Issue 17 - Head vs Heart
In my British youth, I remember frequently being told that Churchill once said:
If You Are Not a Liberal at 25, You Have No Heart. If You Are Not a Conservative at 35 You Have No Brain.
Let’s lightly skip over the fact that Churchill never said this, and it’s a general sentiment which has been placed in many prominent politicians’ mouths (this investigation by Quote Investigator is a thorough rabbit-hole).
Because what’s more interesting than who might have said it originally is the motives for repeating it subsequently.
It may well have rung true for my parents’ generation, the Boomers (those who were classed as white, at least). Even more for their parents, who emerged from WWII into a strange new world, full of postwar opportunity and scientific promise.
For those two generations (and, bear in mind, living memory doesn’t really stretch past them at this point), the idea that you’d become more conservative as you aged made a logical, if mildly depressing sort of sense.
For a period of 20-30 years, the story of working and middle-class life (for whites in the US and the UK, at least) was simple. As long as you followed the rules and kept a job, buying a house was pretty easy. Your retirement was, in the majority of cases, secured by a pension. As you moved through your 20s, 30s and 40s you simply and steadily acquired more value in property, and more material wealth, and naturally as you did so, you’d become more conservative in your outlook because, well, you wanted to conserve what you had.
The story began to unravel in the late 70s, during the rolling energy crisis, and it came completely unmoored in the corporate-raiding, coke-fuelled 80s greed-binge of which Trump was a small part (and which, since he seems stuck in that era, is responsible for at least some of his awfulness).
My parents bought the house they still own, in the mid-70s, when they were 26. Today, however, the majority of people I know (mostly in their mid-30s to mid-40s) still rent; even those with well-paid jobs. The exceptions mostly have a suburban house; usually built as cheaply as possible, or they won seriously big on the Tech Industry Lottery.
And none of us know what retirement will look like—we’re exhorted to put impossible percentages of our paychecks into 401(k) plans, which are only worth anything for as long as the stock market remains viable, which looks increasingly uncertain.
And as for 2020… gestures around us in despair.
So here’s my modern rendering of that bullshit, misattributed Churchill Quote:
If you are not a Liberal, whatever your age, then you are probably stupid, and most definitely either cruel, greedy or both.
And interestingly, I hope this is the tide-turn we need. That generations from X through Y and Z are, en masse, increasingly demanding better social programs, more infrastructure investment, universal healthcare, police defunding, alternatives to incarceration and… all the good stuff that comes under the umbrella of “liberal policies”.
Because we’re all still living in the hangover of the 1980s, and it’s exhausting, and terrifying, and unfathomably sad.
You can see that something’s shifting. Trump, as narcissists always are, is too tied to his course to admit any mistakes and start addressing COVID-19 properly at this point. But he’s digging his heels in on positions—on bigotry, and greed, and division—which only connect with a shrinking, stupid, cruel/greedy minority.
Are you registered to vote by mail yet? USA.gov has a surprisingly-not-terrible starting page if not.
A Thing of Beauty
If you haven’t come across Tom Scott before, I can highly recommend spending an afternoon or two with his Youtube channel. He brings incredibly high production values to everything he does, and is pretty much always informative and entertaining.
I was particularly taken by his latest video, however, in which he illustrates the magnitude of a billion dollars by driving the distance that a billion $1 bills, stacked edge-wise, would take up. His journey runs across Essex and Kent, where I grew up, so there’s a weird mix of nostalgia in this for me.
His first leg, Dagenham to the QEII Bridge in Dartford, is more-or-less the route I took over 2 summers of working as a lab tech at Southend Hospital.
The stretch of the A2 which he follows afterwards runs right across my childhood – past Gravesend, where I spent 5 miserable years at the Grammar School – and on down towards Rochester, Maidstone and Canterbury.
It’s a meditative experience – the video is 80 minutes long, and I “watched” most of it by leaving it running muted while I did other things. But, Tom’s right – it’s a more effective way of truly visualizing the difference between $1m and $1b than the usual volumetric visualizations.
The A2 exit nearest where I grew up…
Ephemera
Well, that was very nostalgic (for me, at least), so let’s stay right in that zone with this video of Nirvana performing Smells Like Teen Spirit in Seattle’s Beehive Records, a week before Nevermind‘s release. Kottke’s “added value” commentary here is well worth a few minutes too.
Keeping it musical, These care-home album cover recreations are 🔥
I’m not sure it was possible to be online in the past week without seeing the Penguin Relationship Flow Chart which Kyoto Aquarium produced. For the full context, though, Nerdist has the best-sourced overview of the story that I’ve seen (including the fact that there’s actually 2 flow-charts, as Tokyo’s Sumida Aquarium has one too).
Running over people you don’t agree with is escalating as a meme, because it’s 2020, so of course it is. And, to refer back to today’s opening ramble, of course it’s a right-wing tactic: stupid, and cruel.
If you make time for one thing from this edition of the Chronicle, please let it be Isabel Wilkerson’s startling, eye-opening meditation on the concept of caste as the root of our toxic racial hierarchies. It explains most of why 2020 in the US is a waking nightmare, and why problems with racism have been so difficult to resolve.
And if that’s left you feeling a little sad (because you’re not a goddamned monster), there’s something melancholy-yet-soothing about Felicia Chiao’s beautiful illustrations on the theme of mental health.
Alright, palate cleansed, we’re back yet again on-board the nostalgia train, barreling towards The Far Side, which Gary Larson quit doing 25 years(!) ago. But now he’s very tentatively, kind of, back! Or, rather, he’s been tinkering with digital illustration tools, and put a few of the results online. Two of the 3 works shared are reminiscent, to me, of the “half baked” sketches which Larson shared in The PreHistory of the Far Side – not really cartoons, quite; more ideas. But the middle cartoon, “Probe and release“, really captures the essence of what I loved about The Far Side as a kid–twisted, weird, kinda cheesy, a bit gross…
I didn’t know much about the history of Charles II’s post-restoration manhunt for the judges who voted to behead his dad, but it’s a fascinating early overlap in the histories of the UK and the US.
Lastly this week, but by no means least, OMG, In-N-Out burger sell drink cup shoes!
Endnote
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