Seeing an Older America on Television
American Decline, Chilton Williamson, Perry Mason, Television
World Spectator excerpt 3.
Chilton Williamson confesses to watching old Perry Mason episodes out of nostalgia for the Old Pre-1960s America all we Boomer intellectuals used to despise while we were growing up.
Today, I, too, would trade the gray-flannel-suited, anti-intellectual, Organization Man Establishment of the 1950s for today’s Woke spineless snivelling Establishment in a New York minute.
Over the past year and a half, I have been re-watching episodes of the original show starring Raymond Burr as Mason, Barbara Hale as Della Street, William Hopper as Paul Drake, Ray Collins as Lieutenant Tragg and William Talman as Hamilton Burger. As with so many good things, I found that they had improved with age — not only theirs but my own as well. Several months ago, the discovery that Evelyn Waugh had been a great admirer of Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels, from which the series was adapted, further increased my appreciation and respect for the films. So did learning that Raymond Chandler — a good friend of the author’s — also appreciated the books for their tight structure and for ingenuity of their plots. Having since read three of the Mason books, I understand what Waugh saw in them; also why Chandler privately described Gardner as someone who could be called a writer ‘only by courtesy’.
Gardner, unlike Chandler, was not a descriptive author, nor had he the ability to create mood and atmosphere. Indeed, he was hardly more than a writer of screenplays, which explains in part why the translation of his novels from paper to celluloid was such a brilliant success. Gardner invented the principal characters (Chandler considered Perry Mason a just-about-perfect creation) and the story lines, while the artistes of the Hollywood movie lots supplied the actors, the settings, the backgrounds and interiors, the décor, the clothes and the cars. The result was a precise image of America in the 1950s that seems almost as distant from America in the 21st century as the antebellum era.
My parents considered the United States of the period hopelessly and unspeakably vulgar, shallow, trivial, ugly and uncivilized. Viewed from the perspective of 2021, it appears more like Athens in her Golden Age. Watching Perry Mason is a comforting experience today precisely because America in the Fifties was a comfortable place, and Americans were comfortable with themselves. Gardner’s Mason was perfect for his time: tall, broad-shouldered, and masculine; confident, competent, generous, chivalrous, and — above all — reassuring. He is solid rather than stolid, always in perfect self-control, even-tempered and imperturbable: the personification of the country that had recently won its second world war and was enjoying the ensuing and well-deserved prosperity, and the superior type of American who is wholly representative of his country without standing above it.
Along the same lines, I’ve become aware myself of an ever-increasing fondness for 1940s and 1950s B movies, resulting simply from the comfort of revisiting a so-much more adult and masculine America full of optimism and self-confidence, and generally completely lacking any insolent, whining, power-hungry Identity Groups, and one in which adults talk, act, and dress like adults.
“Two Photos: Two Different Americas”
Afghanistan, American Decline, WWII
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Watch: A video shows the moment Afghan citizens dropped from an aircraft near #Kabul airport after clinging on to a US Air Force plane in an attempt to flee the country amid the #Taliban takeover. #Afghanistan https://t.co/2vc7iuFmgj pic.twitter.com/MdrNlasobn
— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) August 16, 2021
Warren Kozak, in the NY Sun, points to two images as metonymies for the change in American leadership over the last three quarter century.
Both wars began with unprovoked, surprise, and devastating attacks against the United States. In 1941, the Japanese destroyed much of our Pacific fleet and killed more than 2,000 Americans, mostly servicemen. Sixty years later, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killed 3,000 Americans, mostly civilians.
That is where the parallels end. The two adversaries were not remotely alike. The Japanese were a major military power with a large, unified, and advanced population. Afghanistan, which harbored the al Qaeda terrorists that attacked on 9-11, is a small, backward, failed state run by 7th century jihadists.
To achieve our victory in World War II over Japan and its ally, Nazi Germany, America focused its entire economy for four years, built a military of over 16 million men, mostly civilians, and maintained its will, even with the loss of more than 400,000 of its sons. In the latter war, with an all-volunteer military, Americans felt little economic hardship.
Many didn’t even know a single serviceman or woman who died, much less fought, in the war. America’s military today constitutes less than one percent of our population. In World War II, practically every family had someone serving, and that included the nation’s wealthiest families, from the Rockefellers to the Kennedys to the Bushs’.
