I was talking with my sister at dinner on Saturday, telling her that I was interested in starting podcasting, sometime in the near future. Her reply: "Is there anything that you're not doing
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Misery Loves Company...ratravarmanFebruary 27 2006, 18:29:46 UTC
or so the old truism goes. Frankly, I don't know whether misery shared diminishes its sting or just increases the sense of hopelessness that often turns to impotent rage. I don't care to go into the details now here but I am in the midst of composing a lengthy LJ entry pertinent to this. As my own joblessness situation goes, I can't imagine having a wife and kids to go along with it. I can see why it can just be overwhelming at times. Yet, it seems more tolerable now than at any other time. As a measure of how profoundly society has changed, I look at the present day youth's reaction to the film It's a Wonderful Life. They just can't comprehend why something like bankrupcy is so terrible that George Bailey should try and take that dive off the bridge. Back in the day, bankrupcy was the male equivalent of a pregnancy out of wedlock. Divorce and siring bastard children held considerable social stigma for men, although not as much for women, but bankrupcy was something feared much more than that. To be a failure with money was almost as
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Re: Misery Loves Company...jchanceFebruary 28 2006, 00:49:33 UTC
...I have to thank you for the clarification on Capra--I didn't see Bailey as unreasonable, but I always just figured that he thought himself proper fucked with the prospect of being broke in a time of almost no social safety net.
Re: Misery Loves Company...ratravarmanFebruary 28 2006, 01:58:25 UTC
Of course, nowadays the Social Darwinists lament the creation of said safety nets and consider them to have inculcated generations with bad habits. With social security and other entitlements, so their reasoning goes, there has been no incentive to save or otherwise live in a vigilant lifestyle that would act to prevent health problems. This has been the subtle shift in things as apparently some of the healthcare proposals have this goal not only for solvency's sake, but to promote a socially conservative lifestyle as more healthy.
Another thing about Wonderful Life that one film critic pointed out as being the one thing that torpedoed its believability is the transition of Bedford Falls into Pottersville. Potter was the Scrooge stand-in and as such would never have countenanced the town becoming a den of vice-ridden pleasure. If anything, Bedford Falls without the Bailey Savings & Loan would have become a Podunk ghost town that would eventually lose most of its population in the post-WW2 boom that caused lots of urban immigration.
Re: Misery Loves Company...jchanceFebruary 28 2006, 02:06:22 UTC
...and yet, if they thought it through, or could see past the end of their nose (well, next quarter's balance sheet) at all, a lot more in the way of _preventative_ medicine would be covered by insurance...
Other than that, though, you might be interested in a recent entry on my journal, the second of three labelled rants--on how a state that does not ensure reasonable comfort and security for all its citizens is inherently tyrranical...
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...how did you do the indent thing? I've been puzzled on the HTML code for that for years.
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Another thing about Wonderful Life that one film critic pointed out as being the one thing that torpedoed its believability is the transition of Bedford Falls into Pottersville. Potter was the Scrooge stand-in and as such would never have countenanced the town becoming a den of vice-ridden pleasure. If anything, Bedford Falls without the Bailey Savings & Loan would have become a Podunk ghost town that would eventually lose most of its population in the post-WW2 boom that caused lots of urban immigration.
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Other than that, though, you might be interested in a recent entry on my journal, the second of three labelled rants--on how a state that does not ensure reasonable comfort and security for all its citizens is inherently tyrranical...
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