He's baaaaaack!

After only five years I am back!

I have just been too busy to blog but how can a 60's radical pass up the current political situation?

Regardless of how one feels about the politics or positions on any or all issues, this election will go down in history for two things.

First, truth, though never an attribute of politicians, was deliberately murdered.  It was replaced with fabrications, exaggerations and baseless opinion.  Twenty years of planned dumbing down of the American public paid off big time.  The forces of evil have clearly won the war on science.  A carnival barker sold a gullible public a bridge (actually a wall) that does not exist and has no real reason to exist.

Second, ignorance, fear, anger, hate and aggression, the natural progression used by despots, provided the motivation for many (not the majority at all) to vote for undefined change at the cost of  human decency.

I will have more to say when I have more time.

For now remember, we 60's teens survived LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, 2 Bushes and the Tea Party.  We will get through this one also.

Remember you heard it here first...

The 20's are going to make the 60's look like the 50's.

Hold the Horses!

Hold the Horses!

By Rob Lillis

(Originally appeared in Voice – Messenger Post Newspapers – March 7, 2012)

One of the best protections for consumers is accurate information with which to make choices.  In the 1960s, Ralph exposed the lack of safety concerns in the automobile industry.  It took several decades of consumer education and government regulations but car makers went from advertising that appealed only to consumers’ desire for styling and performance to marketing safety advances.  In the time I sat writing this article with the TV on in the background, I saw an ad for one automaker touting the highest Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crash test scores and another bragging about vehicles equipped with eight airbags.

Each year the television broadcast of the Superbowl is highlighted by the introduction of new, clever, humorous and very expensive ads mostly for beer or junk foods.  The producers of these products know that if you can laugh at an ad, in essence share a laugh with them, or if the ad gives you “warm fuzzies,” you probably won’t see through the deception of linking their product to fun, athletics, sexual prowess or patriotism.

Anheuser Busch, the foreign owned, “Great American” Beer Company introduced and is continuing to run an ad showing Americans in all walks of life celebrating repeal of prohibition with all the enthusiasm they mustered for the Japanese surrender at the end of WWII.  The tag line at the end of the ad reads, “Anheuser Busch, delivering good times since 1876.”

The vast majority of Americans will not hesitate to agree that prohibition was a failure.  Of course the vast majority of Americans base that opinion on the image of prohibition projected in Jimmy Cagney movies, the Untouchables (movie or TV series) and the propaganda disseminated by the alcohol industry.  But hold those horses (Clydesdales) and let’s look at a few facts.  Prohibition was enacted for moral reasons at the urging of the religious temperance movement.  Any such law is ill conceived.  However, the public health impact was dramatic.  The majority of Americans did not drink during prohibition.  As a result, cirrhosis deaths declined by over two thirds.  Motor vehicle deaths also declined dramatically.

What Anheuser Busch neglected to mention in their ad was the collateral damage that resulted from repeal of prohibition.  Every year, 35,000 Americans die from cirrhosis or alcohol liver disease.  Another 10,000 die in motor vehicle crashes involving alcohol impaired drivers.  Half of all murders and half all suicide deaths are related to alcohol consumption.  Deaths due to alcohol are just the tip of the iceberg.  One recent study estimates that excessive alcohol consumption costs Americans nearly $225 billion annually.  Most of that cost is borne by all of us as healthcare costs paid by our shared medical insurance or public healthcare coverage.  Law enforcement and criminal justice costs associated with alcohol related crime are estimated at more than $21 billion. These figures fail to fully portray the human cost of alcohol related problems such as birth defects, domestic violence, divorce, job loss and academic failure.

So before you celebrate the repeal of prohibition, with the indispensable help of Anheuser Busch, hold the horses, even the Clydesdales, and think about the cost of that move.  Then make an informed choice about the safety of this product.

It has been too long

It has been too long since I posted on my blog.  This is certainly not for lack of topics and not for lack of motivation.

I am going to try to knock out few posts in the next few days.

One problem is that I have not yet found a good link between the 60's and the current election.  Good heavens...even the republicans who gave us Nixon would have found at least one candidate with a double digit IQ!

The Next Renaissance

Please do not think that what I am about to say in any way indicates that I am willing to surrender to the moronic and tragic course we are on in these United States.

Having said that… I fear that we are heading for yet another “dark age.” 

You remember the dark ages?  Powerful civilizations crumbled after becoming obsessed with world domination.  The wealthy became the greedy and most or all wealth was in the hands of a very few.  The rich paid nothing while the poor were taxed until nothing was left.  In order to keep control the leaders eliminated arts, culture and education and controlled the political discourse by dividing in order to conquer.  Religion became a weapon of the powerful.  Any thoughtful person was not only labeled a traitor but a heretic as well. 

Of course no nation can survive for long in such a state.  Rome is gone.  Greece is a resort.  England…well…England has rotten food.  More recently Nazi Germany used modern technology to take the dark ages to a whole new level.