The greatest change we have witnessed has come in the leadership of our country. Consider how the earlier military and political officials conducted themselves after their extraordinary achievement in World War II. The head of our entire military, General George C. Marshall, declined from Time Life’s Henry Luce an offer of $1 million, $15 million in today’s money, to publish his memoir.
One of the signers on the deck of the Missouri, Admiral Chester Nimitz, chief architect of the naval victory in the Pacific, also declined every lucrative offer to tell his story. Nimitz spent his retirement as an advisor to the Navy and served as a Regent for the University of California.
Another officer — he requested not to be at the ceremony, but was ordered to be present — was Admiral John McCain Sr, grandfather of the senator. The 61 year admiral pushed himself so hard during the war that after the signing he immediately flew home. He died four days later, probably from heart failure and exhaustion.
General Curtis LeMay developed the devastating air war against our enemies. He took a humble view of the proceedings, though. Instead of feeling any personal glory or accomplishment, LeMay was thinking about all the young men under his command, who did not live to see the day. “Seemed to me that if I had done a better job, we might have saved a few more crews,” he wrote later.
The man at the top of the chain-of-command, President Truman, was barely known when he took over the presidency following the death of FDR. Yet Truman proved to be one of the most capable leaders this nation has ever produced. On a mind numbing number of vital decisions that came his way in hurried order, “Given ’Em Hell” Harry made the right choice every single time.
When Truman retired in 1953, he went back to the same home he and the First Lady lived in long before they went to Washington. He was given no pension (presidential pensions were conveniently set up by Lyndon Johnson just before he retired). Like Marshall and Nimitz, Truman turned down numerous offers that certainly would have made his life easier. His reasons now seem so quaint. He thought it undignified.
No one figure or political party today can be singled out for the terrible decisions and exceptional greed that we have witnessed in recent years. Or for the cringing face of our diplomacy. Can one even imagine Truman begging the Iranian ayatollahs for a nuclear deal not in our favor? Or handing over the keys to a country to the same terrorists who used it to launch an attack on America only 20 years ago?
Which presents the question: How did Americans come to simply accept the million dollar gigs, the mansions, and the celebrity parties that are now considered a well-earned perk of government service? From the rear-view mirror, those World War II leaders now seem so antiquated … and so missed.
Decline of Western Intelligence
American Decline, I.Q., Leftism's Ascendancy, Stupidity
David Solway may have hit upon the reason that totalitarian intolerance and left-wing grievance politics have risen to a level of power and influence no one would ever have predicted: The country mysteriously got a lot stupider.
Recent studies have reported a worrisome decline in IQ scores in Western nations over the last decades, a reversal of the once-hopeful Flynn Effect (named after the late philosopher and psychologist James R. Flynn) which posited a growth in cognitive abilities for much of the 20th Century. Now the Flynn Effect seems to have reversed, leading to predictions of a general dumbing down of selective populations. Other studies report that IQ erosion is not confined to this century but that IQ has dropped by an average of 14.1 percent over the last century. As Evan Horowitz writes for NBC News, “A range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.”
Horowitz argues that the plummet in cognitive abilities “could not only mean 15 more seasons of the Kardashians, but also… fewer scientific breakthroughs, stagnant economies and a general dimming of our collective future.” Flynn himself, who did the original research on the eponymous effect, has stated that “The IQ gains of the 20th century have faltered.” Flynn’s more optimistic Are We Getting Smarter: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century was published in 2012; his subsequent findings led in an opposite direction.
He’s right. The signs are everywhere.
Education in America
American Decline, Education, John Milton
Tony Esolen:
The gorilla in the living room is this: A majority of teachers are pretty ignorant in the subjects they are hired to teach. They write poorly, they do not read good books, they think poorly, and so they end up depending upon on-line lesson plans — which are wretched — or the puked-up politics they are fed in college.
Ask how many high school English teachers are able to read a poem by Milton without trouble, let alone teach that poem. Or rather ask how many college freshmen, having come out of “good” schools with English teachers galore, even recognize the name of John Milton.
Raising salaries won’t attract better teachers, not now, because those better teachers don’t exist. Our college education now is pretty wretched. I am regularly informed by my old students that even in graduate schools, students pursuing a degree in English literature do not know English literature, and often do not even LIKE English literature; they like “theory,” which they do not have the philosophical grounding to evaluate, and politics, which rushes into the vacuum that ignorance leaves.
