PING!
Posted on 04/02/2007 7:50:42 PM PDT by GMMAC
Date of the inversion
David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Sunday, April 01, 2007
The question, at what precise moment did Western Civilization capsize, continues to interest me. (It is still floating, but upside down in the water.) I've brought it up before. Once, for instance, I called attention to a fine book by the historian John Lukacs, A Thread of Years, in which, through a series of anecdotes, one for each year from 1901 to 1969, he reviews the decline, fall and final extinction of "the idea of a gentleman." Note the terminal year.
For long I've mentioned Aug. 10, 1969, as my own estimate for the date of the "great rotation." Why? Nothing of world importance happened that day. The sun did not stop in the sky; the moon, in waning crescent, did not occult; nor were there other memorable cosmic events of which I am aware. That was part of my point. Nobody could have noticed the precise moment when what was pointed more up, became pointed more down. It does take a bit of time for a ship to roll like that. It had been tilting for quite a while.
It was the summer of the first manned lunar landing: I wanted to locate that unfruitful but impressive event before the inversion. I counted it as a Good Thing. But I could count any number of good things that happened After, and bad things that happened Before. For once again, I am not recalling the loss of a ship with all aboard, only the moment after which the linoleum tended to be tacked to the ceilings, and the chandeliers tethered to the floors.
I tell younger people sometimes that "I was there at the fall" -- that I can remember a time before the Western world finished going crazy. They don't believe me. They think everyone remembers the end of his childhood that way. But no: They are wrong and I am right. The nadir was achieved around 1969, when all the gulls of the '60s came home to roost, on the exposed hull of the ship as it were.
The proof came to hand recently when a friend since early childhood sent me the link to a website where my high school yearbooks were stored, including the entire contents for my Grade 9 year of 1967-68, and ditto for my drop-out year of 1969-70. (You will have to take this on faith, I won't supply the link. I don't need some blogger in Saskatchewan reposting pictures of me as a young dweeb.)
The difference is dramatic. The teachers in the earlier yearbook are, when male, invariably in boring suits with narrow ties; and when female, regardless of age, dressed as school marms. The kids themselves, though not uniformed, are almost uniformly wholesome-looking. The photographer has obviously told them how to pose, they haven't been left to smirk and look ridiculous. The boys look as if they had slide-rules in their pockets. None of the girls look like sluts. (Even the ones who, as I recall, were sluts.)
Just two years later, and the teachers are a mess. The ties are disappearing, and some of the men are growing beards. One is actually wearing sunglasses. The younger female teachers are dressing to kill. Longhairs have started to roam the corridors; several of the kids look drugged. Group photos are chaotic, and the photographers should have been sued for half the mug shots. Hippie-dippie graphics have invaded the yearbook itself. The comments with the graduates' pictures have become dangerously risque and smartass.
This corresponds precisely to what I remember. At the end of the earlier school year the old principal had been fired: he was a drill sergeant (literally, ex-military). The new principal was a "reformer": a nice guy, a sensitive guy. Overnight, Ontario's Hall-Dennis Report had also swept through, with its smug title "Living and Learning." Half the subjects had become "electives": 300 pupils in Grade 9 Latin became four pupils in Grade 10. The bottom had fallen out of educational standards that had already been slung very low.
All these changes happened (not quite literally) overnight. Yet within a year or two, nobody could remember that anything had ever been any different. Or rather, nobody would dare remember. For suddenly we were living in that brave new world.
Well, I was kidding about the date. The poet Philip Larkin said the annus mirabilis was 1963. Almost any year could be argued "after the Beatles' first LP." The point is that something happened, and a ship, long listing, finished going over.
David Warren's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
PING!
Yep, ‘67-’69 is when the West collapsed.
When the elites began to believe Western Civilization was the problem not the solution: Vietnam, 1968.
(They were wrong, but that’s beside the point.)
The music began Friday afternoon at 5:07pm August 15 and continued until mid-morning Monday August 18. The festival closed the New York State Thruway
The Beatles broke up in 1969...THAT was the event that sunk Western Civilization, IMO.
8/10/69, around the time of the Manson murders.
The term “Question Authority”, cease just being a slogan
of the far left around this time and began to seep into
the mainstream psyche....JJ61
The last time The Beatles performed together in a studio was on August 20, 1969. On January 4, 1970, the final taping was completed for Let It Be. In April 1970, McCartney announced that he had left the Beatles, citing personal, business and musical differences. On December 31, 1970, they legally dissolved the Beatles.
I’ve often pondered why the wheels came off the Civilization bus a short 20 - 25 years after the end of WW II. Why at this particular point in history?
Pasqualino Antonio “Leno” LaBianca (August 6, 1925 - August 10, 1969) and his wife Rosemary LaBianca (December 15, 1930 - August 10, 1969) were victims of the Manson Family murders.
Pasqualino Antonio “Leno” LaBianca (August 6, 1925 - August 10, 1969) and his wife Rosemary LaBianca (December 15, 1930 - August 10, 1969) were victims of the Manson Family murders.
By pure happenstance, my father came home early, and just at
that moment. J&J’s ESDP facilities had just started the
August retooling shutdown.
He put the Kibosh on my sister’s little excursion to
Yasger’s farm and she b*tch about it for years....JJ61
Copy that....JJ61
Gee, was I really committing a revolutionary act when I bought the first Beatles’ album.
It was earlier than 1969. It was certainly no later than the anti-war riots outside the Dem convention in Chicago (1968), probably about the time of the race riots in our cities, in 1967.
Also around the time of Fat Teddy and Mary Jo Kopechne. A gentleman would have risked his life to save that poor woman.
IMHO the prosperity of the post war periord created a generation of lazy, overfed, spoiled-rotten brats- the baby boomers.
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