The 1950’s

It is always interesting to me to see the cliche of the 1950’s as static, boring, insincere, and uncreative.  What is never added to the picture is that most of the people in the 1950’s had vivid memories of the 1930’s and 1940’s.  Most of them had seen, and many had been, in bread lines, had grown Victory Gardens, had served in the military, had been in combat, had had family members die.

Nuclear war drills were common, the Korean War was fought in the early part of the decade, and when you factor all this together, the thirst for normality, for calm, for consistency, is absolutely healthy.

But even there, I suspect there was vastly more capacity for diversity of opinion back then than now.  You could not predict a person’s entire political range of opinions based on a couple of question, or so I like to believe.  Nuance remained possible, I like to believe.

What is always unclever is taking any one people, group, time, or place, and assuming everyone behaves identically.  The Left blows a gasket if any white makes generalizations about blacks, but they do it all the time.  They simply make different generalizations.  And they are PROUD of the generalizations they make about both whites and conservatives.

In all times and places where is more going on under the surface that is first apparent.  What I see, under the parade of “diverse” ways of dressing, sexualizing oneself–and actually that is all I can come up with–the Left is dismally, abysmally, distressingly gray, conformitarian, and unoriginal.  As I think I wrote a week or two ago, they ARE what they like to mock.

The 1950’s were not like that at all.  A lot of great books got published then, and many great thinkers were doing some of their best work.

I can’t think of one public intellectual alive today I admire.  No, that’s not true: Thomas Sowell and Paul Johnson.  But they are not as well known as they should be.