The Latest Generation

14 09 27 -- The Battle of Flowers parade was my second parade ever. It was April 27, 1979, in San Antonio, Texas, part of "Fiesta," an annual series of events in San Antonio. I was there with my high school band, on a trip we'd been looking forward to all year.

https://battleofflowers.org/events/

The numbering convention is an adaptation of the method used in Defending Your Life. In the movie its a way to refer to specific days in a lifetime while reviewing events that may cover any day within a life. The first number is my age in years on the day this happened, the second is the month number within that year (i.e. the number of months since my previous birthday), and the third is the day within the month. Because I was born at the end of the month, I've simply used the day of that month e.g. for November 11 the month number is 4 and the day number is 11

Although the date is described within the movie as being "Daniels nth year," the actual year used is his age at that point. This means that, for example, 1/1/1 is his first birthday: the first day of the first month when he turned 1., This is noted as a goof on IMDB ( as described, 1/1/1 would be the first day of his first year I.e. the day he was born) but ... having tried to figure it myself, this method turns out to be easier to calculate and more useful to understand about when events are happening.

Note that 14 09 27 is NOT "14 years, plus 4 months plus 11 days" but "the 27th day of the 9th month after my 14th birthday."

A Twitter thread from a day I was thinking about the Battle of Flowers.

On WIkipedia, you can find what a Sousaphone looks like.

Repo Man and Plain Wrap according to IMDB

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_tower_shooting

Hang On Sloopy is not mentioned here and there was no way for me to have included the relevant anecdote in the episode, but I did want to at least have some reference to it. Suffice it to say that it was a song we frequently played at football games.

I haven't stayed up to date on Reactivities - just seeing that it's nearly a year since my last one - so going to put this up again just to prime the pump, remind myself of The Plan.

========================================================

Our first tale from interesting times could've happened in other times - there's nothing specific about that time it happened, except that everyone there was Generation X, and it was just at a point where the mystic allure of the Awakening was giving way to the freedom of the Unraveling.

But don't want to spoil it for you, so just listen.

Not referenced or mentioned or anything here, but there's a character description in Roger Zelazny's This Immortal that includes a situation very like this one.

Okay, now that I've re-read the synopsis on Wikipedia, it has SEVERAL situations very like this one, but I'm specifically thinking of the title character remembering one time where a poet was reading his poetry....It's a classic story, check it out.

(It's not at all clear what Turning that story happens in, and the poetry reading is some time in its past, but I can imagine that these sorts of events are very Third Turning.)

A Kind of Magic is an unofficial soundtrack for Highlander. Most of the songs from the movie are on there, and most of the songs on the album are from the movie. (But the album does not include Theme from New York, New York.....)

One might note that that this happened the day after the Berlin Wall fell. Maybe I'll do another episode about that...

Here's a video of the full show. This recording is from a few weeks later in the year. (No magic, this time.) We just called it The Queen Show. Yes, it also has Bohemian Rhapsody.

Five years at my job, five years since I was trying to find work in the middle of a pandemic.

This is short and simple but the advice it has isn't half bad, still.

Notes from the original:

Eventually you have to make it through to the end.

This is, as it says, the last Gen X Job Seeker episode, because....the search is over.

Going to blame having a job again for not having more to say this month, but working on a more consistent release schedule soon.

https://www.realdefen.se

https://www.iolo.com

Good luck to everyone out there still seeking.

The continuation is from the previous episode, The Sebastapol Sketches, about the 1850s Crimean War and the Tolstoy stories set there. Because so much has been happening, it's a ramblling look at a lot of possibilities and how the generational model might make sense of it all.

As such, there's not a lot here for further investigation besides the previous podcast episodes and a few tweets of mine....

On the other hand, it is an an unusually long episode, so be ready for that.

Previously these were in the episode notes, but they aren't linking now. I'll try to delete them if I can't figure out why...

https://x.com/generationalize/status/1496006671851986948?s=20

https://twitter.com/generationalize/status/1496139226659840018?s=21

https://twitter.com/generationalize/status/1496016572112158724?s=21

https://twitter.com/generationalize/status/1496006671851986948?s=21

https://twitter.com/generationalize/status/1495223269225484290?s=21

https://twitter.com/generationalize/status/1492255773237284864?s=21

On the four year anniversary of start of "Special Military Operation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, I thought I'd repost a couple of my relevant episodes from back then.

