JOE BIDEN’S HEARTLESS SPEECH?

Tom,

That is the most idiotic part about this belief in “The Big Lie”. The ones asserting a claim of illegality have the burden of proof, in court, with evidence, gained by real investigations, gained through actual professional investigators.

Well? Investigators did investigate each of these ridiculous claims (often Trump supporting Republican investigators and officials) and debunked each claim. Trump lawyers did lose over over 60 cases in court for lack of evidence. The Justice Department said there was significant fraud. It’s a scam you’ve fallen for. It’s like trying to prove space aliens don’t exist or that JFK wasn’t assassinated by some grand conspiracy. You can debunk each claim, and a thousand others crop up.

The Trump and Rudy couldn’t bring your lies, hearsay nonsense affidavits and doctored films to real law enforcement officers, or before a real courts, or under oath at a real legislative hearings because he’d be sanctioned or worse, so they held staged nonsense spectacles in landscaping parking lots and before friendly politicians in hotel ball rooms, and they pretended it meant something and you lapped up that pablum because you so very, very much wanted “The Big Lie” to be true.

At this point you are so caught up in your own little world of cognitive dissonance that you don’t know up from down, evidenced from gossip, real data from your own BS.

You’re full of venom for your cartoonish villains and fantastical conspiracies, but I’m the one calling people names for just pointing out the obvious. Yea, sure.

Yes Doug, and most of the time I’m just amused. However, as I learn more about the poor confused woman, an Air Force veteran like yourself, who was killed by a capital policeman, who himself will never be the same, it makes me lose my sense of humor for those who helped instigated this insurrection through their lies and their carelessness with the truth.

Doug,

I think that you may be on to something with your ideas on the roots of government distrust. Our mother was a Gold Star WWII widow – her first husband died on a Navy Ship somewhere. Our Dad, as a WW II vet in Patton’s Third Infantry (N. Africa, Sicily and the Battle of the Bulge) saw some of the worse of that War. Both were also children of the traumas of the Great Depression. Looking back, I think both our parents came out of that experience somewhat damaged, but also more resilient as a result of those scars. Both were very self sufficient but both also believed, as you say, that government could and should solve big problems. These things, I think, became a gestalt, part of the generational psyche, rather than anything that was cognitive at the rational level.

As Baby Boomers, we grew up on a TV mythology, “Gun Smoke” and “Combat”, but then came of age with the apparent governmental failures of the Vietnam War and that brought on the Civil Rights movement. We were children whose parents, it seemed, failed to measure up to the heroes inculcated in our generational soul, sort of like we saw the Lone Ranger get caught robbing a train, our hero’s seemed to be disappointing us. We therefore started out idealistically rebellious and then became conformist to the point of being somewhat cynical. We have benefited from the world our parents forged, in many ways exceeding their wildest dreams, while still remaining distrustful of all the institutional foundations they laid, like spoiled children wasting an inheritance that they did not earn, literally drinking from recently purified waters and clearer, cleaner air, but neglectful of their price. We therefore, I believe, generally became poor stewards of that legacy for our children.

Again, as you know, these are very generalized statements and the range of exceptions and outliers to some extent defines the norms. However, if I were to come up with one pathology that defines the Baby Boomer generation’s cultural psychology, it would be our various responses to a collective authority complex – a repression of emotionally charged feelings about authority which, in order to fill a desperate need to fill that psychological hole, manifests by projecting authority elsewhere in the form of over-submission (to a certain OT concept of God, to cult figures, etc.). This generational complex to some extent explains Jim Jones and Trump and the idol worship of any number of other charismatic con artists and tv evangelists, but it also explains all sorts of irrational religious and atheistic fundamentalism. Obviously, like anything that one says about a whole generation, this exists on a bell curve, and there are cultural differences in the experiences of various civilizations (as Samual Huntington described them) around the world. And as I said, the exceptions (those groups who deal with their innate cultural pathology either in a more healthy way or in a more self destructive way) define the rules.

Because of “the pig in the python” size aspect for Baby Boomers, it seems easier to make generational statements about us. As for follow-on generations (boomlets so to speak), I’m not sure yet what each of their collective reactions have been to discovering that their parents’ are just flawed humans, and not the perfect heroes they imagined them as preadolescents, or if we can see that any generational pathologies even resulted. One possible pathology may be the need of recent parents to be overprotective helicopter parents to today’s post adolescent children. (See “The Codling of the American Mind”). That said, my generational experience has been that my children’s and their children’s generations seem to be more maturely adapted than either the Baby Boomers or the PTSD afflicted members of my Parents’ generation. I don’t know for certain any of this though.

These are just theories. One simply cannot make anything but the most generalized hypotheses about such phenomena. And for a generation that, as I said, pathologically craves certainty of authority, the reaction to the natural ambiguity that makes up all epistemologies, will solicit a cynical reaction in many here, especially our host.

Doug,

I wish, upon later maturity and reflection, I could have talked to my father more about his Depression and WWII era experiences. I know now that many of his apparent flaws, flaws that I rebelled against in post adolescence, were the unnatural results of the damages inflicted and his efforts to repress his youthful trauma. I was fortunate to spend more time with my Mom and to talk to her about this before her death.

I think, like addiction pathologies, the lives of those with the problem and of their families are governed by how they either feed that evil or how the overcome it and get past it. One way or another, whether we find healthy recoveries or remain in an unhealthy denial, our reaction to the demon necessarily dominates the agenda throughout our lives. If one can generalize these statements to whole generations, then, for any given social pathology, probably about half of us are dealing with our generational demons in a healthy way and the other half of us are in some form of repression and projection denial. This may explain the near 50/50 split, don’t you think?

“On the other hand, we can point to lot of comments where justified yourself, but you did not provide any support for why you believe what you believe.

Tom,

So by “justifying myself” what you are saying is that I lecture everyone on everything even when my opinion is informed by any real study and experience?