Posted on 01/19/2012 4:04:41 AM PST by Kaslin
In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount.
News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin -- as Greece is squeezed to make interest payments to the supposedly euro-pinching German banks.
Such accounts may be exaggerations, but they should warn us that yearly progress is never assured. Instead, history offers plenty of examples of life becoming far worse than it had been centuries earlier. The biographer Plutarch, writing 500 years after the glories of classical Greece, lamented that in his time weeds grew amid the empty colonnades of the once-impressive Greek city-states. In America, most would prefer to live in the Detroit of 1941 than the Detroit of 2011. The quality of today's air travel has regressed to the climate of yesterday's bus service.
In 2000, Greeks apparently assumed that they had struck it rich with their newfound money-laden European Union lenders -- even though they certainly had not earned their new riches through increased productivity, the discovery of more natural resources, or greater collective investment and savings.
The brief Euro mirage has vanished. Life in Athens is zooming backward to the pre-EU days of the 1970s. Then, most imported goods were too expensive to buy, medical care was often premodern, and the city resembled more a Turkish Istanbul than a European Munich.
The United States should pay heed to the modern Greek Cassandra, since our own rendezvous with reality is rapidly approaching. The costs of servicing a growing national debt of more than $15 trillion are starting to squeeze out other budget expenditures. Americans are no longer affluent enough to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to import oil, while we snub our noses at vast new oil and gas finds beneath our own soil and seas.
In my state, Californians for 40 years have hiked taxes; grown their government; vastly expanded entitlements; put farmland, timberland and oil and gas lands off limits; and opened their borders to millions of illegal aliens. They apparently assumed that they had inherited so much wealth from prior generations and that their state was so naturally rich, that a continually better life was their natural birthright.
It wasn't. Now, as in Greece, the veneer of civilization is proving pretty thin in California. Hospitals no longer have the money to offer sophisticated long-term medical care to the indigent. Cities no longer have the funds to self-insure themselves from the accustomed barrage of monthly lawsuits. When thieves rip copper wire out of street lights, the streets stay dark. Most state residents would rather go to the dentist these days than queue up and take a number at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Hospital emergency rooms neither have room nor act as if there's much of an emergency.
Traffic flows no better on most of the state's freeways than it did 40 years ago -- and often much worse, given the crumbling infrastructure and increased traffic. Once-excellent K-12 public schools now score near the bottom in nationwide tests. The California state university system keeps adding administrators to the point where they have almost matched the number of faculty, although half of the students who enter CSU need remedial reading and math. Despite millions of dollars in tutoring, half the students still don't graduate. The taxpayer is blamed in constant harangues for not ponying up more money, rather than administrators being faulted for a lack of reform.
In 1960 there were far fewer government officials, far fewer prisons, far fewer laws and far fewer lawyers -- and yet the state was a far safer place than it is a half-century later. Technological progress -- whether iPhones or Xboxes -- can often accompany moral regress. There are not yet weeds in our cities, but those too may be coming.
The average Californian, like the average Greek, forgot that civilization is fragile. Its continuance requires respect for the law, tough-minded education, collective thrift, private investment, individual self-reliance, and common codes of behavior and civility -- and exempts no one from those rules. Such knowledge and patterns of civilized behavior, slowly accrued over centuries, can be lost in a single generation.
A keen visitor to Athens -- or Los Angeles -- during the last decade not only could have seen that things were not quite right, but also could have concluded that they could not go on as they were. And so they are not.
Washington, please take heed.
As California goes, so goes the Nation - - -
” - - - Californians for 40 years have hiked taxes; grown their government; vastly expanded entitlements; put farmland, timberland and oil and gas lands off limits; and opened their borders to millions of illegal aliens. “
The moon landing resulted from the enormous momentum that propelled America into unprecedented greatness created by millions of great men, women, and children throughout American history. There was much, much, much more!
America's zenith was the Normandy Invasion.
The Decadence that has the USA in a death-grip erupted into the open--like a bubo--as the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, when the spoiled, overindulged children of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and the women who rivitted airplanes during World War II sashayed onto the polished dance floor (polished by their predecessors) in their velvet slippers chanting: "Sex! Drugs! And rock-and-roll!" their lofty if flimsy pretensions notwithstanding, devoted to nothing more high-minded than immediate gratification self-indulgence: "If it feels good, do it!"
