Put On the Glasses
Everyone in the “you must listen to me” class wants to talk about how our standard of living has fallen, everything is more expensive, people don’t have as much time, etc… life is harder. Well, I lived through what they are looking back on as a “golden age” and I’m here to tell you that they’re full of shit.
Like the movie They Live, you need to put on the glasses.
I Keep reading about how “housing is so much more expensive, so we’re going to go to fifty year mortgages.” How “Life in general is more expensive and parents are having to work two jobs, oh the horror.” And variations on that theme. So let’s put on the sunglasses and look back at the past as it really was, not as some huckster would have you believe that it was.
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Let’s start with “latchkey kids.” If you look up the term on a good search engine you will find that the term was coined in 1942, for kids whose papas were at war, and their mommas were Rosie the Riveter. But here’s the thing. Not only does the term go back that far, but the reality predates that by about a hundred years or so. In places where farming/ranching were not the primary occupation, (in those places EVERYONE WORKED, SUN TO SUN) both parents working was the average reality, especially in the cities. If momma wasn’t working outside the home, she was taking in sewing and washing, babysitting, or something else for “pin money.” That’s another old term, the direct meaning of which was money the woman pinned inside her blouse, more generically, it was HER money, to do with as she will, as opposed to “family money” which might need an accounting to the spouse.
Ozzy and Heriot, Ward and June, and all the other 1950s sitcoms that have the husband going to work and the wife staying home and keeping house? Yeah, for the most part that was not the reality on the ground. Oh, some folks lived like that, but they were the exception. You’ll notice that the husband also drove a brand new car, and worked in a high end office where he wore a suit to work every day. He took the car to the train, rode the train into the city (generally, in those shows, NY, or LA.) Where he worked as an Advertising executive or some such bullshit. How many advertising and other types of executives do you think there were in the 1950s 60s, or 70s, etc.?
Here’s a clue-by-four. Real life was more like “the honeymooners” or “I love Lucy.”
The average family either lived in what was colloquially called a “Bungalow” rented, or lived in an apartment. A bungalow? Yeah, that’s a cute little word that today would mean “Tiny House.” Less than a thousand square feet.
Some time around the 1952, the phrase “Trailer Park Trash” was coined. But the thing is, by the 60s, “trailers,” Mobile Homes, Tin Teepees, were the place where about a quarter of the nation lived. I know, I was one. Part of that was a factor of my dad’s work moving us periodically, the other part was that we didn’t live close to family. If you didn’t get a chunk of the original family homestead (founded during the time when you could put four stakes out, file with the government, and prove up the land by hard ass work, instead of a lot of gold) and you weren’t very well off, you either lived in a trailer, you rented, or you bought a Bungalow, a Shotgun Shack, a cabin, a cottage, a “Starter home.”
You lived simply, comparatively.
Buy a coffee on the way to work every morning? What the fuck is wrong with you; we have coffee at home! You have a thermos! We can’t afford that shit.
Cable? We can’t afford that, the kid needs new shoes.
Going out to eat was a once a month or less thing and going out to an expensive joint was more like once a year.
Your kid wants “the latest Kicks” (or what ever the new street jargon for overpriced, over hyped, and shitty built shoes are) Fat chance, K-Mart has Converse on sale. Good snow boots? OK those are a genuine need but counting mandated Gym shoes (school requirement) Wrestling Shoes or other sport shoes, (can’t be on the team without them) the average kid might have five pairs of shoes, if he was lucky. And if he messed up his one pair of dress shoes, well, he was staring at an ass whopping and then wearing those messed up shoes for the next six months, until he grew out of them.
There’s a reason that if you go through the average thrift store book section, you’ll find all sorts of “365 ways to cook hamburger” type cookbooks. At that time, Hamburger was cheap, and pork or seafood was expensive. Chicken was relatively cheap, so you got a lot of that, canned Tuna, same thing.
Then the clowns that are the “Ad Executives” came up with Boxed dinners. “Just add meat, everything is already there.” And working moms fell on them with glad noises. They wanted to make good food, they wanted their kids to have good nutrition, and the Dad insisted on good food, but here was a shortcut, because Mom was tired too.
Trouble is, there were about seventy-five cents worth of ingredients in that buck and a half box. This was the origin of “Convenience food.” It wasn’t any better, but if time was short, and if you weren’t taught how to cook, it was a winner, and it was fast. The difference between buying the ingredients and buying the box wasn’t enough to overcome the speed advantage, at least at first. Later that changed.
