[MD] What all is about.

[pholden at davtv.com]

Quoting Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu>:

> [Platt]
> Looks like Arlo is back spoiling for a fight. He'll get one if he 
> suggests that "indecency" is high quality and that the "good ol' 
> days" were all bad.
> 
> [Arlo]
> Where did Arlo suggest "indecency" is "high quality"? As for the 
> perennial pining for the "good ol' days", every generation defines 
> this by making its own origins "normal". Its a generation-repeating 
> trap that has little quality, but knock yourself out.

[Platt]
Another trap of little quality is described succinctly by Toynbee: 

". . . or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future . . ."

Politicians of all stripes -- take note.  


> "As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of 
> the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in 
> the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any 
> scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs 
> guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by 
> the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the 
> deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death- the birth, not 
> of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within 
> the body social, there must be - if we are to experience long 
> survival- a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to 
> nullify unremitting reoccurrences of death. For it is by means of our 
> own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work if Nemesis is 
> wrought doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace is then 
> a snare; war is a snare change is a snare; permanence a snare. When 
> our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is 
> nothing we can do, except be crucified- and resurrected; dismembered 
> totally, and then reborn." (Jospeh Campbell, Hero with 1000 Faces).
> 
> "The end of the twentieth century in America seems to be an 
> intellectual, social, and economic rust-belt, a whole society that 
> has given up on Dynamic improvement and is slowly trying to slip back 
> to Victorianism, the last static ratchet-latch." (Robert Pirsig, LILA).

[Platt]
Society could do worse. Compared to the "modern" 20th century, the 19th was 
a picnic.





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