moore
@maya:
When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.
Cris (without an H)
Well, if they talk, I’ll listen.
srv
If I were to go on what I saw Saturday, Generation Y really gives no f**k about anything:
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Golden-Gate-Park-pot-party-a-major-mess-4451852.php
This event was largely < 30 crowd.
Roger Moore
@The Moar You Know:
Take all that stuff with at least a grain of salt. Those genetic tests aren’t especially good at telling your ancestry. You can probably get some clues, but they’re far from conclusive. A well documented family tree will tell you a lot more about your ancestry than genetic testing, and even a family story is as likely to be true.
Rex Everything
@Randy P: Sure. But the reason that, to us, those didn’t seem like “liberal” values was that those values were EVERYWHERE! We just thought of them as values. There wasn’t a controversy about it.
I mean, once in a while you encountered someone who was against feminism or racial equality, or someone who rationalized corporate pollution, or whatever. And the reaction to such a person was: “Oh, well, that guy’s a dick.”
(I should emphasize that I went to a regular run-of-the-mill public school in a regular middle class neighborhood in a not radical medium-sized city.)
maya
@Cris (without an H): Incidentally, EFH went out of business in the mid-80s because of customer check kiting scam. Deliberately mailing checks out later than settlement date for the interest that that produced for the company.
edit: Roger Moore ibid.
rda909
@aimai: YES! Thank you.
Goblue72
@dnlZ: this has all happened before and it will happen again
raven
@maya: Observed. My wife would have the day off if she wasn’t on sick leave.
maya
@srv: Doesn’t surprise me A-tall. See #33
Joel
Give it a few decades, and the effects of global warming will be plainly obvious for all to see!
Roger Moore
@Joel:
Yep, and as soon as they’re obvious, it will have been the Conservatives who were fighting to prevent global warming and liberals who were getting in the way. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
maya
@raven: So your wife is a malingerer in the ranks, eh. No way to win a civil war.
Only kidding. Sincerely hope she recovers in good order.
Bruce S
@Rex Everything:
Yeah, but it wasn’t totally obvious in 1970 that the elites wouldn’t co-opt more than swing hard to the right. Of course there’s always that tension, but they really fought back hard to extinguish the economic critique of corporate America. Cultural issues, not quite so much although the Religious Right certainly were essential to building their electoral base. I don’t think most of us who saw LBJ and Nixon as the face of an opposition that could embrace legal-protection demands of the civil rights movement, a minimalist welfare state or nascent environmentalism on the one hand, while waging the Vietnam war on the other, saw Reagan – and worse – coming. Certain assumptions were made about “establishment corporate liberalism” that proved to be extremely naive. There’s really a huge divide on how certain social issues have been treated, vs. core economics. We still see this in play with the GOP trying to figure out how not to alienate Hispanics, blah, blah, while sticking to their tax cuts uber alles guns re: Reaganism on steroids, aka Ryanism. So “they” not only minded, but they took some very effective action in the political and ideological terrain.
Rex Everything
@Bruce S: I’m a bit too young to speak authoritatively re 1970, but I see things pretty much the same way.
The thing that gets me is that the Reagan outlook is such a blatant, such a see-through-able lie. I can understand the tension between the various forces and how it’s played out over the decades, but the influence of Reagan which continues to have a huge impact just leaves me shaking my head.
Howlin Wolfe
My brother went to China recently. I asked him how it was and the first thing he mentioned was how polluted the air is, and how he coughed alot. We really should be grateful, and aware that the cons could trash the environment if allowed to.
Bruce S
@Rex Everything:
Yeah – kind of mind-blowing, but I think that it has a lot to do with the growth of a media environment in which a Reagan could leverage his (few) real talents. I think there had been quite a few Presidents elected who were empty suits, but never such a media-genic, masterful empty suit who could so overwhelm even his opposition that they pretty much played by his new rules.
