re: #178 iceweasel

[Link: www.vanityfair.com…]

Even some of the groups are the same. The Birchers, etc.

There really is a fair amount of continuity between the JFK haters of 1963 and the ODS crazies of today. The Hunt brothers, for example, are gone but people they knew and influenced are still very active in right-wing politics.

In very general terms, the very rapid pace of technological and social change has tended to obscure just how much history passes within one person’s lifetime. In terms of lives, and the persistence of living memory, the Civil War was not that long ago. As a child, I met people who could remember the Civil War. There were even veterans of the Civil War still alive when I was very small, though I never met any of them. My grandmother (born in 1905 and still very much with us) knew a number of Civil War veterans and former slaves.
As a student at North Texas State in the 1970s, I worked on an oral history project that involved interviewing some very elderly people who could remember life in the Dallas area in the 1880s. Today, as I struggle to keep up with computer technology and technique, I am awestruck remembering that I spoke personally to a gentleman who could clearly recall the first time he saw electric lights. They were part of a big exhibit at the Texas State Fair in 1882. “You can’t imagine what a couple of hundred electric bulbs look like to someone who has never seen one before,” he said.
I struggle with broadband providers, and I remember the lady who described the uncanny experience of speaking on a telephone for the first time, at age 8 in 1885.

It all makes me wonder if so much has changed, or if we just think it has. In particuar, I wonder which of today’s attitudes and beliefs really do date directly from slave times and their immediate aftermath.