How great is the United States of America?

Cribbed (stolen) From John Ellis' News Items:

The United States is likely to be the only large economy to emerge even richer from the COVID-19 pandemic than if the crisis had never occurred, according to the latest global economic projections released by the International Monetary Fund yesterday. The IMF forecasts global growth of 6 percent in 2021, an increase of 0.5 percent from its January projection. Of major countries, India is expected to see the strongest growth, 11.3 percent in 2021—after a steep 7.1 percent contraction in 2020.

Speaking of material goods - and materialism...

A while back, I quoted one of Katha Pollitt's 1990s columns, in which she pointed out that the reason we were hearing from so many sad and angry 50-ish birth mothers of adoptees was that those mothers were FORCED to give up their babies in the 1950s and 1960s; those who wanted to raise them were given no support.

Well, it seems that there many sad and angry birth fathers as well. As in, loving teen couples, not just girls abandoned by cads.

From CBS:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/book-excerpt-american-baby-on-the-shadow-history-of-adoption/

It's an excerpt from Gabrielle Glaser's new book, American Baby. The reference to materialism is in the second paragraph.
____________________________________

...The silence surrounding this massive experiment in social engineering is hardly surprising. In the decades after World War II, America embarked on a frenzy of homemaking and family-building unlike any previous period of history. Images from the baby boom during the postwar Baby Boom portrayed an ideal (white) breadwinning father and a beautiful mother who stayed home with several children, all living happily in a pretty new suburb. But in fact, there were lots of families living outside that tidy picture. Millions of couples were unable to conceive and did not yet have the benefit of advanced reproductive medicine. The need to adopt was viewed as shameful as becoming inconveniently pregnant. A woman who had engaged in out-of-wedlock sex and one who was embarrassingly infertile in an era of relentless fecundity had both failed some new test of social acceptability, and the solutions to the problems they represented were found in silence and secrecy.

Many of the same demographic and social forces that had launched the baby boom propelled the explosion in unwanted pregnancies and adoptions. Birth rates had dropped during the Depression and war, but now the prosperous postwar economy, fueled by generous government loans for college and new suburban homes, catapulted millions of white Americans into the growing middle class. In previous generations, young, unwed couples who found themselves with unexpected pregnancies married quickly and kept their babies. But the shifting cultural landscape had made shotgun weddings for teenagers much less appealing, at least to rules-following parents who had withstood the deprivations of the Depression and World War II and now had aspirations to achievement. These surprise pregnancies were an obstacle to a better life that needed to "go away." For the millions of couples who could not conceive and were longing to join the baby boom, the plight of those women was an opportunity, the ideal solution to a painful problem. The babies were desirable; the mothers were not...

And, from the next day on CBS (I can't see the video, but there should be one):

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/an-adoption-tale-uncovering-a-lifelong-secret/

It's about one such teen couple.

I don't know if Glaser mentions it in her book, but thanks to fertility clinics, even white newborns are not as needed as beforehand.

Not seeing how 'materialism' plays into that.

…Unless you're affirming that many women have a seemingly materialist attraction to childbearing, if not necessarily to child-rearing… Which has always been apparent. Thousands of women fearfully approaching menopause speak in blunt, shameless language, as if there was a bargain at a shop in the next town: 'I don't want to miss out!!'

And ironically, after hearing them speak in such robotic urgency, it's difficult to regard them as willful agents making their own moral choices.

This:

...In previous generations, young, unwed couples who found themselves with unexpected pregnancies married quickly and kept their babies. But the shifting cultural landscape had made shotgun weddings for teenagers much less appealing, at least to rules-following parents who had withstood the deprivations of the Depression and World War II and now had aspirations to achievement. These surprise pregnancies were an obstacle to a better life that needed to "go away."...
__________________________________

....despite the fact that for most birth mothers, being forced to surrender newborns emotionally shattered those mothers for life.

In other words, post-WWII, conservatives were pushing teen boys and girls alike into materialist lifestyles they probably didn't even WANT. (This is, btw, exactly what Camille Paglia, in the late 1990s, accused feminists and liberals of doing - just because those groups were trying to discourage teens from DELIBERATELY starting families in high school. Clearly, a "surprise pregnancy" is not the same thing.)