Still, middle class in the 60s and 70s could be defined as “there’s meat on the table two meals out of three, no one is wearing clothes with patches, or home made, the family owns a TV and at least one car less than ten years old. I had friends that were NOT middle class, kids who had meat once a day or less unless they caught or shot it, who had patches on their jeans and worn-out coats.
The yammering class talks about the high cost of childcare. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s childcare was finding some other mother that didn’t work and took in kids before and after school.
License? What’s a license?
Once you were seven or eight, childcare consisted of “if you break shit or burn shit down while we’re at work you will be living on the street. Here’s the key to the front door, and a list of chores.
Oh, but we have the government involved now to “help.” I quote the late great Ronnie Reagan: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
Yes, there are some horror stories from that era about people who never should have been watching kids, watching and harming kids.
Guess what, there’s stories today about “licensed facilities” where the same thing’s happening. Kiddy diddlers, abuse, neglect, none of that got cured by “Licenses.”
It merely raised prices astronomically, and made sure the government got a cut of the money. “Lovely daycare you got here, be a shame if something was to happen to it.”
I also had friends whose parents were part of the Ward and June class. One whose dad was a VP of Clark Equipment Company, and another whose dad was a VP for Tyler Refrigeration. I saw how that class lived. Yeah, they had a lot of luxuries we didn’t and we in turn had a lot of luxuries that some of the poor kids I knew didn’t. The pools, pool tables, music rooms, and so on were nice, but may not have been worth the price paid in parental neglect, and mental abuse.
Eventually, we bought a house. This was after my grandmother died. It wasn’t the inheritance that did it, but I’m fairly sure it helped. The big thing was that we had been saving towards it for some time. It was a good-sized house, two story, three bedrooms, a library, a living room that was used as a “sitting room” and a family room that was where we mostly hung out. But by this time I was fifteen or so, and my parents had been working toward this for many years.
What we didn’t have was a Fifty-year mortgage. In fact my mother (who did the books) fully understood the concept of paying more than the minimum payment, and I think they paid that forty-year mortgage off at twenty-five or so. I have friends up in Canookastan, where they have (no shit) ninety nine year mortgages.
Guess what, it hasn’t improved the affordability of housing. In fact it’s the opposite. A house in BC, a mid level rambler on a postage stamp, goes for over two million five. If I wanted to be a serf to the land, I would go back to the middle ages!
The point to all this is that you need to put on the reality glasses that let you see you’re being sold a bill of goods. It wasn’t all beer and skittles back then, and we, in general, don’t live more poorly than we did then. My first, second, third, and fourth places were all rentals, and the first three had roommates. Even married we shared a house with another couple, because that’s all we could afford in Maine in 1982, on an E-4 salary. I didn’t own a house until I was an E-6, in 1987, and it wasn’t big. About 1000 square feet and a walk out basement that I finished myself.
While we’re at it on the subject of failing to learn and understand history, let’s talk about the latest news by Fanny Mae.
Are you fucking kidding me? Did you stupid bastards forget the Subprime mortgage collapse of 2007-10 so quickly?
Do you want another bank collapse?
Making loans for people that can’t afford to pay them back is how you get a bank collapse.
Then we have the idiocy of “Rent stabilization” which results in:
“Not long after Covid ended, a tenant in one of my Manhattan buildings died. He was an elderly Italian immigrant who lived alone in a small studio near Gramercy for decades,” writes Matt Miller for The Free Press. “Normally, it doesn’t take too long for landlords like me to renovate an empty apartment and list it on StreetEasy so that new people can move in and start the next chapter of their lives. But since this particular apartment is rent-stabilized, laws that were passed in 2019 essentially prevent me from doing anything with it except shutting the door and keeping it empty. Strict limits on rent increases under the 2019 laws have left an estimated 50,000 apartments like this one vacant across the city. Because the restrictions on what landlords can charge for these apartments often don’t even cover the costs of maintaining them, they become ghosts. It’s like they don’t exist at all.”
And we wonder why living in a rent stabilized area is so expensive. Oh but don’t worry, that stupid bastard that was elected as NYC mayor has a solution, he’s just going to nationalize those “ghost apartments” and give them to the homeless, because that sort of maneuver always works…
Cabrini Green Manager, white courtesy phone, Cabrini Green Manager white courtesy phone, please.
(Not to mention the unconstitutional nature of nationalizing the property of a private individual. I’m not mentioning it, because New York left the constitution in the dumpster about 50 years ago, and, short of being federalized, isn’t going to pay any attention to it in the near future.)
