Is Going Backwards the new Progress?

“WAR IS PEACE

  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

George Orwell

Think of an authoritarian leader; anyone in the world, it doesn’t matter. You will be in real trouble if you make a derogatory statement against that leader in his country. Every last one. Recently, at the Texas GOP Convention, it was decided that anyone who speaks ill of Donald Trump should face repercussions from within the party.

We all look to the past with a golden nostalgia, we remember a simpler life and better times. It’s perfectly natural and it’s killing us. Slogans like Make America Great Again, and Take America Back (in time) resonate with many.

Of course, this assumes that the United States is not a great country today. It assumes that America was simply a better country fifty years ago. Like most things MAGA, exactly what it is we need to recreate is a bit on the fuzzy side. Things left unsaid.

I will argue that the world was not a better place fifty years ago, especially for the U.S. In the foreign arena we were locked in a death match with the Soviet Union and on the domestic front there were riots in the streets. Cities were on fire and I don’t mean Fox News cities on fire, I mean hundreds of buildings burned in many communities across the country.

So what’s going on? I think three things are happening at the same time; and they are related:

1. Much of the middle class is now poor. They have simply dropped out the bottom and have no hope. Unsurprisingly, death from drugs, alcohol, and suicide are up in this group. They are angry about what has happened and want a do-over. For the former majority, things were better before factory jobs were shipped to China & Mexico.
2. The rise of the one-percent (a new Gentry Class) and multi-national corporations are also playing a big roll. Yes, I know, we have always had powerful corporations like the British East India Company. But this is different; you see today eight year old children want eight hundred dollar phones. It would be helpful if the phone came after we upgrade to the latest PlayStation. We have Internet, Cable TV, and wireless bills. Both spouses must work to pay these new bills so that corporate dividends can continue to climb. Ricky and Lucy didn’t have these problems. Things were simpler.
3. Hot button, smash mouth politics: When I was a child there were three networks and PBS. That was it: four channels. The news was serious business, delivered by serious people. Yes, the anchor was white male (and Barbara Walters) but they didn’t try to manipulate the facts. Today we have silly name calling and false flag BS. Example: High School trans athletes. Seriously, how often does it happen that a girl with a pair between her legs makes the swim team, displacing a girl disadvantaged by not have said pair? Certainly not often enough to warrant the attention of government and national media at the highest levels. It’s just a way to keep certain people angry. 

• Mexicans are drug dealers and rapists (there are a few good ones too). 
• By taking away choice, women can now have it all. 
• Going backwards is the new progress.

We could make tomorrow a better place, but we will not; instead we will put autocrats in office. I can’t travel back in time and neither can you.

Back in the USSR..?

To be precise, right in the mid70s. This was when I was born, in October 1974. I was born in Leningrad, a.k..a Saint Petersburg. 

But then it was Leningrad and the Soviet Union was in its heyday. America was weakened by Vietnam and Watergate. On the contrary, the USSR looked very strong and gaining momentum. Some influential people in the West, like Henry Kissinger, were even making predictions about future American decline and Soviet advances. 

This was the time when young Vladimir Putin graduated from high school in Leningrad, then went to the university’s department of law, and, finally, to the KGB school. 

He was in his 20s, active, had lots of plans, and his country seemed to many like the strongest power in the world. 

This is exactly the time that he and his cronies now, I think, subconsciously in a way, are pulling contemporary Russia. Not just back in the USSR but back in the Soviet life of the 1970s. 

People lived in a superpower, with still enough enthusiasm and ongoing great economic projects, with a clear-cut communist vision for the future, and, by the way, the shelves were not empty back then. What else could a simple person dream about? Yeah, Ukraine was a part of this great land. And no internet, too. The USSR has reached nuclear parity with the United States and the whole world was divided into two parts: don’t forget, it was the ultimate goal of all Soviet leaders since 1945. 

I believe this is the world Vlad dreams of today and has been for most of his life. And this is the world he’s doing his best to rebuild. He doesn’t understand that this USSR v. 2.0 will be gone the next day after he dies: people around him, with rare exceptions, don’t believe in this BS. They care about money and making investments in the West for themselves, their families, their mistresses, their grandsons, their bastards, etc. 

So, as long as Vladimir Putin is alive, we’re steaming back to this future.

Is Going Backwards the new Progress?

I hadn’t long been married, so it must have been the mid-1970s. Britain was “enjoying” a 3-day working week, massive strikes were the order of the day, with very powerful unions running the show. Fuel prices were going through the roof, in fact I even remember a period of fuel rationing! Power-cuts were the norm, and I distinctly remember piles and piles of rubbish on the streets of our towns and cities. The dustbin men were just one section of the community who were striking because they were fed up with, well, just about everything. I was receiving yearly wage rises of some 15%, and that still went nowhere near rate of inflation, which reached 25% at one stage.

Fast forward over five decades, and exactly the same situation is facing the U.K. today. The biggest rail strike that most can remember is happening as I write, with many more sectors of the work-force threatening the same. Many ordinary people can no longer afford to fill the fuel tank of their cars, and once again, we feel the unerring mood of a nation in deep decline.

And once again we have a government, (there were several in the 1970s) totally devoid of any empathy, any focus and objectivity, and a complete inability to create a better environment for its people. Worse still, no proper opposition exists, capable of offering anything of substance. 

I believe that the country of my birth will shortly find itself in a virtual time-warp; back to the 1970s in every way except for reality, and with no Margaret Thatcher and a Falklands War to bail the country out of its misery.

In fact, I could go further. In the 1970s, our brightest young sparks did not come out of university with up to #50,000 of student debt; we didn’t to my knowledge, have any food banks, compared to the thousands today; and a house back then would set you back a mere four times your salary, compared to today’s ten.

Maybe our progress today is even more regressive than I give it credit for.