History ala Mode

What is History ala Mode? History ala Mode is a slice of History, with a good size scoop of Psychology… best served warm, with coffee.

==bumped to the top in response to the exploitation of the Corona Virus panic==


Let's start at the end of World War Two, take a look at the world as it was then at the dawn of the atomic age. What are we looking at? Well, the Allies won the war, everyone knows that, but what was really going on back then? What was left once the fighting was over?

The only major industrial nation not physically beat to a pulp was the United States. Germany and Japan were all but destroyed, Great Britain hammered hard, for the second time in fifty years France and Belgium and the Scandinavian countries had had a war run right over the top of them, they weren't in very good shape, the western end of Russia looked worse than Germany. Still though, Russia is a huge country, eleven hours wide, and the war had only gotten to the edges of Moscow so where they'd suffered heavy harm in the west they still had strength left in the east. Pretty much the story as it was, for the industrial nations that had fought in that war, at least if all you're looking at are physical resources.

But history is a great deal more than just the physical things, history is the people of a time, their attitudes, their outlook on life, the things they dream of, the things they fear. The physical is just the terrain, it is those attitudes that write the history.

When you look at the people involved in those times several very important differences are to be seen.

At the end of world war two the United States was just as hammered as any of the others, in some ways the people of America were in worse shape than the others. It is one thing to fight a war and return home to a place that shows the consequences of war, it is quite another thing to fight that war and return home to a place where to the surface levels there are no consequences to be seen. When there are no consequences to be seen, day to day, it is actually harder to fully accept that the war is over than when one returns to the devastation of war, and the memory of the war can be put away slowly as the devastation is cleared away and restored.

In point of fact both the United States and the Soviet Union were heavily impacted by this phenomenon, for where the Russian people had indeed seen the western parts of their nation savaged by war it was the lesser part of their land, many and a many of the survivors of that conflict returned home to places thousands of miles from where the battle had raged, places untouched by the conflict.

The full consequences of this phenomenon are seldom commented on, but in all truth they drove the history of the second half of the twentieth century, the full consequences of this phenomenon may cause the history books written three centuries into our future to point at the second world war as the driving force behind the demise of both nations, the Soviet Union and the United States of America. The Soviet Union is no more, it is now the Russian Republic, and the United States of America is teetering over the same brink of extinction. But that is not my focus, not in this work, we'll leave that thought for later.

What this phenomenon translated into, as the people tried to return to peace, is a thing I'll call victor's paranoia, the habits of war seeking a reason to remain in power. To distill the paranoia into words might read "oh my god, I dare not relax, what if someone is planning to do to me and mine what I just did to them?"  Both nations suffered their own forms of this paranoia, the Russian people suffered to the tyrant Joe Stalin as well, who in all fact probably did more to destroy Communism than any influence from beyond the borders, emphasizing with his insanity every weakness of the system. Without Stalin Communism might well have modified, mutated, the democratic principles of the Soviet constitution found traction and history have been written differently. But again, not the focus of now.

Suffice it to say that when the two remaining powers, soon to be called superpowers, both found themselves afflicted by this common problem the result was inevitable. We have been taught to call it the Cold War, and it raged for forty years as the consequences of World War Two oh so slowly faded from the world's mind. The cold war is not the focus I wish to build, but the cold war is what provided the cover and the environment for the social forces that evolved in that time to become the power players of our day.

During that time the two nations, diametrically opposite in their theories of commerce, their plan form of society, were in fierce competition across the face of the globe as they sought to recruit nations to their cause. They did not engage in armed conflict beyond a few accidental skirmishes, but each armed and empowered other nations involved in conflicts of some strategic importance to the relative powers. The arming and influencing of allies, or allies desired, became a major industry in both nations, an all engrossing endeavor. For those forty years the world's focus was almost exclusively on the cold warriors, sometimes a deadly serious focus, other times considered almost humorous, like a Saturday cartoon of Danger Mouse versus Pinky and the Brain, but always the focus was on the maneuverings of the cold warriors in the political arena. It was WAR by God, and war is important business.