I don’t know if we will get to the point of creating another dark age and I don’t know if the U.S. will go the route of Rome, Greece or Germany.  But in order to protect the interests of a very few very powerful individuals and corporations whose greed has led to a near collapse of the greatest economy in history, our elected leaders have decided to let the poor take the beating again. 

It is inconceivable that a country that can afford to provide food, clothing, shelter and education to all of its citizens, and to most of the world for that matter, is going to eliminate access to food, clothing, shelter and education to those who have not been invited into the exclusive fraternity that controls the power and wealth.

Now for the brighter side of this posting…I hope it isn’t too late…after every dark age there is a renaissance. 

I hope I can be around for it.

The next renaissance will be interesting.  What we call classic…like classic music and classic literature…will survive and be reclaimed.  It might seem to disappear.  With no more Public Broadcasting, no more funding for orchestras, libraries or museums it will certainly be hard to find.  But it will survive.  Maybe one benefit of spiraling technology is that literature and music won’t have to be hidden in huge catacombs.  Every great book ever written will fit digitally on my Black Berry.  Come the renaissance we can print them again.

Music might be a little more challenging.  Sure digital recordings can be hidden on thumb drives.  Computers can make synthetic music that is flawless.  But what if nobody is taught to play an actual instrument?  I have listened to and enjoyed recordings of some great operas.  But only seeing a live performance can connect an audience to the emotion and the passion of the characters.  Hearing a recording of a cello concerto is great.  Seeing Yoyo Ma perform one makes a bunch of notes become something extraordinary…something human.  Seeing the Iron Butterfly was way better than listening to a recording of In a Gadda Da Vita. (There…back to the 60s at last.)

Speaking of the 60s, some of us thought of the 60s as a renaissance.  The Viet Nam war, the political strangle hold of the military-industrial-complex, the paranoid sociopathic government of Richard Nixon were part of a moral dark age.  Culture survived because there were still the remnants of philanthropists who built libraries, museums, orchestras and universities with their incredible wealth.  OK much of their wealth might be considered ill begotten, but the early industrialists like Carnegie and Rockefeller recognized that their wealth and their future depended on a productive citizenry. That required education and culture.  Not only would these people make good workers and good customers but they would be tax payers and would foot the bill for infrastructure that would ultimately benefit them.

I think what we are witnessing is the swing of a pendulum.  Not the swing from good times to bad times. Rather it is the swing of the pendulum of how the rich get rich.  On the one side the rich get rich by maximizing opportunity by ingenuity, common sense, hard work, ethical behavior and most important, a sense of and concern for the future. But that side limits the total wealth, though there is still enough to go around. On the other side, where we are now, the rich get rich by being utterly unfettered by common sense, ethical behavior or any concern for the future beyond the next stock dividend.  That side limits the number of people who get wealthy and, though there is plenty to go around…they don’t share.

The trick is to be around when the pendulum is straight down…in other words, during the renaissance.

The Good the Bad and the Ugly

I have been reading my college reunion materials and trying to plan a trip down memory lane.  It reminded me that on the third or fourth morning I was on campus, a boy with a gun a million miles from home…no really...we had mandatory ROTC…we were awakened to the blasting music from the then hit movie, The Good the Bad and the Ugly with Clint Eastwood.  Great sound track.  The noise had something to do with hazing the freshman.  In any case, the idea of the good, the bad and the ugly has had me thinking recently.

There are lots of good ideas.  There are good ideas for doing well, that is, for making money…too many of those…just none that I ever had. 

But I want to write about good ideas for doing good.  For 40 years I have worked in and around numerous fields and disciplines that are intended to help some groups in need or to solve some social or human problem.  Many times, good people have good ideas to make things better.

The problem is, most human service organizations don’t pay very well and many, maybe most people who give it a try move on to better paying jobs.  That is where the ugly come in.  The ugly are the people who take good ideas for doing good and ruin them by trying to make them into something for doing well…usually for them to personally do well.  That is when good ideas get bad.

The ugly are usually people who think they know more and better than the poor suckers who work in human service programs.  The other source of ugly is state and federal bureaucracy.  Virtually every human service program is regulated by some state or federal agency.  The people who work in those agencies rarely come from experience with the organizations they control.  They are prone to find the “why not” for every good idea.  In order to assure control, they place endless requirements for funding or license approvals.

The current budget crisis is making it almost impossible to keep the good and will almost certainly protect and promote the breeding of the ugly.  That is bad.

In the 60s we had a lot of good ideas…you remember…peace, civil rights and women’s rights.  I think it was easier to spot the ugly…they were over 30 and worked for the government.  Over the years the ugly have had such brilliant ideas as quotas, reverse discrimination, and an endless string of military peace-keeping missions that look remarkably like wars.

I guess the good news is that despite the best efforts of the ugly, a lot of good came from the good ideas of the 60s.  I just hope the good ideas of today can survive the attempts of the ugly to make them bad.

