Sunday, October 25, 2015

“…a house of pudding cannot stand.”

“…a house of pudding cannot stand.”   That's from the conclusion of Fred Reed's ponder about the wimpiness of today's America:
This ménage of middle-school delicates is not the country that fought World War II, or Vietnam. It is a jellyfish threatening to collapse under any serious stress. Corrupt, seriously divided racially, the middle-class sinking, ruled by fools and kleptocrats, a house of pudding cannot stand. Scared, fat, weak, fragile, narcissistic, herd-minded, prissy, censorious and, increasingly, ignorant. Deliberately ignorant. This is wonderful stuff.

It warms a curmudgeon’s heart.
Read the whole thing.

What Fred describes is precisely what I saw in the past 20 years or so of working in the city.  My profession (software engineering) depends on a lot of teamwork – but some of my colleagues took that to an extreme that I found downright scary.  Their embracing of interdependence and aversion to independent operation was startling to me – and not just in their professional life, either.  Their personal lives were full of the same thing.  I worked with dozens of people – mostly men, mind you – who wouldn't be able to even identify the tools in my toolbox, much less actually use them.

How did America get like this?  What happened to the ruggedly independent and self-reliant American who was once the symbol of the country?

Well, not all of America matches Fred Reed's description, thank goodness.  We saw a much more traditional sort of American when we lived in Jamul, just 35 miles from the city.  There we saw many examples of people whom Fred would recognize as those rugged independents.  Now that we've moved to Utah, that is the norm, no longer the exception.  This is a part of the country where there are no safe houses, where people still hunt for meat, where everybody has a toolbox and knows how to use it.

I suspect Fred would like it here :)