What was fully ignored were the equally complex maneuverings of the worlds other industries as they went about the labors of restoring the worlds economy beyond the cold war. There as with the cold warriors alliances and relationships were formed between the various industries, there was need for such alliances. Many industries made their home in lands where war had all but destroyed the interlinking structures that support modern industry, it was cooperate or be crushed by the juggernaut of production that was the United States in those first post war years. The might of America's industries that had tipped the balance in armed conflict came to become the driving force of a very Darwinian socio-economic evolution on the world's stage, only the most fit of competitors survived the challenge.

As is always true when a successful evolution is driven by a single point soon enough the newer entities grow in size and strength to challenge the original, often able to surpass the original. A quarter century after the end of the world war such was exactly the case, by 1970 or so the production capabilities of the world had returned to balance, no longer could the United States dominate by sheer volume, by 1980 the improvements made to allow the alliances to compete against the sheer size of the United States in the earlier days had in fact set them superior in many ways. That decade saw a critical transition in the attitudes of the world, a most critical transition. It was a transition worked in the deepest of attitudes, those that often pass one generation to the next handed down parent to child in a manner that can be thought of as closer to a genetic transfer than a transfer by education.

That decade saw a strange crystallization occur in the youth of America, those commonly called the baby boomers born to parents honoring the tradition of replacing a dead enemy with a living child. The baby boomers were and are a bulge in the age distribution of the American population, an extraordinarily large group of people of common age, a common place on the curve of life, an extraordinarily large group universally influenced by the emerging technologies of entertainment. A great deal has already been written in one forum or another concerning this group, but perhaps the most critical elements have yet to be explored, the long term impact of such a large group coming into their full maturity in parallel with, and deeply influenced by, the United States beginning to realize their advantage of size was over, that no more did they dominate commerce as they had in the beginnings of the Cold War.

The baby boomers grew up in a culture that never even entertained the idea it wouldn't always enjoy the wealth of being the unchallenged provider of material things to the world. In large degree it was the arrogance of that assumption the baby boomers rebelled against in their youth, that part of their rebellion that wasn't based on rejecting the limitations inherent to the hidden PTSD of WW2 and the insecurities formed enduring the great depression of the 30's. They could sense these things on their parents, burdens their parents so rarely spoke of, but little to nothing was ever actually said concerning those facts of their parents' lives.

Because of the silence the force of those events was never fully dissipated, in the adults those hurts scabbed over, submerged and became encapsulated but never fully healed. The adults were able to do this in large part based on the security of the United States' position in the economic world, the actual foundation beneath the seeming security of America's military might reassuring them that even if they could not be defended they would be avenged. The cold war was still very much on, remember? The critical point leading to our current state of affairs occurred when the facts of the economic world began contradicting that underlying assumption of wealth so much of America's security was based on, and the resulting response was exactly the wrong thing to have happen.

Rather than acknowledge the facts of reality those facts were concealed, hidden away by the same people using the same internal tactics they had been using to deal with the buried and encapsulated hurts mentioned above. A dangerously large portion of the American population went into what the psychologists will term denial, which is most definitely not a river in Egypt. As is always the case with denial soon enough the mechanisms of denial became far more detrimental to the people than the thing being denied could ever have been.

Up until this point my little tale of history has been fairly linear, one line, one event directly producing the next. But from here on the tale must split and follow several paths, for in fact the people and the culture of the United States split around this point and diverged to where we find ourselves today.

It is an old joke, an old truism, concerning children and their parents: when I was eighteen I was certain my folks didn't know their rump from a rolling donut, by the time I was twenty four I was beginning to think there might be more to what they were saying than I'd realized, by the time I was thirty I wondered how in the hell they'd gotten so smart so young. Just an old folk saying, really, but many if not most of those old sayings have a solid foundation in fact.