One thing that’s key to understanding the way Reagan is remembered, is that he was lucky as hell that his rhetoric about the Evil Empire was proven totally delusional by the Gorbachev phenomenon (Gorbachev would have been a metaphysical impossibility in Reagan’s version of the USSR). Gorbachev oversaw the dismantling of a very weak empire and dysfunctional economic system, ended the Cold War and Reagan got most of the credit. “Being There.”
thalarctos
@handsmile: Nicely played, sir.
thalarctos
@JGabriel: I see what you did there.
–thalarctos, another Oscar Wilde fan
gttim
Of course the Crying Indian commercial spots were created by Keep America Beautiful, a non-profit founded by corporations to persuade America that pollution is caused by them, not by big business. Check out their website and their programs. It is still all about people causing pollution, not businesses and corporations.
Mnemosyne
@aimai:
I didn’t actually mean it as a slam on Warren, just a point that, to most people, Johnny Depp “looks” more Native American than she does. Given that her ancestry seems to be a bit further back on the family tree than his, that makes perfect sense.
Lots of people I know have found interesting surprises in their ancestry — a Filipino co-worker of G’s was shocked to discover that her great-grandfather was Chinese. Never knew it, even through family stories, because he adopted a Filipino name when he immigrated.
gene108
@Rex Everything:
It’s not Reagan, it’s the billionaires, who have the money to dictate how we function as as society.
They’ve bought up media, they push out ideas, they work hard to return us to the Gilded Age and they are the ones, who keep pushing Reagan as their ever-living avatar of all that is good and holy.
That’s why Reagan is still influential.
A lot of rich people use the only popular Republican in the last 50 years as the front for their agenda, because Reagan made white people feel good about themselves again.
gene108
@Bruce S:
What’s “funny” is I know a few very religious hardcore right-wingers, who voted for Carter in 1976.
After Reagan, they’d never vote for a Democrat again.
There really was a change in the dynamics of this country in the 1970’s regarding social issues for conservatives.
The problem is none of these guys realize the economic damage Reagan has done to most Americans, including them and there’s no way to get over the cultural issues to talk about the economic issues.
greenergood
@handsmile: The Dedalus article is here, and it’s a doozy:
http://history.ucsd.edu/_files/oreskes/daedalus.pdf
moderateindy
@cleek:
Actually the core of social conservatism is a longing for some imaginary way things “used to be” but never were. The right simply loves their fantasy world where Reagan rebuilt this country, and never raised taxes, or the founding fathers were all fundie Xtians, or whatever ridiculous 1950’s Leave it to Beaver paradigm they believe should once again rule the land.
To me the perfect example of how far detached from reality conservatives are is the fact that they felt the need to create “conservapedia”, because wikipedia was too liberal.
There is no way to influence someone that willingly insulates themselves from facts, and instead gladly consumes propoganda.
Like my brother asks cons about Fox News…..If you had 9 people telling you one version of a story, and 1 person telling a different version, who would you think was lying? (which if you switch the numbers to 97 and three is the argument you can use about global warming)
Cassidy
@moderateindy: Your premise is flawed in that it doesn’t include *sexual deviancy. The whole conservative/ glibertarian mindset is founded on a psychosexual power fantasy.
*deviant as in not missionary
Bruce S
@gene108:
Of course, like a lot of stuff this breaks down along racial lines. The category “Evangelicals” in a “Religious Right” context is actually almost soley “White Evangelicals” in political terms. Black “Evangelicals”? Whole different story.
I went to a local economic forum that was targeting the “faith-based” last week and, while most of the white participants were either Catholic or liberal Protestant, including Unitarians, the black folk were much more a theologically mixed bag. At one point an African-American Church of God in Christ pastor used the apocalyptic visions in Revelations as reference to our current economic straits, income inequality, financial crisis, etc. Another person referred to the picture being drawn – which substantively was straight out of Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz – as evidence of the work of the Devil.
Quite a revelation, no pun intended – I realized once more how racialized our understanding of the political demographics of religion happen to be. While many of these folks would also likely be quite conservative on some social issues and have a “conservative lifestyle”, they simply weren’t having it when it comes to GOPer economics.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: As I’ve said before, Black people do not exist. We are just pigments of the imagination. This is why adding more than 1 in a speaking role and 3 in the background turns it into a fantasy production.
