notes for monday

America is at a sea change
We always in politics expect the future to be like the immediate pat but it never is. Thatis generational withing . . . Kennedy wil be back, Reagan will be back, Clinton (Bush, Brittany?) will be back because they are all immortals . . . when they ask England hundred years hense when it is back to drooling peasantry rooting for potatoes status on the global specgtrum why did they sell their gold in ____ the answer will be because like more than half of his generation Gordon Brown thought bill Clinton was a god. Maybe it comes fro old saw . . . one of those misguided truths scribbled on a three by five index card in college, that history repeats itself and that those who don’t read history are condemned to repeat it. But so are those who do read history are condemned to repeart it. As history runs in cycles and changes like water, like swirling fire, like the dancing hands of shiva swirling left nad right in his dance of the creation. Worth noting he dances on the corpse of the last. But in the center of that famous icon with the left foot kicking beneath the circle of fire anm that the right hand stabilizes in the center as if posing for a photograph. It means this and this is the real s tory of history an da comment repeated by mad men’s dond draper at almost every episode. And sometimes he holds his hand up in the same way when he says, “Everything will be alright.”
Toynbee said that history flips that the yin b ecomes the yand; that rock becomes water and water in time becomes petrified
The rise of washingtonh in opposition to ny that is the vitriol now from ny so much like that which came form th southern Christian against he Beatles, against the hippies against everything.
I’ve never really seen the difference between optimists and pessimists . . . they sesem rather extraverts an dintraverts – the extraverts hope to build the past into the future but they never see the turnings; the introverts always see the turning – as Lincoln said it was looking to a river seeing to the next turn – and then the extraverts take over . . as a rule of thumb, generally buring the introvert at the stake. The optimist wants to build the old temple higher, the pessimist dreams of the old temple, the ancient temple, the golden temple, Temple Mount. And sees it rising again – it is always therer, hidden underneath - when the optimist building builds too tall collapses.
Rule of thumb: When the elegant nihilist gains the competitive edge – Victoria’s last days, Jimmy Carter’s disco-era presidency, our present moment – the culture has stopped producing. It will then either die or be born again. Such is the turning ahead. Hard to decipher, so we strive, like Cher, to hold back time. But now it is upon us like a deep cerulean tide.

Don draper perfect master of his imagined time and our own

History repeats itself and so do historians and bloggers