And, for what it's worth, I seem to remember hearing that the materialism of the 1950s was partly the result of living in the shadow of the bomb. As in: "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die."

Of course, that still didn't mean that most of the teen mothers WANTED to give up their babies.

Something tells me the reason he went solo to NY was to get laid.

https://twitter.com/nypmetro/status/1379774336702242817

Diddinknow about this.

> pushing teen boys and girls alike
> into materialist lifestyles

What's the materialist part?

Chart & graph for the IMF thing.

How about "new suburban homes," for starters?

The point is, multiple parents on both sides, back then, refused to give their lovebird teens even the OPTION of choosing the working-class lifestyle instead of the trauma of losing their baby. As if class appearance mattered more than anything else.

Also, it was still somewhat common, in the 1950s, for affluent parents not to send girls to college. From what I've heard so far, those pregnant girls whose parents denied them the right to marry weren't even being pushed to go to college, necessarily. So what reason was there to deny them marriage - other than forcing them toward a standard of living they didn't necessarily want?

I realize, of course, that there were no happy solutions when the boy REFUSED to marry the girl - or did so reluctantly - but while I'm sure the author also tackled those cases, often, that wasn't the case, as she pointed out, and the adopted baby often suffered as well, as a result. Or at least grew up to be angry upon finding out that the birth parents didn't WANT the separation in the first place.

So a couple months back I was yammering about this piece from Tenet, which most people would say is a not-great film. But that stretch of music is really strong.

Turns out that Nolan uses the circular-ascending pattern in his film scores a lot. Like, often. Good of him to let the composers keep the money.

A few years ago I was working with a gifted audio engineer who was breaking into Hollywood's production music & film scoring business, and his future looked really bright.

I asked him why so very many orchestral movie scores sound like ripoffs of Barber's Adagio, one of the finest pieces of the twentieth century.

He said the problem wasn't a lack of imagination from thieving composers: It was the producers & directors who hire them. They start cutting the films before the scores are ready or even before the composer is hired, and they use whatever they want to establish the mood in the editing room. And a lot of them like Barber, as we might expect. Then the composer comes on board and is told, 'Make it sound like *that*… No, make it closer....'

So the composer usually ends up getting teased for being a hack by his peers, who know perfectly well what's going on.

“Also, it was still somewhat common, in the 1950s, for affluent parents not to send girls to college”

It was quite common for affluent parents not to send girls (and boys) to college who had no academic aptitude for it.

After all it was their money on the line and not the government’s like it is now with hoards of ill educated and low IQ people getting worthless degrees or none at all, on someone else’s dime.

> How about "new suburban homes,"
> for starters?

That's a great way to start! It's hard to fault young families for wanting to begin their child-rearing in clean & tidy environments. If that's "materialism," I'm all for it, and grateful for the forces which squeeze young couples in that direction.


The mother of someone I knew closely had been dealing with the dislocation you're talking about her entire life: Given up by birth parents when circumstances were against them. You would describe the impact upon their child as formative. The mystery of her origin was eventually solved as an incidental consequence of 'mundane' commercial genome sequencing a few years ago. It was a dramatic 20th-century (+) story, the stuff of novels and cinema.

Coulter on Chauvin... You already know if you wanna read it.

One more point: Yes, it makes sense not to push - or nag - teens toward any PARTICULAR career they don't really want or have the aptitude for, let alone pay for that unwanted schooling. However, it's another thing altogether (regardless of the kid's sex) when the kid doesn't really want to think about the future and just thinks "God will somehow provide me with a rich spouse - or the middle-class lifestyle I've always had." Hint: you don't get to become a doctor by starting as an orderly. Especially without medical school. Nobody wants a helpless hobo for a kid.

In other words (leaving aside the pregnancy scenarios), parents weren't doing their kids any favors when they didn't order them to plan ahead and stop daydreaming, which typically meant going to trade school, at least, and nowadays even cops often have to get college degrees first.

Or when they flat-out DENIED their daughters the schooling and careers they WANTED, such as when Billy Graham ordered his daughter not to go to nursing school (circa 1967) - and for all we know, had she disobeyed him, he might have disowned her.

What was he thinking? As if there weren't a ton of simple, practical reasons for a woman to have marketable skills, such as when her house burns down.