One of the first points to be understood in understanding our nation today is how this most generally true progression of life was instrumental in enabling the socio-political problems of today's United States. The coincidence of the financial security of the United States coming into question just as a major portion of the baby boomers were turning to reconsider what they knew of their parents as adults worked what no conspiracy could have ever done to the American people: in a great many, perhaps even a slight majority, of the next generation it installed the same fear and insecurities, the same emotional damages the parents had carried into their children, and it not only installed those fears without a focus, it amplified them in that the individuals could not name or understand the nature of their fear in order to build a courage from which to contest it even as the events of reality gave ever more reason to be unsure.

These things happened in the silence that had surrounded the subjects from the beginning, and in the silence a great many of the baby boomers adopted the only tactic they had for an example, they adopted their parent's tactics of silence and denial. But to rational observation the changes in the culture, the changes in the political across the 1980's is solid evidence of how many were afflicted with those fears. Consider the rise of Ronald Reagan and the new conservatives in that time, the return of the cowboy legends of the old west, look and it isn't hard at all to see how deeply the culture of the United States retreated into past glories, past strengths. Retreat is a sure sign of fear.

Consider how the media and the entertainment industries fed the population with things drawn from the simple and the heroic matched against villains painted in simplistic terms easily understood, easily substituted for the genuine source of the fear. Consider how those industries, to a motive of pure profit as ignorant as any of the reasons, assisted the American people in maintaining the state of denial even as the facts of the world moved unchallenged from frightening into genuinely dangerous for the nation.

Recall to mind how in the 80's and 90's the national consumer debt began climbing, as genuine prosperity faded and credit came into play to maintain the façade, the denial. Look back on how the corporations began selling off America to foreign endeavors, that they might present their shareholders with glowing reports that did not reflect the true state of the nation's economy, how their deception to maintain the façade actually aggravated the actual threat. This is a matter of hard history, it cannot be denied.

Observe the events of financial history during those times, how as the baby boomers became the rising executives of America's industries those fears biased and skewed their business decisions to facilitate the denial, how the underlying imbalances in their judgment opened wide the doors for corruption and scandal. Does the name Enron come into your thoughts? The misdeeds of the insurance giant AIG? They should, but the thought of corruption should not be limited to such immense entities, in fact that corruption spread from the bottom up, the smaller of America's social entities just as infected as the larger, and for the same reasons.

For all intents and purposes this was the story of the United States through the last two decades of the twentieth century. Technology exploded in leaps and bounds, the personal computer became common, the internet was born, cellular telephones revolutionized communication, but none of those new technologies deflected the basic direction of the nation in the least, in fact in many ways they helped maintain it, making it ever easier to retreat into any fantasy of one's own choosing from the most base and disgusting of vile pornography to the most elevated and intellectual things of the world's cultures, but still, none served to reveal the common fear driving the culture, all served as an aid in greater or lesser degree in maintaining the denial.

For a bit let us leave the United States as it was in say mid 1999, and turn our focus to the world at large where things were also in motion, evolving and responding to the changing times. Through the last quarter of the twentieth century a great many things had changed in absolutely fundamental ways. Many of those changes were hardly noticed by the majority of Americans, but the Americans were of course still effected by them, the United States is of course still just one nation in a community of nations.

Of course the most obvious change was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here, in order to tell the story without bias, I must ask that you make a distinction between communism as the theory was proposed by Marx and what communism became when it entered service as the only political party (party… like Whig or Labor, Democrat or Republican) allowed by law in the new nation of the Soviet Union.

They are quite separate things, although to Americans subjected to the Cold War propaganda that distinction is rarely realized. Still though, it is a very important distinction to understand at this point, it is important to understand that as a nation, as nations go, the Soviet Union never made it out of childhood. It died very young, and it died to a disease I'll call mono-politic, as nations go a disease very comparable to asthma: it could breath in, but to exhale became almost impossible. Add in WW2, add in Stalin, and no, the young nation didn't survive. Try and imagine what would have become of the United States had Tom Jefferson and the Adams' boys been paranoid tyrants in a system that never had the chance for democratic checks and balances to come fully online. Give that a moment of thought, set the time scales equal, it will make clear many things about the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union didn't survive, but what did survive much to the detriment of the United States of America were the attitudes and opinions the world formed about our nation watching, and often suffering, the maneuverings of the Cold War. Make no mistake about this point, take courage and do not blind yourself to the fact that the Americans operated abroad with just as much brutality and menace, just as much corruption and coercion and deception as their opponents. The complete history of America's activities in the Cold War should be a source of national shame, and now our nation is reaping what was sown in those days, seeds thought impotent and ignorable by reason of where they fell. Never has there been such a mistake as that!

