Then: 1950s teenage men:
Now: Adult males on a bus:
Physiognomy collapse.
WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol. The sword: that is: the storms
and counter-storms of general destruction; killing
of men,
Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
less intentional, of children and women;
Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
the innocent air
Perverted into assassin and poisoner.
The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
mass-torture, frustration of all hopes
That starred man’s forehead. Tyranny for freedom, horror for
happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Comments on this entry are closed.
Lower sperm counts = little squirts.
Nobody grows up any more.
For 40 years kids have been raised by people other than their parents.
Daycare, then preschool, then kindergarten, then 12 years of public schools, then 4 years of college.
All along the way constant coddling.
By the time a person of today is 30 years old they have the mentality of a 15 year old.
And 15 year olds are not responsible for anything.
Children for ever.
I’d say “15-year-old” is a compliment. Look at any photo of 20-30-somethings and notice how many of them are (a) wearing baggy clothing and (b) carrying a backpack. They look like toddlers, holding hands as they cross the street.
I didn’t expect the collapse of western civilization to be this funny.
It’s worse than this. Now, they wear full body fleece animal jammies. To WalMart. The ones with heads.
Now, we have Russian comedians making jokes out of democrat congressmen (an easy target). Soon…war. Foreign enemies see this kind of crap at it’s a license to strike.
The comments under this post on Chateau Hartiste are almost all lacking in any intelligence,critical ability or insight. Silly hateful rubbish! I get the point of the photos but why link to a site that caters to the bottom of the mental gene pool.
I link to items not to sites.
To be fair, that’s not “adult males on a bus going to work.” That’s some kind of funzie tour. Everybody looks stupid when they’re mugging at a camera, and there are plenty of pictures like that from the 1950’s. Similarly, if you had told the guys on the bus to “look cool,” as the biker kids were doing, they would probably look pretty similar. If you were to compare frat boys at the prankier parts of frat conventions to each other, you might have something. The main difference would be the suits and undershirts, though.
The one that cracks me up is when you see comparisons of women, allegedly showing today’s women to be fatter. What they usually show is that today’s women are exactly the same weight as Victorian women of the chubbier-is-better period (when you have comparable height to weight), but that today we usually don’t wear corsets or girdles. If you compare ladies wearing contemporary Spanx to ladies of previous eras wearing foundation garments, there’s not much difference aside from height.
I was watching the launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket yesterday. At one point the feed showed a large atrium full of 20-30 year old men that looked just like the ones on the bus. They may, or may not have been the engineers behind the rocket. Not a suit or tie was in sight. There was also a significant lack of diversity, which is what makes me think they were engineers.
Now that rocket is a pretty big deal. Granted, Elon Musk doesn’t take a piss without a government subsidy. But they strapped 27 rockets together, hit the button and it all worked, including having the boosters fly back and land at the cape (one landed on a drone ship).
But the contrast between these guys and the ones back in NASA’s glory days is startling.
Heavy sigh.
I personally DO perceive a difference in younger “folks”. Collectively shorter, fatter, and more reticent. Slinking around like abused rescue dogs. Avoiding eye contact, shocked when asked something like “how’s it going?”.
And I’ve grown weary of spokes-cucks like the Tru-Car beard and the Can You Hear Me Now clown, portrayed as the status quo. Something has been lost, by design.
I could be wrong now, but I don’t think so.
It interests me how a group of young men can be photographed eating popsicles without looking ridiculous; in fact, looking masculine. And another group of young men photographed riding a bus look squirrelly.
Civilization has enemies, of different kinds. Sometimes it’s alright to hate something. Hate is useful, it is sometimes needed to fuel resolve. Some things ought to be hated, and stamped out if ever they show their head above ground.
The validity of any generalizations made about two generations based on two photographs is nil.
The validity of any generalizations made about two generations based on two photographs is nil.
How old are you?
Yeah, the guys on the bus look like a bunch of boobs.
The comments under that article are made by a bunch of trashy nazis.
That’s right, Redacted. While we are undeniably fatter, trust me, we had our share of homely, lumpy girls and skinny, nerdy boys back in the day. Why, I can even remember some markedly effeminate young men.
What we didn’t have were tats and multiple piercings.
The guys on the bus are on the way to military boot camp; soon they won’t be smiling and goofing.
The 1950’s guys are busy modeling what were called dungarees, now jeans. They don’t look too happy doing so. Why’s that?