hobiejoe wrote: 
 Everyone in my kitchen agrees with and supports this remark.

 hobiejoe wrote: 
I'm finishing up a cup of chamomile and then am crashing in a few minutes , but mine is I find myself making a post and then just deleting/not posting it because I know I will receive a personal attack by some uncivilized cretin.

 bokey wrote: 
I agree, that's why I stick with RP - it really is a community. Facebook just doesn't have the structure we have here .
 
We can see the arses on RP, and we can choose to ignore them, whilst I'm never exactly sure what I'm seeing on FB
 
BTW, the worst habit I have developed is ignoring threads on the raft because of the last poster - I have to click against my instincts to see if there are any posts worth reading beneath. 

 GeneP59 wrote: 
Well yes there probably is, but he hasn't worked out how to calm his rage, engage with others, and articulate his arguments.
 
He's probably a bright kid, just needs a year or five to get his head together .
 
Unless he's an Ubertroll, which I doubt. I'd imagine that they stay away from the sexual, as that makes them more noticeable in cyberia.

 hobiejoe wrote: 
A member who was driven off recently offered to walk me through the basics, but I'm getting tired of the internet in general.

 People used to have to have at least a double digit IQ to use it, now if you can score a 9 on an IQ test you can still click buttons and get online.

I'd probably cancel my FIOS account if it weren't for Pops.

 hobiejoe wrote: 
You mean not an original thought amongst the posts? 

 bokey wrote: 
The weird thing, or maybe not in his calculation, is that most of his posts are copies of articles that many here might agree with. I'm talking about his political posts.
 
The personal stuff, well I guess he's read up on it a lot, but, well, you know, one day he may get lucky, save enough from his paper round for a flight to Vegas and enough spare change for a helping hand.
 
In the last three or four months I've enjoyed his posts as pure entertainment, and he has absolutely no other impact on my experience here. 

 hobiejoe wrote: 
Naw, it's just my little poem.

 bokey wrote: 
Mmmph. I don't know if we can describe them as being a cohort, there's no links between them other than being at odds with the general ethos here.
 
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with being at odds, it's just the way you do it. I, for one, proudly wear my MBE cap, although the immigration guy at the airport looked long and hard at it, although I think that that was more to do with the Maoist stylings.
 
And yes, disappointing though the changes in posters are, I think that RP has survived the onslaught of newbies who don't respect the old rules very well. It's not just your local bar your defending, it's now billions of people. 
 
And I reckon that now is the time for RPeeps to get back in here, raise the flag and just plain ignore the people you don't like - fer' FSM's sake, it's easier than working out exactly how facepalm works. 
 
Bugger 'em. 

 bokey wrote: 
And obviously will never cease unless BillG does the right thing and DD's the obvious hateful trolls.

It's pretty much gotten to the point where the remaining decent people will just give up and no longer be around. Most of the positive contributors have been driven off anyway.
 I guess it's just about time to give up on this place, since it has basically devolved into a bunch of squabbling children with no interest, love or care about music whatsoever.

 hobiejoe wrote: 

 I don't believe he does.

I think he and his cohort have been pretty successful destroying the RP community.

 GeneP59 wrote: 
Hey now. The little twerp will just notch his bedpost with another win. If he even cares.
 
Gods knows I've been caught by various trolls fishing for a reaction in the past, and the thing to do, and what every one says you should do, is ignore the sods.
  
And if you're stressed or angry, and of all people here you are allowed to be a little tense, then go and walk about for a bit, take a breath.
 
And then tell RomeoT he's a prat. 

Remember when you went away and I got on my knees and prayed you never come back? Well, you keep coming back so I'll go away cause you driving me utterly MAD!

Mayberry R.I.P.
by Frank Rich
New York Magazine
July 22, 2012

Declinist panic. Hysterical nostalgia. America may not be over, but it is certainly in thrall to the idea.