China is on my radar screen again (still).
CDR Sal had a couple brilliant pieces last week: -wakeup-call-at-whitman-afb? If you’re not familiar, Whitman is where ALL of our B-2 stealth bombers are based. (all 20 of them. Stupid? Damn right, but there it is.)
Gosh, just off the end of the runway there’s a PRC native owned restaurant… What could that be all about?
Then we have just-a-succulent-chinese-meal? Documenting the PRC shenanigans in the UK. This one is especially for the mathematicians and statisticians in the house… VERY worth reading. The odds that the CCP isn’t spying using Chinese restaurants in the UK is worse than the odds of me being elected President.
Of Venezuela.
But hey the PRC is willing to expand official channels from the existing “Defense Direct Telephone Link” to include “high-level strategic communication, policy-level talks, positive interactions between troops, and communications among educational institutions, academia and strategic circles,” Chinese Embassy spokesperson LIU PENGYU told NatSec Daily.
Of course, this communication comes at a price. “Any new ties must be ‘based on equality and respect,’ Liu said. The U.S. will also have to ‘honor its commitment not to seek to contain China or pursue conflict, and work with China to inject positive energy into regional and global peace and security,’ he added.” According to the Politico article.
Let me translate that for you.
“Washington, we expect you to rubber stamp any land grabs we make, refuse to argue either with military force or on the floor of the UN, with any action we chose to take anywhere in the world. Oh, and if you could kneel down and give us a blowie when ever we ask, that would be great. In return we’ll let you pretend that you are still a world power.”
Yeah, how about you lick the inside of my rectum, Pengyu? How does that sound?
They want to win on the cheap. It’s very “Five Rings.” Win without fighting.
That’s gotta be refused. As long as we bend over, they’ll continue to shove it up our ass. When we turn around and say: “My turn, bitch” they reconsider.
We must make it expensive enough that they decide not to play, for at least another five to ten years. If we can hold it off for that long, their internal problems will take them out of play. That’s why this time is SO important. Both of us are racing a clock. They’re supporting our internal problems in the hope that they can keep us out of play long enough for them to inject a new paradigm into their internal mix. We’re hoping to hold off any adventures by their leaders long enough for their whole house of cards to collapse.
Last but not least, we’re finally doing something about rampant fraud in welfare. Specifically the SNAP benefits. Look, whether we should have the program of feeding the people that can’t feed themselves for some reason is irrelevant, that decision has been made nationally, and while I’m not a fan of it, because it rases the price of food for everyone… The ship has sailed.
We are probably never going back to being issued “rations in kind” by the USDA, where the government could selectively buy food that we had grown a surplus of and give it to the poor. (the old “Government cheese”)
Nor sadly are we likely to go back to the days of stigmatizing the people on the program, by making them pay with “food stamp script” Something that was done away with for the twin reasons of “the horrible stigmatism” (GOOD, taking my money to buy your food should come with some stigmatism, to encourage you to get off the program!) and because it was claimed that the SNAP card would be more fraud resistant.
Well here we are, it turns out that the guys who are in charge of making a system fraud resistant, aren’t nearly as inventive as the guys who are trying to do the fraud.
No surprise here.
It’s estimated that more than a million fraudulent transactions a month occur, just in the 29 states that reported (mostly red states). In those states that reported, there’s 186,000 dead guys drawing benefits, and 500,000 getting SNAP from two or more states. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/all-snap-recipients-required-reapply-trump-admin-cracks-down-fraud-business-usual-over
The end result of which is that everyone in the system is going to have to re-apply for benefits. Hopefully, that will be an application in person, with required valid ID, and hey, while I’m dreaming, maybe fingerprints?
If it turns out you have a warrant, you don’t need SNAP, the Department of Corrections (DOC) will be feeding you. If it turns out you’re here illegally, well we’ll walk you across the isle and hand you to the nice people from ICE.
If your fingerprints come back as belonging to someone else, or already receiving benefits under another name? Well the DOC will be feeding you too.
OK that’s more than enough for this week, I have work on the farm to do.
QOTD: From the hypocrisy thy name is politician files: “That attitude that you can make a president or a party unsuccessful, no matter what damage it might do to the country, because it’s good politics — we have to get past that ruinous idea. ... We have to figure out a way to stop viewing each other as our enemy.” —Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led the Russia collusion hoax
Yours in Service,
William Lehman