That full history is far, far beyond this little essay. Suffice it to say the maneuverings of the Cold War impacted on the economic recovery of the world, how could they not? The industries of the world watched the Cold War, they watched it closely, they had to. What they saw, from their perspective, was not two ideological superpowers contending for political control, no, what they saw was one huge bully abusing everyone else on the planet, and mostly in the realms of economics. The Soviet Union was never the power player the United States was in terms of commerce, certainly not in consumer goods, only in military hardware did the Soviets rival their American foe.

What the industries of the world saw in the United States was a danger, a threat to global balance and global prosperity free of political strings and entanglements. To the perspective of industry war can be profitable in the short run, but industry understood all to well that in the long run? In the long run eh, you know, war? Itsa bad for business… industry, commerce, is in fact made up of men every bit as much men of action as any military operation, and I assert to you that before the end of the century the world's men of commerce came to the conclusion that something needed to be done about the Americans.

As in all things where large numbers of people are a factor to be considered there will be those who make it their business to understand how the people feel about things, the balances of opinion and motive. Politicians know this, but then again so does commerce. To know how the people feel is to know how your market will run, what you need to have ready on the shelves when folks head into the stores. Commerce keeps every bit as close a watch on the world's mental state as anyone else, sometimes closer. There is no doubt in my mind, none at all, that the men who run the world's commerce were among the first to perceive what was happening with the attitudes and mental state of the Americans. They knew they needed to do something, and as the world passed through the 70's they saw a way to proceed.

Bear in mind that two of the world's greatest economic powers, Germany and Japan, were the defeated nations of WW2. Nobody likes to get their butt kicked, fact of life. Even when you know you deserved to get your butt kicked it still rankles, you'll still carry a grudge for quite a few years. When you deserved to get your butt kicked it is very common to look around, and say "they deserve to get their butt kicked too! Just look at what they're doing, and no one is doing anything about it!" A small lesson in the facts of life, most folks learned something similar on the grade school playground. Germany and Japan had good cause to be carrying that grudge, they did get their butts kicked, and by the 70's they were picking up allies from the rest of the world, nations they'd conquered in war that at that point had gotten just as beat up as they, the defeated, by the United States' economic power plays fighting the cold war. They had in common getting their butt kicked in war, and they had in common getting beat up by the United States after the war. By the beginning of the '80s there was quite a consensus among the commercial powers of the world concerning the United States.

Think it through. You're facing a foe that is bigger than you are, and you need to arrange it so that foe is going to fade away, cease to be a threat. What can you do? You're not going to whip him in a fight, a war, that much is clear to see. Girls, you know what I'm talking about. There are other ways to put someone down, put them out, make sure they never spoil your party or rain on your parade, never again. The answer is of course you don't wage a military war against your foe, of course not. What you do is smile, suck up, and wage covert cultural warfare against your foe. I want to say that again, I want that phrase to stick in your mind because it is the most critical single concept in this essay: Covert Cultural Warfare.

Now we have two streams of thought working, now we can start making some sense out of what has been going on. With two points you have a line, and from there on every new point defines you a new plane, a new playing field. Yes, points and lines just like you learned about in geometry, but the analogy holds true, it can be worked. Working from the two things known, that a very large part of the American population is deep in denial, suffering to left over fears given a new lease on life; and, knowing that before the end of the twentieth century the economic pressures of commerce had put the world in the position of waging Covert Cultural Warfare against the United States for both self defense and revenge, knowing those two things it is possible to start pinning down what is really going on, and make plans to remedy the situation to everyone's gain.

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The story continues from a slightly different perspective in the forthcoming chapter "History ala Mode: The Chef's Tale"