@maya: I adored those commercials.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
You existed in the 1970s and 1980s. Watch any of those old shows — “Emergency!” holds up surprisingly well, and has a Native American (Seminole) lead to boot — and you’ll see tons of black folks as doctors or nurses or just wandering around in the background as extras, and not just in scenes set in “black” neighborhoods.
Something went very, very wrong with us in the 1980s, and we still haven’t faced it and fixed it.
ruemara
@Mnemosyne: I know. I found “Quincy” reruns on Hulu and suddenly-BLACK PEOPLE! Dark ones! With lips, ‘fros and no jive talk. It’s like watching Canadian television. We were people who were allowed in. Then suddenly we became stock characters and thusly, could be eliminated because we really weren’t needed in the (or any) scene.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
I have to admit, at first I didn’t really pay much attention to the blinding whiteness of the “Battlestar Galactica” remake because I figured, hey, they shoot in Canada, maybe they can’t get many actors of color. (IOW, typical white person obliviousness on my part.)
Then I started watching “Warehouse 13,” which is also produced in Canada, and suddenly there was a whole rainbow of actors available for both major and minor roles, including one of the four main characters. And I was embarrassed for “Battlestar Galactica” and, frankly, kind of mad at myself for excusing the show for its view of the future.
Tehanu
@aimai:
Now that I know the actor was actually Sicilian I find it even more moving than I did before. We are all brothers and sisters, however inadequately we live up to our knowledge of that.
Tehanu
@Randy P:
You mean, in the big-budget Hollywood movie, the leading role is played by a movie star? And you’re… surprised?
Mark Haag
The problem isn’t with the people who don’t believe in climate change, the problem is with those of us who do. If everyone who believed in climate change hit the streets this summer, not once, but again and again, things would change. The system will not change without our commitment
PanurgeATL
@Cassidy:
Maybe they won’t care. But we don’t have to make them care–we just have to make everyone else care. That’s the real problem–we keep confusing relating to the center (who’ve proven capable of relating to the right conservative message) with relating to conservatives themselves. So we go all conservative in the name of relating to the center. I keep saying we don’t have to go that far, but no one listens (of course…).
PanurgeATL
@Bruce S:
One big mistake the left of center (of whatever sort) made in the wake of Reagan was that it concluded that (a) since economic issues now needed to be front and center, socio-cultural issues weren’t important, which meant that (b) we could afford to stage some “tactical retreats” on the cultural front (Get a haircut, you damn hippie!) in the belief that this would somehow position us better to make the economic argument. I think this was wrongheaded, and I think events bear me out, as the cultural turn rightward emboldens the economic right.
Much of this is due (AGAIN, he said) to punk, a movement that took place in a rock’n’roll world that wasn’t expecting Reagan to win. When he did, the punks blamed the hippies for being “weak”, “selling out”, getting “co-opted”, take your pick. Why should the GOP play “divide and conquer” when we’re so eager to divide ourselves?
PanurgeATL
Continued from above:
And TBH, Reagan was incredibly lucky. If George Bush had been able to beat him for the GOP nomination in 1980, Reagan never would’ve been POTUS. If Jimmy Carter hadn’t had an annus horribilis of a re-election year, he might’ve hung on and again, Reagan would never have been POTUS. The sheer disbelief left of center that Reagan could make it is (ISTM) still a big contributor to our being so out of sorts today. We’ve never gotten over that disbelief, so we can’t address effectively the question of what to do now. We could do MUCH worse than to conclude that the general direction we were on in the ’70s was the RIGHT one, but we seem determined to refuse to do so, insisting on re-claiming Liberal 1963 and thereby validating the right-wing claim (central to their world-view) that The DFH’s Ruined Everything.
PanurgeATL
@Mnemosyne:
It had started to go wrong as early as ’75 or so, but it didn’t hit critical mass until, well, soon enough to get Reagan elected President.