Memories of America 1.0

Our lost, decidedly imperfect paradise

Note: This is another in a continuing series of previously published articles. Please subscribe to my primary Substack at donaldjeffries.substack.com

The other day, Nancy Pelosi called for Steve Bannon to be jailed. It’s hardly unusual for a high profile “Woke” authoritarian to call for someone to be put behind bars, of course. We already have more prisoners than any country has ever had, and “liberals” still aren’t satisfied. It reminded me again that I’m a stranger in a strange land.

I don’t feel old, but I am sixty five, and am starting to sound like the oldsters did when I was young. Certainly, the world changed a lot between the Great Depression era and the drug and sex fueled 1960s-1970s. So I understand how they felt, and why there was such a “generation gap,” as they called it back then. But while rock and roll and carefree premarital sex must have shocked the WW2 generation, they still had the same basic rights they’d had forty years earlier.

What makes today’s Brave New World Order so frightening is its dreadful, draconian nature. The counterculture surely scared their parents and grandparents, but I don’t think they wanted them imprisoned. They argued about Civil Rights, and Women’s Liberation, and the Vietnam War. But those in power then- the “squares” clinging to their short hair, never attempted to “cancel” those they disagreed so strongly with. They never thought of getting “hippies” fired for their political beliefs.

I used to think those WW2 veterans, who were my first baseball and basketball coaches, and my first work supervisors, were incorrigible hard asses. I hated tucking my shirt in, and any other rule they devised. I questioned everything. I guess I looked forward to the “flower children” attaining power. No more buttoned down rigidity. Free at last! I expected marijuana to become legal at any minute. I ranted against everything from mandatory car safety inspections to timecards. I didn’t respect any authority figure. I’m sure I was no fun to manage.

It wasn’t until things began to really change, in the 1980s, that I started to realize that those survivors of the Great Depression had been pushovers, compared to the counterculture generation. CEOs were invented, and by the 1990s they came with freshly created tax free “performance” bonuses. Benefits for average workers began to be gradually rescinded. Private pensions became rare. And so many rules. Unfairly and inconsistently enforced, naturally. The surveillance state began in earnest once the ex-hippies and then Gen Xers took over.

When I tell younger people about the things we “got away” with back in the 1970s, they cannot believe it. I went probably my first few decades in the job market without ever working an entire eight hour shift. But I was certainly paid for those eight hours. Flexibility and reasonableness were rampant back then. If your work was done, they ‘d tell you “get out of here!” Now you have to account for virtually every minute on the job. You hit a traffic jam on the way back from lunch? Tough! Did you ask permission to go the rest room? People used to openly smoke joints on the job forty five years ago. During Christmas week, the liquor would flow. On the job.

Actually, it wasn’t just Christmas week. Those WW2 guys, including my own father, all kept a bottle or two of their favorite booze in their desks at work. It wasn’t uncommon for workers to be drunk on the job. And yet, even with all those drunk and stoned workers, things ran more smoothly. Way more smoothly. I don’t know what it says about today’s workforce, but it’s pretty difficult to be noticeably less competent than those who are inebriated. You’d think with all the diversity, and the boasting about “hiring only the best candidates,” that things would run swimmingly.

Literally every job paid a living wage back then. Most of my friends in the 1960s had fathers who worked in retail or sales. Regular, non-management jobs at Sears, Montgomery Ward, and other long defunct stores. And yet they lived in nice single family homes. They drove new cars, had much bigger families than the Baby Boomers would be able to afford, and their wives didn’t have to work outside the home. By any measure, there was an appreciably higher standard of living.

The 1970s were hardly a golden era. If you’ve read my novel The Unreals, you might recall some blistering comments about the lack of production values in everything from comic books to cartoons to films and television. The fashions were pretty ridiculous. I still winch when I recall my lime green leisure suit. And because so many people did so many drugs, and had so much illicit sex, it would later become laughable to watch a lot of them develop sanctimonious, faulty memories.

And the corruption was very real. The elite of that era killed JFK, and MLK, and RFK. They shut down any real efforts to reform or abolish the CIA and the other troublesome parts of the Military Industrial Complex. But while the Nixons and J. Edgar Hoovers of the world were loathsome creatures, even the worst of them were generally competent. The roads were plowed when it snowed. You never lost power for more than a brief period during thunderstorms. The trains ran on time.

