Perhaps that's the right way to start the year? Just trust that if the world doesn't have a nuclear exchange in 2026, it'll be a "good" year?
I mean, there is the possibility that good things could happen this year: Republican "centrists" (yeah, I know) being sufficiently chastised by Democrat wins in mid term elections to actually start opposing Trump and his worst minions? China might have its leadership replaced by someone not so devoted to forcing re-unification with Taiwan? Putin might fall off the perch - although I have no idea whether there is any potential successor who is likely to be more moderate. (Well, same can be said about China.)
Look, the new Steven Spielberg film might be his best in a long time? (The trailer worries me a bit - it features Catholic nuns a few times, and few American movies seems to depict them realistically. And it does seem to be rather X Files-ish looking. On the other hand, we never have had a decent film that runs with the Jacques Vallee take about how the UFO phenomena is much more closely tied to paranormal mysteries than to alien visitation, and my impression is that this is what the movie is about. Or birds and deer not being real, perhaps?)
Anyway, you all know I like "big picture" takes on history that help put things in an interesting new perspective. There's a good one in the New York Times today by an American historian who considers the situation in the US during the so-called Gilded Age (at the latter part of the 19th century) and now. He brings up lots of points that I would not consider common knowledge, and analyses change in the country in more of a "zeitgeist-y" way that seems fairly novel, and above a simple Left/Right political view.
Go read it all, but here is a taste:
In the last decades of the 1800s, horses left millions of pounds of manure on Manhattan’s streets every day. Life expectancy sank to its lowest levels in U.S. history, and politics reached new heights of violence.
By the early 1900s, Americans were living longer than ever. Elections grew so peaceful that some worried about “apathy in political circles.” And gardeners in a cleaned-up New York were complaining that “well-rotted manure is becoming quite scarce.”
Something changed between the 19th and 20th centuries. The Gilded Age ended. Wouldn’t it be useful today — trapped deep in what many call a second Gilded Age — to understand the forces that produced and then restrained a similar era in our past?....
If you track political polarization, income inequality, social distrust and many other metrics over the past 150 years, you get a U-shaped curve, charting the ways our nation went from a chaotic splintering in the 19th century to a rigid new order in the 20th to our disrupted present. It looks like a great national seesawing, as we toggled between eras of release and eras of restraint....
This section has some facts I was not familiar with:
In one Wisconsin county, 89 percent of the teenage males present in 1860 were gone by 1870, and 90 percent of those present in 1870 were gone 10 years later. They clumped in new places. Chicago had 200 residents in 1832 and one million by 1890. Newcomers flooded in. From 1850 to 1914, one-quarter of Europe’s work force emigrated to the Americas.
At its best, these disruptions meant new prosperity and new freedoms. From 1860 to 1890, national wealth quintupled, and political turnout peaked. Gilded Age society often felt bold and innovative, blossoming with utopian visions, spiffy technologies and inventive cocktails.But it came with a heartbreaking recklessness. America laid more railroad track than anywhere else in the world, but corporations rarely bothered to ensure safety on their lines. Nearly 200,000 people died in train accidents from 1885 to 1900 alone.
In politics, power changed hands in the most corrupt, most violent elections in our history. In 40 years Americans witnessed the assassinations of three presidents and multiple governors, members of Congress, mayors and election officials, plus ethnic riots and racial terrorism from Manhattan to Memphis and beyond.
The very meaning of authority changed. Gilded Age leaders seized power, then wielded it to the hilt. Unlike traditional aristocrats, raised as caretakers of what they’d inherited, the new tycoons created and destroyed “without restraints of culture,” as Demarest Lloyd put it. America’s forgettable presidents were an exception, but the party bosses who ran things behind the scenes followed similar rules, employing dirty tricks and open crimes.
His basic argument in the rest of the piece is the decision to exercise "restraint" (or "limits") in the 20th century. He paints this as a movement that doesn't fit into a simple Left/Right viewpoint, and to a degree, argues it was cultural:
People began to talk about a new style: American cool. Employers, parenting experts and fashion columnists instructed Americans to control their emotions, in contrast to the Victorian love of bold passions. Instead of baroque sentences packed with complex clauses and grandiloquent vocabulary, people began to speak in a shorter, terser style. Literature, art and fashion shifted to a clean, stripped-down, modern aesthetic.
Anyway, it's an interesting take, I think.