These spoiled brats have now succeeded in seizing control of the United States. The results were predictable and are obvious.
"History is a staircase on which men in hobnail boots ascending pass men in velvet slippers descending."
Yes.
And this is the crux of decadence.
The decadent Leftists who control California will not come to the senses until violent drug gangs raid Malibu, Mill Valley, and Beverly Hills and throw them out into the defecation-filled streets (if they're lucky!).
Even then--they'll manage to blame it all on somebody-else.
Hollywood's "Stars" meanwhile--if they can manage to escape--will jet to safety--still preaching decadence to the gullible.
>Sweden is in decline.
Actually they are not any longer. They already hit their bottom, or at least to the degree necessary to wake them up. They got to the point where the Krona had to issue some ridiculous rate of interest in the 90s for anyone to lend them money, and that was a wake up call. Since then they have not elected the socialists again, and the center-right governments have been trimming the social services bit by bit.
Canada is also like this in a way. Back in the late 90s the cannucks realized that their budget deficits were unsustainable, so they just took an axe to the budget. They told each department that this would have to be cut my x%, and made it happen. This was no BS baseline budgeting ‘cuts’. This was real cuts which reduced spending. They also have a conservative government which has them back on track. They take advantage of their natural resources, call out that the AGW emperor has no clothes, and have worked on putting some meat back on their military.
Heck, if Canada would repeal their dumb gun laws, I’d consider moving up their. Admittedly though, they are still saddled with the socialized medicine debacle, but I think people are starting to see it for the sham it is.
Thanks for the ping.
In 1980, who would have labeled Devo as brilliant prophets of what was to come, rather than just a New Wave band with an amusing theme twist?
SAT scores- 1962 was all time high for a number of years, then they changed the test.
Decline is about a lot more than just budgets.
For instance...
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/01/sweden-violent-muslims-halt-mail-delivery-in-malmo.html
Swedish society is still unravelling and being overwhelmed by a foreign mass migration. Sweden is still very much in decline.
That homogeniety need not be ethnic or genetic in any way, either.
Simply an agreement on the basic tenets of a common culture.
Here we have a “gimme” class that thinks the world is owed to them because of their genetic or cultural background,
contrasted with the traditional cultural adherents who work to provide for themselves and the charities they voluntarily choose to support.
Couple this one with the piece NDH wrote on the situation in the Central Valley and it’s a pretty bleak picture.
Californians are exciting like rats to Oregon, every other person I sell homes to are Californians. It is going to hit Oregon hard too, as these Californians will want to make Oregon into the "paradise" that exists in CA. They are more than halfway there already.
Victor Don Juan Hanson, tilting at windmills again... It’s too late. The bums, deadbeats, and parasites of America found that they could vote themselves money from the public treasury, and eagerly waiting to assist them was a political party who would gladly trade their services for votes.
See you on the other side.
How do you pack up a vineyard?
Thanks for linking that site, which I will have to check out later.
Let me just say that as one who grew up in New Jersey about 12 mi outside of NYC (and a 55 cent bus ride away for most of my youth, it was not even an issue busing into NYC for an 11 year old at the time) there some times in the early 70’s where NYC was in absolutely crumbling shape, just horrible. I actually kind of liked it because I could hop back on my bus and go to where it was safe, plus I was an ignorant yout’ at the time.
let’s just say that I have a small appreciation for very serious urban decay, LOL.
I remember the garbage strikes in '81 and how awful it was everywhere. LOL
There is no place like NYC. Period. If I were Chinese, perhaps Hong Kong might be similar, but I have lots of Chinese friends and they have never said it was anything like that, but I don’t know.
You have to be a little bit bad just to be there. It is massively safer than it seems.
I think one of the most astonishing things about NYC is that if you say “let’s do lunch sometime”....you WILL.
I lived in Los Angeles for 20 years, where if you “say “let’s do lunch sometime” it is metaphysically certain that you never will.
In all that time in LA, I think I ran into one person from my HS class.
In 1986, I went back to NYC for a trade show, and stayed with a buddy in his condo. One night we went to the village for some pizza. In 45 minutes, I met 4 people (in two separate sets) who I knew from CA.
Excellent. Emailed.
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