There were bullies. And bitches. But the population was just more attractive. Obesity was almost nonexistent. Very few fat people at any age level. No tattoos, outside of some men who got a girl’s name inked on their bicep during their military service, usually while drunk. The police were mostly bad, but asset forfeiture wasn’t the driving force in policing for profit yet, so they weren’t quite as frightening as they would become. The Medical Industrial Complex was bad, too, but I don’t think doctors and hospitals were the third leading cause of death yet. And medical costs weren’t as financially devastating.

Perhaps the greatest difference, until well into the 1980s, was the comparative lack of crowding. The great immigration push was just starting. Millions of illegal immigrants weren’t here yet. Neither were all the foreign Visa workers. You had rush hour traffic, but if you drive around my area today, the only time it doesn’t look like rush hour traffic is from about midnight to five a.m. Huge crowds and long lines make everything less enjoyable.

So now we come to 2021. An Orwellian dystopia that even I never imagined. The goal of the Greatest Psyop in the History of the World is to get everyone vaccinated. Maybe there is an even more sinister reason behind it all, but clearly this is what every authority figure is pushing nonstop. Even those who argue to varying degrees against mandates support the vaccine. And they make sure to declare that it “works.” Never have these putrid plutocrats tried so hard to get people to do something. If you actually believe they care about you, then there is nothing else I can say.

When I was reading all those books and subversive literature from all over the political spectrum, back in America 1.0, I recognized the agenda was to diminish national sovereignty and consolidate power in the hands of a relatively few oligarchs. It never occurred to me that they’d so blatantly restrict free speech. “Cancel culture” would have seemed an outlandish, fictional concept. I never pictured “liberals” pushing all the censoring and “cancelling,” and punitive punishments. I naively rejected the notion of them constructing and cheering on a biased, politicized legal system, that targeted opponents of the establishment.

As a young leftist, that’s what I fought- the establishment. I thought all good radicals did then. But that right-leaning establishment, even with its crimes and conspiracies, couldn’t hold a candle to the virtue signaling gangsters in power today. They have less scruples than mafia hitmen, maybe than serial killers. They rejoice at someone losing their job, or being ostracized by society. And they want their political opponents arrested, not defeated at the polls, as Nancy Pelosi’s recent comments demonstrate.

I will start collecting Social Security next year. But Bill Gates has already suggested that the Unvaccinated not receive Social Security payments. I’m sure that all the odious members of his ilk wholeheartedly agree. Already, they have trotted out policies where the Unvaccinated are being denied medical treatment. We aren’t welcome at some concerts or sporting events. As I’ve said, we’re looking at a return to Jim Crow. An Apartheid where we don’t even get to sit in the back of the bus.

When I look back even ten years or so, I can’t believe how fast we’ve fallen. Fifty seven genders? Critical Race Theory? Calling people who protest an election “insurrectionists” and wanting them tried for “treason?” Comedy no longer exists. Sports have become anti-White, pink ribbon wearing outlets for identity politics. And buying into the “science” of this plandemic is every bit as stupid as buying the single- bullet theory, or that we went to the moon fifty years ago, with the computing power of hand held calculators, and don’t have the technology to return.

America 1.0 was never the idealized black and white world of the Cleaver family or Mayberry. The authorities were unfair, but not as punitive. Not quite as heartless. People were generally friendlier. I don’t know where all the bipolar adults were then, because I never encountered one. I guess they were where all the autistic kids were then. Or the pedophiles. Like most kids, I rode miles from my home every day during the summer on my bike, when I was as young as ten. Any “predator” could have grabbed me and had me across several state lines before my parents knew I was missing. I don’t remember seeing a single “bad stranger” in my childhood.

Sure, like all of us I’m looking back at the past with rose-colored glasses. But the monstrous world we inhabit now is all too real. Mandates- not laws passed by representatives- rule the day and few question them. Literal freaks in charge at all levels of government. Pussy hat inspired identity politics ensuring that emotion, not reason, is the driving force behind everything. No forgiveness for violating political correctness. No golden rule.

Santayana said, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.” Our reality is that few younger people know anything about the past. They are historically illiterate. America may have never been Camelot, even during the Kennedy years, but for one brief shining moment, we were the world’s greatest hope.