 

The wave of nostalgia for Andy Griffith’s Mayberry and for the vanished halcyon America it supposedly enshrined says more about the frazzled state of America in 2012 and our congenital historical amnesia than it does about the reality of America in 1960. The eulogists’ sentimental juxtapositions of then and now were foreordained. If there’s one battle cry that unites our divided populace, it’s that the country has gone to hell and that almost any modern era, with the possible exception of the Great Depression, is superior in civic grace, selfless patriotism, and can-do capitalistic spunk to our present nadir. For nearly four years now—since the crash of ’08 and the accompanying ascent of Barack Obama—America has been in full decline panic. Books by public intellectuals, pundits, and politicians heralding our imminent collapse have been one of the few reliable growth industries in hard times...

Depending on the political coloring of the authors, the books have different villains: the tea party, coddled Wall Street plutocrats, coddled welfare-state entitlement junkies, the yapping and trivializing news media, broken schools, a polarized and broken Congress, a politicized Supreme Court, a socialist president. And China Über Alles (with an occasional cameo by India). The books’ pet issues also vary, from the collapse of the family to the debasement of cultural values, the demise of political compromise, the extinction of the “vital center,” the president’s feckless “leading from behind” in foreign affairs, the rise of income inequality, the ballooning of the national debt, and unchecked federal spending. But the bottom line is nothing if not consistent, and is most concisely summed up in a tirade delivered to a hall of college students by Aaron Sorkin’s alter ego, a television anchor played by Jeff Daniels, in the HBO series The Newsroom: “When you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Yosemite?”...

Some declinists who should know better retreat into the those-were-the-good-old-days bromides that characterized the Andy Griffith hagiographies. Thomas Friedman and Charles Murray have little in common politically, but Friedman’s love letter to his old neighborhood in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park in the sixties and Murray’s paean to his small hometown of Newton, Iowa, in the fifties—both presented as middle-class Utopias united by solid values and a faith in the common good—are interchangeable. And no wonder: According to the U.S. Census, both towns were more than 99 percent white at the time the two men graduated from high school. Would the midwestern nirvanas of St. Louis Park and Newton have been so friction-free if black or immigrant aliens had moved to Maple Street before Friedman and Murray left town for college? To measure the rapidly evolving America of 2012 against the segregated white America of a half-century earlier is as empirically spurious as contrasting the current bankrupt plight of Stockton, California, with the solvency of Mayberry (which, let us not forget, was not a documentary slice of sixties America but a repurposing of Hollywood back-lot sets first built to stand in for Atlanta streets in the 1939 Gone With the Wind).

Still, our legion of white-male Cassandras may not be wrong. America may well be in a fateful decline. But given that the country has survived a civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression, 9/11, and the quagmires of Vietnam and Iraq, is our current crisis proportionate to the doomsday hysteria—or have we lost perspective? Is it really true, as a Friedman friend is quoted in That Used to Be Us, that “at no time in our history have our national challenges been as complex and long-term as those we face today”? Is the Harvard professor Niall Ferguson right to cite the elimination of Western-civ survey courses at elite universities as an indicator of Western civilization’s endgame? Is Michael Sandel, also of Harvard, correct to call our volunteer military (numbering 1.4 million on active duty, or roughly 0.45 percent of the population) the country’s “last repository of civic idealism and sacrifice for the sake of the common good”?

Or is something else going on here? A more revealing question raised by our declinist panic is why it has been accompanied by a strange parallel infatuation with American exceptionalism. This once little-heard term, sometimes wrongly attributed to Tocqueville, was coined by Joseph Stalin in a 1929 anti-American sneer. Now it is flung about as the ubiquitous, defensive measure of America’s global standing. And it’s often used, Joe McCarthy style, as a cudgel to bash those who are judged to have hastened our decline by being insufficiently jingoistic—notably the president, who came in for a fresh and particularly cartoonish barrage of slurs on his bona fides as an American from Romney partisans last week. How much our declinist panic has to do with the actual facts of America’s case and how much it has to do with the fact of Obama is not always clear...

