It is interesting watching movies from the 80’s and early 90’s. Political posturing was more rare than now, but the political postitions of the past stand out a lot more now than they did then. That is the benefit of encountering cultures other than your own. And today, any yeterday is a foreign land.
The Rings of Dante’s Paradise
Gustav Dore. The Beatific Vision from Dante’s Divine Comedy. 19th Century.
Great works like those of Shakespeare and Dante stand the test of time well because they are not merely about their own time. No one cares about a blog post you wrote about yourself five seconds after it is written, if they cared at all. And the number of people who cared, even at that time, is limited to a small audience. But when you write stories that tap into the nature of human existence and experiences we all share as humans, those stories can appeal to more people at the time and more times than their own. And so Romen and Juliette in fair Verona speaks to relationship between youths today. Beatrice can speak, inform, enliven, and motivate our passions to this day. Because she is timeless.
In the recent past, movies had short commercials for causes like the hole in the ozone layer, soda six pack rings, the horror of killing trees, paper bags and other trivial nonsense which is all to plain to see today. The overall message of many of these movies is that business is bad, culminating in Stone’s Wall Street.
I was considering another message about the problems of consumerism. Like the political climate with Trump today, Reagan was attacked for the good he did simply because they needed something to attack. So the poverty index of Carter’s fail pesidency becoming the prosperity of the Reagan tax cuts had to be made to look sinister. So we had the “greed of the 80’s” or the problems of consumerism. Similar themes resurfaced when Bush 41 encouraged people to spend our way out of the recession. And his big government, bailing salvation put his money where his mouth was.
And so today I hear about how the millennials are so against consumerism. They don’t favor big government. The only problem is that these are the opposite of the truth. As Mark Steyn has pointed Howard Schultz becamse wealthy by offering a product that is more expensive and less efficient. He made coffee take longer and cost ten to fifty times more. And the same is to be said of most of our food and beverage industry. ‘Organic’ was little more than a slick euphemism for ‘elite’. I’m better than you, eat organic. And as everyone knows that isn’t cheap. Whole Food has created another whole industry offering lower quality food for a much higher price. I say lower quality based on sickness and disease caused by organic food’s higher concentration of bacteria due to fertilizing. I say lower quality because it last’s half as long. If you buy a $2 carrot instead of a $1 carrot, you are consuming more. Money is little more than a unit of energy and while feeling good about saving the planet is nice, the reality is you are consuming more.
Soda rings. The horror.
So it seems to me the consumerisitc spirit is alive and well by every measure of consumer spending I could find, Americans spend more, they just spend it on more fleeting things. They don’t buy heirloom quality things, they eat out at niche botique eateries puncuated by dozens of woke adjectives. They don’t buy houses and other real assets, they flit about the globe pretending that pollenating americanized tourist enclaves makes them world travelers. They don’t buy cars, they waste billions having experiences and posting about such nonsense on twitter, often while drunk. And perhaps the biggest waste of money, their ridiculously overpriced multidegreed educations.
After writing this, the first story I found, seemed to confirm. Yeah, that’s how I do research.
https://havenlife.com/blog/millennial-spending-habits/
Which is even more disturbing. They spend more on alcohol, and interest. They spend less on books, giving and saving. So those educations are really just for show. This is another sad reality, the day you graduate you never read another book again. And you pay more for everything because your ‘education’ never taught you about basic economics.
Further Reading, no one will do:
Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics