Pro Commerce

Why We Are Divided

What had to be gone first, what was in place already and what was new that brought this division about?

Over fifteen million Americans served in the military in WWII.  College graduates usually became officers.  It was a source of civil behavior and meritocracy.  The rest of society accepted civility as a military necessity.

When the war was over the civility that had been needed and created after the end of the American Civil War with civic groups, dissolved. Membership in the Masons, Odd Fellows, Kiwanis, Lions, scouts and others shrank to insignificance.

More importantly, the meritocratic military officers entered the labor force and rose to the top ranks of the fifty major corporations; they formed hundreds more corporations and displaced the source of power for the American hereditary elite. By 1960 the hereditary elite was so disrupted and displaced that it no longer published the Black Book of membership (actually red) and the debutante balls sponsored by local hereditary elites were replaced with non-profit sponsors.  

America entered a period of rapid corporate expansion, globalization and technological innovation.

The absence of the hereditary elite left the second most powerful institution in control in urban areas: labor unions. Labor unions came quickly to control the politics of every metropolitan area to this day.  Unions are seniority-oriented, very rule based and are deeply anti-meritocratic.

Two other lesser institutions gained power and prominence after the fall of the hereditary elite and civic organizations.  Academia which had been Marxist for most of the 20th century took over the intellectual world and the media. 

Prison values took over fashion in pants to the knees and rap which uniquely had performers being murdered wantonly. Big bands and rock groups had never been homicidal.

All of this allowed a long simmering division in America to become visible and important as populations moved; white families left bused school cities for the suburbs and young Lefties moved to urban centers after college.

Then came the most powerful force to hit the vulnerable United States and Israel, the new social media on the Internet.  The self-fulfilling mirror.

The extraordinary impact of the Internet is not obvious.  The Internet and social media allowed individuals to expand their personal and political worldview to prominence and full blown significance.  Millions of people who played little or no role in prior civic life or politics all of a sudden had a vehicle to publish and voice their opinions in a semi public way and find allies to align with.

Voila, we had a divided America and a similar Israel where hatred could be expressed openly and civil behavior was drastically diminished.

A whole new phenomenon where individuals expanded their opinion persona and found sympathizers among strangers.

Welcome to divided America. Welcome to angry Americans.

 

Let Me Try

One of my longtime readers objected to a statement a few blogs back where I called the Democrat Party the ‘party of hate.’  I apologized for using such intemperate language, and explained what drove me to it. 
There is no excuse. My explanation was that it is my reaction to the rising and very dangerous Jew Hate in my beloved country, America. And that Jew Hate has found a comfortable home among Democrats, journalists, academics and other lefties.

I am now in Tokyo, where I see none of the recriminations and political venom that is out of control in America.  Maybe I can think about the reasons for this period of terrible anguish at home.  Anguish that is tearing families apart.

It is very worthwhile mentioning, as I did in the last blog, that I’m reading Bibi’s autobiography.  A brilliant book where the subject is his brother, Joni, who was murdered leading the first great airplane terrorist recovery, Entebbe, and then the subject shifts to his wife Sara.  An autobiography in reflection.  I might try it myself.

The whole point of bringing up Bibi is that the Israeli press and the Labor Left hate Bibi with the same malice and venom of the American press and the Democrat Party towards decent honest Republicans.  

I personally knew Richard Nixon, I knew several cabinet members of Ronald Reagan’s.  So I felt personally the endless mindless attacks on them.  And now for seven years I’ve watched with absolute horror the outrageous lies, hatred and constitutionally illegal villainy poured on Donald Trump and his family.  So where does this daily national bile come from?

While the toxic spleen may have boiled over for Bibi and Trump, it has been with us for half a century. The Left hated Nixon and Senator McCarthy from 1950.  It has only grown since then.

Unlike Jew hate, there is no social opprobrium.  Lefties feel free to pour out their acrimony with little or no restraint in public.  They are even self-righteous on many occasions.

What is it and why has it metastasized?

Two disappearances are central to what has happened.  

• The Army and the draft that went with it.  I was in the Army. We all got along even in peacetime and we accommodated each other despite wild differences in social class, politics and background.
• Civic organizations evaporated. We lost the Odd Fellows, the Lions, the Masonic Order, Kiwanis and a dozen others. These organizations created civility.  The Army satisfied the civility role and may have been the reason for their disappearance.

Religions promptly split along political lines in the 1960s.  Reform Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, Unitarians on the left and Baptists and Evangelicals on the conservative side.

• Unions took over nearly every city as I’ve explained before with the collapse of the hereditary elite and union values of anti-meritocracy triumphed in the public square.
• Prison values took over the fashion world.
• Importantly the long-standing Marxist suzerainty of academia took over the intellectual world and the media. 
• Finally the Internet plays a role but not for the popular reason that it gives individuals a public outlet. The Internet gave each participant a place to vent and curate their political views among allies and potential converts.

There you have it.  

Six institutional forces that divided America with a venom that we have not seen since the 1850s Democrat-Republican divide.

Japan never got the divisions because it never lost its hereditary elite.  Israel got the divisive illness  because it had a monstrously powerful labor and socialist overlord. 

I’ve got it. I think I’ve got it. I will summarize in the next blog.

Arrived in Tokyo

Four years of covid have kept me from my beloved Tokyo.  I have been coming to Japan for nearly 50 years, usually for two months; once longer and now mostly for one month.

What is the difference between Tokyo and San Francisco?  The food is spectacular here, every meal.  In the past I’ve had horse and whale and today I had ox tongue.  I love horse,  some variations of whale are interesting, the tongue was grilled in tiny pieces; it was not as interesting as boiled cow tongue.  I also had clam chowder on a hot dog.  Not as bad as it sounds. Plenty of good espresso.

Everyone on the street is immaculately dressed, immaculately. Much of it is exquisite. 

Everything works; buses are to the minute, trains are to within 30 seconds and clean, clean spotless.  This is a dense city of 40 million compared to dirty S.F. 850,000. 

The biggest surprise is to walk through stores, giant department stores and all the merchandise is out.  Everyone pays for what they take.  In San Francisco, much of the merchandise is behind plastic doors with locks and the merchandise that isn’t is loaded by the criminal underclass into bags to be stolen.

In San Francisco, we now get electric outages on days of good weather, floods from the underground water pipes that aren’t maintained and hypodermic needles nearly everywhere we walk in commercial areas and East of Van Ness. Along with the vast numbers of street people.  Street people use public transportation making it smell awful.  Use of public transport has dropped so low it can no longer survive.

Downtown San Francisco is empty, I’m not exaggerating.  Tourists are few and largely European.  Over ten thousand retail businesses have failed in the City.

I don’t miss the foul life of San Francisco and contemporary America. And we live in a prosperous neighborhood.

It is hard to ignore the idea that America is a failed state. The goal of the military is to ‘fight global warming.’  Enlistment has fallen catastrophically.  Nearly every college and university teaches that America has endemic racism and that meritocracy is malignant white supremacy. No society can survive that self image.

The worst of America is the rapid rise of Jew hate.  No society has ever survived Jew hate, certainly not modern Russia, Poland; Spain or East Europe. 

I’m reading the autobiography of Bibi.  Really great.  History will record that I lived in the time of Bibi and Elon and that I appreciated them both.

Sushi for lunch today.  I only eat sushi in Japan.  Four years without sushi.  Only sushi chefs in Japan love raw fish enough to understand how to recognize high quality fish, cut it, prepare it and serve it.

My goodness, the dollar is strong and the yen is weak for the moment.  I am enjoying my new found wealth.  It's temporary.

Japanese small businesses were not hurt too badly by covid.  Small businesses are financed by their landlords, their suppliers and their neighbors.  American small businesses are only financed by friends and family.  Seldom deep pockets.

Department stores were hurt during covid because tourism, especially Chinese tourism, evaporated.  The Japanese equivalent of Amazon, Rakuten, has hurt too.  Home delivery never got as big for the Japanese as it did in the U.S.  Different ways of shopping and cooking.

Uber is insignificant in Tokyo.  There are so many taxis and they are everywhere.  They are clean, they are immaculate.  Very different from the U.S. yellow cabs.

The Japanese had a tiny fraction of the covid of the U.S. because they are so clean to start with. But still 9 out of 10 people wear masks in public.  I think it is because they are naturally shy.

Bohemian Club

Evil fools have brought the Bohemian Club into the news recently.  The hatred that the Party of Hate (Democrats) has brought to Justice Thomas has boiled over to the Bohemian Club, where he was invited to visit, claiming it to be some domestic version of Davos.