A decade later, just as Mayberry was being readied for prime time, fears of decline were ratcheting up further. Bipartisan panels of elite leaders convened by the Rockefeller brothers in the late fifties—ranging from liberal stalwarts like Adolf Berle and John Gardner to conservative grandees like Henry Luce and Henry Kissinger—published their collected findings in a 1961 report titled Prospect for America. “The number and the depth of the problems we face suggests that the very life of our free society may be at stake” was the opening sentence. This history has been either forgotten—or willfully blocked out—to such an extent that a period marked by rising civil-rights conflict is now routinely trotted out by some 2012 declinists as a Platonic baseline of American unity, centrism, and fairness against which today’s America can be found so sorely wanting. That nostalgia for what never was tells us more about the roots of the current declinist panic than any of the pie charts and graphs used to track America’s present statistical erosion.

In decoding that panic, our fixation on American exceptionalism, or the depletion of same, is an invaluable tool. Exceptionalism is actually something new in the usual declinist mix. As a 2010 Washington Post examination of the craze noted, until recently the term had been “rarely heard outside the confines of think tanks, opinion journals, and university history departments.” A blogger for The Atlantic who did the requisite number-crunching found that the locution “exceptionalism” had been used by national publications only 457 times between 1980 and 2000, and 2,558 times in the following decade. But “since 2010, it’s gone viral, leaping into print and online publications roughly 4,172 times” as of March of this year...

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand why Obama, branded as an outlier to the “real America” by Palin in 2008, would be held to a different standard than his predecessors by a modern GOP that is almost as lily-white as Mayberry. But declinists not normally engaged in conservative partisan politics have fallen into the American-exceptionalism trap as well by buying wholeheartedly into the right’s elevation of Stalin’s coinage from near obscurity to a jingoistic buzz term. Murray writes that the country will be on the right track “only when we are talking again about why America is exceptional and why it is so important that America remain exceptional.” Friedman and Mandelbaum second the motion: American exceptionalism “has to be earned continually” and “is now in play.” Their intention may not be to join the right in tarring Obama with America’s collapse, but in this hothouse political climate that is the practical effect...

None of this makes us No. 2 to China, an autocracy riddled with state and business corruption and often abridging the basic human rights that, for all our lapses, are more often honored than not in 21st-century America. We’re not Greece. We’re not even post-empire En­gland. But if we were to slip into so much as a tie for No. 1, that would drive many Americans nuts, because if anything is baked into the national character, it is that we must be the alpha dog, the leader of the pack, the undisputed world champion. Yet the alpha dogs of our own economy now inhabit a realm so far removed from most of their fellow countrymen that the whole idea of No. 1 is becoming an unattainable abstraction to those below. This is why the platitudes to be found in some of the declinist books fall flatter than usual. When Murray airily calls for “a civic Great Awakening” and a return to “founding virtues,” or when Friedman and Mandelbaum urge us “to reconnect with the values and ideals that made the American Dream so compelling,” the words have about as much value as a subprime mortgage in the context of our current Gilded Age...

Lost in all our declinist panic is the fact that the election of an African-American president is in itself an instance of American exceptionalism—an unexpected triumph for a country that has struggled for its entire history with the stain of slavery. “Only in America is my story even possible,” Obama is understandably fond of saying, knowing full well that as recently as the year of his birth, 1961, he would not have been welcome in Mayberry, let alone the White House. That his unlikely rise has somehow been twisted into a synonym for America’s supposed collapse over the past four years may be the most disturbing and intractable evidence of our decline of all. 

 emeraldrose63 wrote: 
Filled my VW for $3!

 Prodigal_SOB wrote: 

I can remember when gas was .26 a gallon at the 7/11 in Houston, way back when I was in elementary school.

 emeraldrose63 wrote: 
I remember a Coke being 10 cents and a bag of Wise chips was a nickel: I don't remember extra sales tax - but that was quite a while ago.

 emeraldrose63 wrote: 
I remember getting the 8 oz bottles for a nickel out a machine with a lever you had to pull that mechanically moved the next bottle to the door.  We didn't have a sales tax back then.

you could by a coke for .10 plus a penny tax?