I’m in a mood where this actually made me laugh…
We were gonna be the ones to end racism sexism and homophobia, but the the right morphed into Infowars and libertarianism and peeled enough off so nothing changed. Paul Ryan and Scott Walker are Gen Xers
— Brian Gaar (@briangaar) May 13, 2018
All of your cultural totems will be absorbed. There will be a GOP presidential candidate in 15 years doing Rick and Morty impressions and talking about how much he loves Beyonce.
— Brian Gaar (@briangaar) May 13, 2018
How will this happen? Because the Mercers or whoever will throw six figures at people who look just like you. And they’ll start YouTube channels that explain how Cardi B’s message was really about capitalism. And they’ll fund political candidates you can vote for on every level
— Brian Gaar (@briangaar) May 13, 2018
… because it reminded me of the old epitaph that ends …”Prepare for death, and follow me.”
Don’t intend to have a headstone myself, but if I did, it would be more like this:
Reader, pass on! Don’t waste your time
On bad biographer and bitter rhyme;
For what I am, this crumbling stone ensures,
And what I was is no concern of yours.
Doug R
All we can is be best.
Culture of Truth
a while ago I predicted that in the near future a weapons manufacturer would use Colin Kaepenick’s likeness to sell drones with deadly lasers
NotMax
If must have a headstone, I demand 2 point type on it reading “If you can read this you’re standing on my head.”
(((CassandraLeo)))
I get what he’s saying, but there’s a factor he doesn’t seem to be considering: demographics. Gen Y (I refuse to use the term “millennial”) is way more demographically diverse than Gen X. The levels of racism among white people aren’t actually that different between the generations, from my understanding; there are just way fewer young white people as a percentage of their age group.
(Or, shorter: white people are generally terrible; there are just way fewer of them in Gen Y.)
All that said, though, there’s an entire age cohort that grew up with GWB and Trump as their representatives of Republicans and Obama as their representative of Democrats. An awful lot of Gen X grew up with Reagan. That may end up making a difference long-term in how younger white people vote.
(((CassandraLeo)))
Unrelated to above, I’d like to encourage everyone to contact their rep/senators to vote for net neutrality. In fact, I think this might be important enough to merit being front-paged.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@(((CassandraLeo))):
That’s why I think some generations have a liberal or a conservative bent. The Silents grew up with Truman(bad) and Ike(Happy Days), Boomers had JFK/LBJ and Nixon, X’ers had Carter and then Reagan.
Msb
How old is this guy? I’ve been around long enough to know that this is actually a sign of progress. That progressives have dragged the right far enough with them, that the right has to take a new stance. Yes, it’s tiring. And yes, the Good Fight is never over. So? How else should we spend our time?
Redshift
I also think the diversity will have a second effect on white people. The Trump anti-immigrant voters weren’t a backlash to seeing immigrants around and thinking they were taking jobs, they were the ones with the least exposure to immigrants. (And similarly for other bigotry.)
There will still be plenty of awful racist white people in their lily-white communities, but there will be proportionally less of those.
What can I say, I’m an optimist.
Chet Murthy
@Msb: I read him a little differently, and felt that @(((CassandraLeo))): had a good answer, but his argument wasn’t so vacuous that it didn’t need answering.
Yes, the right gives up something. But there are two things that I think Gaar would argue they don’t give up: racism and economic feudalism (for want of a better word — it’s late). I buy CassandraLeo’s argument that, maybe, maybe, maybe in the next 30 years, America’s original sin of racism might finally start to get expunged. Maybe. Maybe. But that’s more hope than we’ve ever had.
Thing is, I still don’t see that the economic feudalism goes away. B/c (as someone once said) there are lots of conservative folks amongst people of color. But those conservative folks (at least, most of them) still recognize that the GrOPers hate their fucking guts, even if they agree on economic policy. So imagine a GrOPer party that compromises on race (yeah, I know: hard, hard to imagine, but otherwise, it’s either they die, or we have a civil war, so imagine *grin*) and stays steadfast on the money thing. Conservative PoC might join up. After all, the KKK takes Slavs (and Catholics!) now. Who’da thunk it? Hell, a Slav can be a Nazi in America today! Progress!
B/c at the end of the day, the *original* GrOPers — the ones from the 1870s thru 1950s — were more about the money, than the racism. At least, I think that’s how the history worked-out.
Major Major Major Major
I have absolutely no trouble imagining republican Millennials doing Rick and Morty impressions.
piratedan
@Major Major Major Major: true, they have no problem getting the humor up top but completely ignore or understand the subtext and context of the jokes… they’re laughing, but don’t really understand why… its like watching Bullwinkle and Rocky without listening to the dialogue…
Aleta
In Wired, story about Mueller leading a Marine platoon in combat (against NVA) in Vietnam.
oatler.
It’s all good (listening to Three Dog Night’s “Shambala” currently)
Ken
The right (Terry Rakolta?) wanted to take “Married, with children” off the air. Now it’s the party of Al Bundy.
sukabi
@Msb: if you read his Twitter thread, you’ll find that it’s actually the libertarians that have advanced all social progress…????