There’s no reforming it. We have some teachers who really do love English literature — I’m choosing that subject because it’s the one I know best — but they are coming out of “classical” Christian academies, secondary and post-secondary, and they haven’t taken courses in education, they don’t have degrees in education or in English education, so in most states you can’t hire them for public schools. They end up teaching in private schools, most of them for wages that at best barely allow them to support a family.”
Army Drops Hand Grenade and Land Navigation From Basic Training
American Decline, Millennials, US Army
All Outdoor has some more bad news:
The United States Army announced they will be dropping hand grenade and land navigation competency as requirements for basic training graduation.
Reasons cited to drop the grenade competency: People are growing up never learning how to throw. That’s right. Too many people are going into the army who never learned how to throw as a child. The Army does not have the time to teach all the adults how to properly throw.
How far does the grenade have to be thrown? Only 20 – 30 meters. Which equals between 60 – 90 feet.
However, just because the two were dropped from basic training does not mean the skills will not be taught. They will just be taught at a later time.
From Military.com – Low Recruit Discipline Prompts Army to Redesign Basic Training.
“We are finding that there are a large number of trainees that come in that quite frankly just physically don’t have the capacity to throw a hand grenade 20 to 25 to 30 meters.
In 10 weeks, we are on a 48-hour period; you are just not going to be able to teach someone how to throw if they haven’t thrown growing up.â€
The whole article is a very interesting read. The part about the new recruits lack discipline and have a sense of entitlement should be a concern.
Washington’s Birthday
American Decline, George Washington, History, Richard Nixon, Traditions, Washington's Birthday
The submersion of the national holiday honoring George Washington into a generic and meaningless “Presidents Day” is one of the nearly too-many-to-count bad things we owe to the administration of the late and unlamented Richard Nixon. A number of editorialists this year are arguing that America needs to do the right thing by going back to honoring our first, and possibly greatest, national hero.
In 1968, the public-employee unions, seeking a three-day weekend, convinced Congress to move the commemoration of Washington’s birthday to the third Monday in February. This eventually led to what we now call Presidents Day, which marks the birthday not only of Washington but of Lincoln and all other presidents. By celebrating every birthday, we effectively celebrate none.
Washington’s contemporaries hailed his Revolutionary War victories at Trenton and Yorktown, but they honored him more for risking his fame, fortune and life in taking on military responsibilities for which he wasn’t paid—and then giving up command to return to his farm and family. The young American citizenry esteemed him for bringing together and presiding over the Constitutional Convention, but they honored him more for his steadfastness in holding the colonies together and facing down potential insurrectionists who might have seized the government and made him a military dictator. And while they appreciated him returning to public service as president, they honored him more for leaving an office that many expected him to hold for life.
Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries were unaware of, but they would not have been surprised by, what King George III supposedly said upon hearing that Washington, after winning the Revolutionary War, had refused to be king: “If that is true, he must be the greatest man in the world.” …
Our ancestors expected that America would produce other great leaders. But they celebrated Washington’s birthday because, as the Connecticut Courant observed in 1791, “Many a private man might make a great president; but will there ever be a President who will make so great a man as WASHINGTON?”
Washington’s Birthday
American Decline, George Washington, History, Richard Nixon, Traditions
The submersion of the national holiday honoring George Washington into a generic and meaningless “Presidents Day” is one of the nearly too-many-to-count bad things we owe to the administration of the late and unlamented Richard Nixon. A number of editorialists this year are arguing that America needs to do the right thing by going back to honoring our first, and possibly greatest, national hero.
In 1968, the public-employee unions, seeking a three-day weekend, convinced Congress to move the commemoration of Washington’s birthday to the third Monday in February. This eventually led to what we now call Presidents Day, which marks the birthday not only of Washington but of Lincoln and all other presidents. By celebrating every birthday, we effectively celebrate none.
Washington’s contemporaries hailed his Revolutionary War victories at Trenton and Yorktown, but they honored him more for risking his fame, fortune and life in taking on military responsibilities for which he wasn’t paid—and then giving up command to return to his farm and family. The young American citizenry esteemed him for bringing together and presiding over the Constitutional Convention, but they honored him more for his steadfastness in holding the colonies together and facing down potential insurrectionists who might have seized the government and made him a military dictator. And while they appreciated him returning to public service as president, they honored him more for leaving an office that many expected him to hold for life.
Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries were unaware of, but they would not have been surprised by, what King George III supposedly said upon hearing that Washington, after winning the Revolutionary War, had refused to be king: “If that is true, he must be the greatest man in the world.” …
Our ancestors expected that America would produce other great leaders. But they celebrated Washington’s birthday because, as the Connecticut Courant observed in 1791, “Many a private man might make a great president; but will there ever be a President who will make so great a man as WASHINGTON?”
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Basil explains that the federal holiday really is still officially designated as Washington’s Birthday.
I know. Some of you thought today was “Presidents’ Day.†Don’t let that bother you. Some of you believe in the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, and that Elvis works at a Burger King in Michigan.
Where I come from, we usually look at such people and say “Bless their heart.†That’s Georgia-speak for “What a dumbass.â€
I know, the calendar you got at the kiosk at the mall has “Presidents Day†written in the little block for today. Well, about those people that made that calendar? Bless their heart.
I know, all the TV and radio ads talk about “Presidents Day†sales going on today. Those people that wrote those commercials? Bless their heart.
Today’s a federal holiday. And, it’s “Washington’s Birthday.†Take a look at United States Code 5 U.S.C. 6103 and see what it says. Sure enough, it says “Washington’s Birthday.â€
Now, the truth is that George Washington’s birthday isn’t until tomorrow. In fact, the official federal holiday for Washington’s Birthday never falls on his actual birthday. Who else but the government could screw up a birthday so bad? And some folks want them in charge of health care. Bless their heart.
Why do I make a big deal about what today is called? Because I think it’s bad idea to ignore history. George Washington was actually a pretty important guy in American history. Important enough to actually give a holiday for his birthday. …
In 1968, the movement to change many holidays to a nearby Monday began. In 1971, Richard Nixon issued Executive Order 11582, beginning that process. Still, the holiday is officially Washington’s Birthday, and has always been Washington’s Birthday. (Snopes has a write-up about this, too, by the way.)
Some states observed Abraham Lincoln’s birthday (February 12). Some still might. And some people got the idea that the new federal holiday in February was for Washington and Lincoln. Bless their heart.
Somewhere along the way, people began to call today’s holiday “Presidents’ Day.†Whether by design or not, it contributes to the ignorance of Americans. It ignores the importance of George Washington. And it causes many Americans to either forget or never understand the contributions of George Washington in the formation of this great country.
So, I wish you a very pleasant Washington’s Birthday today. Some of you are off work. Others, like me, have a regular work day. Whatever your plans are, take some time to remember George Washington.
And, if you’re celebrating Presidents Day today? Bless your heart.
Sad, But Accurate, Metaphor
American Decline, Hard Times, Sippican Cottage
Sippi imagines today’s America as a beat-up old junker.
So, I passed United States. The United States was driving fifteen miles an hour in the breakdown lane with the flashers on. The Baby on Board suction cup had gone south and the laminated placard flopped on the rear deck like a fish on the beach. The back seat was full of unread newspapers and bees and sticky empties with no deposits. Three tires were bald and the fourth was a solid rubber tricycle wheel and half as effective.
All the windows of the United States that weren’t shot out were rolled down and you could hear the AM radio tuned to NEWSTALK RADIO! doodoodoodoo-doo offering to paint somebody else’s favorite car for $49.99 including rims and doorjambs if you had any. There was enough smoke for a new pope coming out of the gossamer remains of the tailpipe. The United States saw no point in pulling over because the gas gauge read E-and-a-half and the spare was on the car already and the tire iron was in a police evidence room somewhere.
Read the whole thing.
Of course, the old jalopy looked just about as bad back in 1979, but we elected Ronald Reagan and he performed the kind of transformative restoration that the tall Limey Edd does on the tv show Wheeler Dealers.
Hat tip to Vanderleun.
Fourth of July Today
American Decline, Cartoon, Independence Day
Oh, beautiful for drone-filled skies
A tax code so arcane!
A voting class on their fat ass
From Houston to Fort Wayne!
America! America!
You voted stuff for free
You made your bed, ye overfed
Go watch some more TV!
—Tam