A look at Leo Tolstoy's Sevastopol Sketches, and what we can learn from them about recent activity in Crimea and Ukraine.

Can't say for certain that the Orthodox Church of Ukraine has a lot to do with this, but it is recent enough to raise the question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Church_of_Ukraine

And the Wall Street Journal does just that:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-orthodox-church-and-ukraine-christianization-greek-catholic-prince-vladimir-great-empire-invasion-11643296236

Text of The Sevastopol Sketches https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47197/47197-h/47197-h.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-catherine-great-invaded-crimea-and-put-rest-world-edge-180949969/

Originally intended to point out what a Crisis looks like, in the futile hope that maybe people in the USA would recognize when they were making them. Alas, this was not the case, and so we have a real peak Crisis happening.

Can we tell the start of a Fourth Turning by noticing the frequency and intensity of nation-level unforced errors? A look at the Soviet Union during the 1980s, when in retrospect the nation was clearly falling apart, and the unforced errors during that decade that might have been good indicators of what was happening.

https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/the-notorious-flight-of-mathias-rust-7101888/

"At about this time, Soviet investigators would later tell Rust, radar controllers realized something was terribly wrong, but it was too late for them to act."

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration released a publication called "Soviet Military Power" which was frankly intended to make the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics look more powerful than it was. In 1989, someone FINALLY put out a response to it, called Soviet Military Power, Annotated" which pointed out that it was frankly a propaganda document. Unfortunately, the annotations were also frankly propaganda. At one point it alludes to Rust's flight as having a lot of lucky coincidences that just happened to embarrass the Soviet Union on Border Guard day. It implies, that is, that Mathias Rust's flight sure looked like an intentional propaganda stunt that must have had direct help from someone who wanted to embarrass the USSR> Anyway, if it was the case that this was anything else, I'm rather confident that Rust would have been "disappeared" a while ago.

Googling us intelligence tracking Mathias Rust leads to a "Secrets of Signals Intelligence During the Cold War" - nothing there, really, that I used here, but it was interesting reading.

(Okay, it no longer seems to lead there, but you can search for it directly, and there are some links that are evidently to the book itself.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Berlin_Wall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Solidarity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Round_Table_Agreement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severomorsk_Disaster

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/11/world/soviet-naval-blast-called-crippling.html

Listing them here for additional clarity and impact.

• 1979 - Afghanistan
• 1980 - Solidarity
• 1983 - KAL 007
• 1985 - Chernenko dies
• 1986 - Chernobyl
• 1987 - Mathias Rust
• 1989 - Berlin Wall Falls
• 1991 - August Coup

HBO's miniseries on Chernobyl influenced my views of the Chernobyl disaster by making the causes clear enough to be enthralling cinema. It's a good intro to the disaster, although parts of it are fictionalized.

I could not find the cosmonaut cartoon, but saw it at work every day in 1985-1987. There was another cartoon I remember but also couldn't find about Solidarity: Polish & Soviet leaders discuss the labor union, and assume that it was engineered by reactionary forces in the West. It then shows a small group of people reading from The Communist Manifest: Workers of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

That sixth Star Trek film is The Undiscovered Country, released in December 1991, only a few weeks before the official dissolution of the Soviet Union.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102975/

Because the Countdown episodes were short and were 5 years ago, they likely aren't showing up in most podcast services. Here they all are at once...again.

A consolidation of the half-dozen Countdown episodes from 2020, starting in October and ending on Election Day, with an epilogue from Inauguration Day, 2021. There was a lot happening in those couple of weeks. The observations range from the implications of voting, to the elevation of Justice Barrett, the shockingly low number of school shootings that year, and whatever is next.

There's about a five second gap between most of the episodes, but because each episode ends with a few seconds of lead-out too, it can be a 10-20 second gap. Total time is not quite an hour.

Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut" was similar to "Forty Years" in that it was a look back at how the goals of World War II had worked out. Which means it's been on my mind in a similar way, so I felt like redoing it as well.

But the bit about

"...you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears

And what's more

No-one ever disappears

You never hear their standard issue

Kicking in your door"

That seemed to me, always, an exaggeration of what happened in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.....until Minneapolis, until Portland and, yes, until Los Angeles.

But now, it's too real. It's just what The Gunner, - "in a corner of some foreign field," one that is forever England - just what he would have been fighting against. What he was fighting against.

If you can't find it on your streaming service, then in addition to the conceptual video linked below, you can also hear a simple acoustic version by Roger Waters on Youtube. It's from about the same time as this episode.

https://youtu.be/aC9rY4HeN6A?si=nUo_mcl-bh2BcYTn

My Countdown series was pretty well done, I think, so if you like it you can listen to more of them...around...if you look for it.

===============================================================

What is your dream for what the world looks like, after all this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Cut_(album)

"A place to stay, enough to eat, somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street

Where you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears

And what's more

No-one ever disappears

You never hear their standard issue

Kicking in your door

You can relax

On both sides of the tracks

And maniacs

don't blow holes

In bandsman by remote control

And everyone has recourse to the law

And no-one kills the children anymore."

Turns out a video was made for it, but let me recommend listening to the song on its own, if not the album, at least the first time or two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSE7qdjy3Q0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

Redoing this one because it's the forty year anniversary of the recording of the song Forty Years.

A quick note from Joe Jackson's website - where, incidentally, you can't listen to his music any more. (You could when I first published this podcast episode, and I wanted to include the notes that were here before, but that particular one isn't true any more. Or at least, not right now.)

http://joejackson.com/release?page=release&album_id=36852

"I want to clear up two myths about this record which still crop up all the time. Myth 1: During the live recording of the album, the audience was forbidden to applaud. Fact: There was plenty of applause. We were just playing a lot of unfamiliar material, and recording it for an album, so the audience were asked to hold it until they were sure a song was finished. They understood this and there was no problem. Myth 2: It's a double album with a side missing. Fact: This was my first album to be released on CD, where the running time was not an issue. I was having a hard time deciding what to leave out for the LP, though, and I suggested making a 3-sided one, and selling it for the price of a regular album. Much to my surprise, the record company said yes. So rather than a side missing, you got an extra side. Critics, of course, hadn't had to pay for it."

And as long as I'm mentioning John Brown below, I'll note my personal belief that he saw the Carrington Event (really, he couldn't have misssed it) but also that he may have seen the red sky as a good omen for the raid on Harper's Ferry.

In any case, Forty Years was recorded 40 years ago, in January 1986. That turned out to be a notable year, in particular with the Chernobyl nuclear incident which was one of the turning points that led to the end of the Soviet Union. The song mentions Berlin, D.C., and "where I come from" (England/United Kingdom), but not Moscow. The Soviet Union would be gone 7 years after the song was recorded.

--------------

Starting from a 1986 song about how attitudes had changed in the time since World War II, a look at the passage of time, and how it affects the way people think about history.

You can listen to Big World on Joe Jackson's site - "Forty Years" is track 9: http://joejackson.com/music&album_id=36852

Information about the album, including recording date (January 1986) and release date (March 1986)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_World

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_v._John_Brown

Charlestown, Va. 2nd December, 1859. I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860

Evidently in the mid-19th century, it was not common for candidates to campaign. They sent out activists but mostly stayed home themselves, with Stephen Douglas being the one breaking tradition in 1860.

https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/campaigns-and-elections

https://www.sethkaller.com/item/1583-23646-Lincoln-Tops-the-Field-in-1860-Presidential-Election-Currier-&-Ives

This essay from Locke is dated 1690…so nearly fifty years after Gallileo's death, 60 after his trial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Concerning_Human_Understanding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei

I had to look up how long Elizabeth and Victoria reigned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabethan_era

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Victoria

A look at the last year, starting from jigsaw puzzles.