I don't like "like."

As the Sara Lee jingle says, “Everybody doesn’t like something…”  Well I don’t like “like.”  It is amazing how something as insignificant as inserting the word, “like” before any or all spoken sentences has become so prevalent among young people.  It is annoying as all…like…heck. 

The over-use of “like” also reflects a deeper social psychological phenomenon.  We are in the throws of a national, maybe even international, epidemic of narcissism.  (Though I doubt people in some parts of Africa have time for narcissism.) According to the Pub Med website, “Narcissistic personality disorder is a condition in which people have an inflated sense of self-importance and an extreme preoccupation with themselves.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001930

Some of the symptoms are an obsession with physical appearance, lack of concern for the impact one’s behavior has on others and lack of concern for the future.  Narcissism differs from arrogance, though the two can go hand-in-hand.  Arrogant people are certain they are always correct.  They have no need for qualifiers such as “like.”  Narcissistic people might think about themselves a bit too much but they are never sure of themselves.  By qualifying every declarative sentence with “like” it leaves the listener with the concept of some doubt about the factual or truthful nature of the assertion.  It gives the speaker a built-in escape clause.  “I didn’t say she was ugly.  I just said she was…like…ugly.”

There are other symptoms of this epidemic of narcissism.

According to www.cosmeticplasticsurgerystatistics.com the most common surgical and nonsurgical cosmetic procedures among men and women in 2007 included:
Botox 2,775,176

Hyaluronic Acid (Hylaform, Juvederm, Restylane) 1,448,716

Laser Hair Removal 1,412,657

Microdermabrasion 829,658

Laser Skin Resurfacing 647,707

Liposuction 456,828

Breast augmentation 399,440

Eyelid surgery 240,763

Abdominoplasty 185,335

Female breast reduction 153,087

To be fair, about 20% of breast surgery is for reconstruction following mastectomies.

Another symptom is the realization by advertising experts that there is a lot of money to made by appealing to the narcissism of the target audience.  In our area, one local furniture store uses the Queen song, “I Want it All” to appeal to the audience’s greed and lack of delay of gratification.  While the voice over talks about furniture financing deals the music screams, “I want it all, I want it all, I want it all and I want it now.”

Nike ads now appeal to the narcissism of amateur athletes by pounding the old hit song, “Nobody But Me” by the Human Beinz.  At least that might get a few sedentary folks up off their keesters.  Sometimes we need to accept doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

So how does all this compare to the 60s? 

In the 60s the most socially desirable trait was “non-conformity.”   Now, of course, deliberately trying to be a non-conformist because that is the norm is a bit hypocritical or at least ironic.  To be a non-conformist one was supposed to let one’s hair grow long and wear bell-bottoms and tie-dyed shirts, but we were expected to think for ourselves…not about ourselves. 

The idea behind non-conformity was to think less about ourselves and to be more concerned about others.  This often was expressed through being involved in causes other than our own success.  Civil rights, the anti-war movement, the peace movement (not the same thing but that will be the subject of a future post), the women’s movement and social justice would seem to indicate concern for others.

Being a non-conformist was certainly a form of narcissism.  Choosing to be a non-conformist implies that our concerns and opinions are somehow important to others.

Just as we now say that “time will tell” what the long-term implications of narcissism will be, time has told us a great deal about the long-term implications of the 60s non-conformity.

Sadly, I can count on one hand…okay maybe both hands…the number of people who were activists in the 60s and still believe and act on those principles.  Most of the hippies I knew are now active (or retired) stock brokers, corporate managers, and…gasp…personally and politically conservative.

At least a lot of these guys have been consistent about one thing… German cars.  Of course then they drove VW Vans…now they drive BMWs.

blogging

I have been blogging for a whole week now.  It has been fun.  According to the blogspot stats I have had nearly 100 views including one from South Africa, one from Germany and one from Singapore.  I thought I might do some research on other blogs that might be similar to mine. 

First I looked for 60s related sites.  Here is a couple I found that should be of interest to anyone who likes my blog.

http://thisdayinthe60s.blogspot.com/

Informative and fun.

http://mariepoetryofsong.blogspot.com

Specific to music and its interaction with politics.

Then I went to blogsearch.google.com and entered “liberal political blogs.”  It found 8.4 million results.  When I entered “conservative political blogs” it found 3.4 million. When I clicked on the first four or five on each list I found two things.  First, at least half of these blogs had not posted anything in months, some even years. 

I can’t promise I won’t get tired of posting.  On the other hand, I would hope that I get bored before I get boring.

Second, I didn’t find any blogs that even pretended to be balanced in any way.

http://theragblog.blogspot.com/

Progressive or anarchist it is interesting and passionate.

http://www.redstate.com/

Right wing…but current.

http://conservativepoliticalblog.wordpress.com/

Radically right wing…but also current.

So onward and upward and remember, don’t believe anything you read in a blog.