It isn’t a domestic version of Davos. In fact the only significant event is the two-week summer camp at the Bohemian Grove on the Russian River.  A few famous people have been invited, including a few Republican presidents.  The club is not elite.  Many of my friends have been and are members. There is nothing elite or sinister about us.

Otherwise the most interesting part of the Club's history is that in the late 1880s and 1890s the local social elite, including the hereditary social elite, decided to exclude Jews from the three main clubs and the two women’s clubs.  This was during the great wave of East European Jewish immigration from the late 1880s to the mid 1920s. 

The Jews who had, since the founding of the City, been important leaders and major businessmen simply took over the Bohemian Club for themselves.  Jews were the ones who bought the property on the Russian River and created the Grove and its traditions.  Remember Jews were a key component of the theatrical world at the time, so they humorously made that a part of the Club facade.

The looney haters in the media seem to take public urination as some sign of the Club’s perversity. It is a men’s club and there is a tradition of peeing on the redwood trees.  It is just a form of camaraderie.

It is a men’s club. By Federal law you cannot have a men’s only club with over 200 members if the club is important to business. The Bohemian Club bans all discussion of business and is in fact not important to any local business.

Nearly Everyone Fails to Understand

I never see anyone mention the most significant revolution in our society that is a central cause of the major changes in the past half-century.

The hereditary elite of America fell apart in the 1960’s.

The cause

The cause was the rise of the officer class in the military in WWII.  The U.S. military, which had for nearly a century gotten its officers from Southern military schools, was faced with a massive draft and expansion of the services into the millions. To meet the demand for officers the decision was made to make every college graduate an officer.  Only a dozen colleges were for the hereditary elite, so the thousands of other college graduates became a new meritocratic class.

When the new meritocratic leaders from the officer class left the Army, they moved swiftly into the upper ranks of modern commerce.  Some moved up the corporate ladder of the 100 largest companies and many others started new businesses that became important.

The few who climbed the corporate ladder replaced the hereditary elite and destroyed the main source of jobs and income for the hereditary elite class.  Without the jobs and money the elite provided for their own, the elite fell apart beginning in 1960; it was almost gone by the 1970’s.  By 1961 the institution was so weak it could no longer publish the New York Social Register.  (See photo.) The Debutante Balls were no longer sponsored by the local elites.

The image on the right is the last NY Social Register published by the elite’s own members. Its contents are interesting. Each person’s home address(es) and phone(s) are listed with the schools they went to and all the private clubs they belong to. Only people listed could buy the register.  When traveling the country they usually visited each other.

I personally saw the elite collapse as a Vice President of one of the West Coast’s elite banks.  I was told to join a club. (Most clubs still didn’t accept Jews.) Clubs really mattered. The Bank President’s son came to me to ask if it was possible for him to marry his Asian girlfriend (not possible until 1970.)

The consequence

To understand the consequences of the lost hereditary elite, their role as the top social institution must be recognized. 

The elite's members were at the top of all American institutions including print and electronic media, the courts and the law, the military, the civic organizations (IOOF, Lions, Elks, Masons) and even the major Protestant religions.  The civic organizations were hit first in the 1950’s and were ghosts by 1960. The major Protestant religions were hit next (Unitarians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopals) and were empty pews by 1965.  Catholics and Jews were never allowed membership in the hereditary elite, so they didn’t suffer the same fate.

The second largest and most powerful institution in America was the labor unions.  Being almost entirely urban, they replaced the hereditary elite and took over nearly every city in America.  The correct name for the public face of the unions is ‘the Democrat Party.’ By 1975, every city with over half a million people in America, was under total control by the local unions; union leaders have run cities to this day.

The third largest institution in America turns out to be ex-felons. The reason ex-felons are important is that they comprise between 7 to 10 million persons, more than half black and they influence young black males.  Men become felons before age 20 and prison comprises the bulk of their life experience. Prison life is homogeneous, the most homogeneous experience outside the military.

Prison experience impacts fashion: pants below the butt. It impacts woke values: ‘blacks are systemically oppressed’ and ‘police target blacks’ are prison views of the world.  Music since the early 1990s has had a great deal of rap, the sounds of prison life.

I haven’t included the impact of the dissolution of the hereditary elite on education and academia.  The elite was never in power outside of the elite schools; Marxism was a main force from before WWII. The ideology was re-invigorated from 1970 onward by Michel Foucualt and Herbert Marcuse.