Planetpundit
Also start Colbert fan clubs.
lowtechcyclist
Here’s a good epitaph possibility, courtesy of Florence Welch:
I can’t help but pull the earth around me
to make my bed
akryan
I don’t think that conservatives will ever concede anything. I definitely don’t remember gay folks being allowed to be married as something that was conceded. As I remember it went straight to SCOTUS and it only passed 5-4. There aren’t any Gen-X Republican politicians that are okay with it still. Conservatives have fought every step of progress towards a just society no matter what party they belonged to in their day. They’re always pissed because they always lose eventually and history shows them to be the assholes they are.
NotMax
@Planetpundit
Yeah, that Claudette was sumthin’, eh?
:)
NotMax
@akryan
Eighty years on, they’re still fighting to overturn/roll back the New Deal.
Gvg
We need to resist resegragation. Schools have stopped integration. I think that the people who have changed on racism often do so because they know other people, from school, work or society. I tend to be shy inperson and don’t make friends easily. I am intimidated by new people. If I had grown up separated from black people I am pretty sure I would also have been afraid of them which would have been supporting racism. However I met them normally in school and at work all my life and knew better. I see from statistics that schools are actually less integrated than they used to be and that worries me. I see a lot of the school reforms of the last few decades as sneak attacks on integration, using test scores to determine teacher pay, cutting bussing because of costs and it was never popular, school choice, lots of things that don’t seem to be related but all somehow adding up to less mixing.
Planetpundit
@NotMax: Sure is :)
Bobby Thomson
@(((CassandraLeo))):
Jesus Fucking Christ, “better than Junior Fucking Bush and Dipshit Donald” is one of the lowest possible bars to clear. Reagan suuuuuuuuuucked, and Gen X still ate it up because white people suck, too. Stop this shit with Reagan being a great or even good president. I was there. He was horrible. He laid the groundwork for literally every bad policy choice that has been made over the last 37 years.
msdc
@(((CassandraLeo))): Yeah, I don’t know where this guy got his rosy view of Generation X; the older ones who came up under Reagan and Bush were always conservative. Alex P. Keaton didn’t come out of nowhere. In 2004, they were responsible for re-electing Dubya (along with their always-awful Silent Generation pals).
But by 2008 the Gen Xers had fully aged into their (our) thirties, and the younger ones who came up under Clinton outnumbered the old. We broke decisively for Obama and didn’t look back. Gen X hasn’t gotten more conservative with age; we’ve gotten more liberal, as we ditched the hipster irony and Xtreme! apathy, stopped listening to the people who told us what we were thinking, and got to work.
john fremont
@Ken: Heck, I remember Bill Cosby was in a ratings war to get the Simpsons off the air. Bill Cosby thought that Bart Simpson was encouraging rude behavior.in children. Conservatives were applauding Cosby back then.
OGLiberal
Many of the Gen-Xers I grew up with are racist or racist curious. While growing up in my WWC NJ town we had one black family in town. When they moved, another black family moved in a couple years later. We had one Cuban family, one half-Jewish family, and that was it for diversity. Surrounding towns, several very wealthy, not much different. These kids grew up with the racial resentments of their boomer parents, who felt they were run out of places like Newark and Jersey City by the brown folks. Their racist jokes, the ones told by the kids I grew up with, sounded like they came out of the 50s and 60s…because they did. They hated and were afraid of people they had no exposure to.
I don’t have much exposure to post-Gen X folks but wouldn’t hang any hopes on my generation…and we’re not that old. Fucking Reagan kids…
Nicole
A friend recently posted photos from my high school yearbook’s 1989 edition. The Young Democrats numbered 30 (and “hoped to grow in number”). We all looked slightly apologetic and were dressed in some pretty bad 1980s fashion, but nothing out of the ordinary for suburban PA. The Young Republicans were over 100 in number, and prominently displayed in the front were a group of kids wearing T-shirts with a caricature drawing of Dukakis’ face (did you know he had a big nose and eyebrows? CUZ HE DID) and a red line drawn over it. I didn’t even notice the meanness of it back then, but boy I see it now. I the GOP really appeals to natural-born assholes. Not that the Democrats don’t get our share, but there weren’t any tshirts with “potatoe” on them in the Young Democrats picture. I’m just saying.
sigyn
@Aleta:thanks so much for that link, Aleta, ya think Trump has seen that history yet? Is that why he can’t come right out and fire Mueller?
Picture him stomping around “Oh if it weren’t for those damned bone-spurs…
RedDirtGirl
@Redshift: That’s a smart take. Thanks for the glimmer of hope.
The Moar You Know
@Gvg: The number one way to do this is to fight charter schools to your last breath. The result of charters, every time, are segregated schools.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Bobby Thomson: He wasn’t a good president, but he played one convincingly enough on TV to fool low-info voters. GWB and Trump couldn’t/can’t even clear that low bar.
EthylEster
Brian Gaar?
Who is he and why should I care?
I recall when AL started posting Twitter captures from Schooley.
I figured it was some guy she was banging.
I still don’t know who HE is.
Another Scott
@Aleta: I’ve probably told this story before:
There was a prof. in my department at Cincinnati. He had been a B-52 pilot in Vietnam. He said something like, “Once you’ve survived SAMs exploding around you at 30,000 feet, you learn that office politics isn’t that big a deal.”
Sounds like Mueller has the same attitude.
Cheers,
Scott.