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On the federal debt question, you should recall that John Nance Garner, Veep under FDR in the 30's, first two terms, broke with Roosevelt on the question of spending, believing it was ruinous, and he was of course a Democrat, and "a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man." The Roosevelt court-packing scheme was the final straw, of course.

The point is that even 80 years ago, knowledgeable folk were predicting ruin right around the corner if we kept on living beyond our means. So far at least, that ruin has been postponed. No one, of course, knows when it will strike, of if it ever will.

When I was at UT, 45 years ago, I took the view that if someone didn't like all the government debt, give it to me and I would live off the interest on as much of the filthy government bonds as the naysayers were willing to part with. It never happened either.

If you read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, some parallels are unmistakable. You know what happened to those Roman guys? They all ended up a bunch of Italians!

RoyGBiv wrote:

JALLEN wrote:What do you expect where it is better to have been in the KKK than be a Boy Scout? All the values that previous generations were expected to live by are going the way of the dinosaur now.

Sometimes I wonder if we are not on the edge of an abyss, a new and more terrible Dark Ages where learning, culture, justice, liberty, privacy and the other values developed over many centuries in Western Christian democratic culture that have produced a standard of living, and not just economic, undreamed of by previous cultures and generations, are going to disappear, and their opposite become the norm.

I recall that Archie Bunker (and my grandparents) felt the same way about my generation.
Maybe it's just the natural order of things that us older folks think the younger folk are mostly rotten apples?

Pass me another Ensure, please.

I had the opportunity to spend some time in Cairo some years ago with my host, a man who had grown up there, "in the shadows of the Pyramids." He graduated from the Military Academy there, a classmate of Sadat and Mubarek, rose to be a General in the Army, managed the Suez Canal. He wasn't a government official but he was pals with almost all of them.

He told me about a newspaper editor he knew who had run a letter to the Editor, decrying the young people as lazy, ill-groomed, rude, irresponsible, crude, worthless, uneducated, wastrels. This letter got the most response of any letter the newspaper had ever published. Letters came pouring in from all over the place for weeks, agreeing with the original author, citing new examples, haranguing about the decline in civility and manners, hand-wringing over the future, etc. After some weeks the Editor revealed that the original letter had come from an ancient scroll found in an old crypt and recently deciphered. The letter was dated about 4000 years before, which is why it didn't mention Elvis, I guess.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose is not a new concept, it turns out.

What do you expect where it is better to have been in the KKK than be a Boy Scout? All the values that previous generations were expected to live by are going the way of the dinosaur now.

Sometimes I wonder if we are not on the edge of an abyss, a new and more terrible Dark Ages where learning, culture, justice, liberty, privacy and the other values developed over many centuries in Western Christian democratic culture that have produced a standard of living, and not just economic, undreamed of by previous cultures and generations, are going to disappear, and their opposite become the norm.