Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[FullMoon]

Thanks for noticing! I am planning to write on the marriage/family crisis on the main board, but just need to get up the energy to do so. Encouragement helps.

Please do! I appreciate anything that you write.
Best wishes and know that your contributions are appreciated.

[aeden]

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RESPPLLOPNWW
You worry about the wrong things and listen to evil people who only care abour reelection first
and they spend on even more evil fools since Cain slew Able.

[Higgenbotham]

The State of Marriage as Seen Through my Eyes Through 50 plus Years

When I say I saw these things, it doesn't mean all of these things were necessarily mainstream. But I saw them multiple times for a brief time and it was only a characteristic of that time in history.

1975: Born early 1940s (younger friends of my parents - 1 real life example). Your married life is boring. You have 2 kids and your husband is well established and successful in his career. Tough Tittie has started, but you hardly notice. You are 35 and wonder how you missed the sexual revolution that is supposedly going on all around you. Your friends who were born in the 1930s fight with their husbands a lot, but they stay together for the sake of the kids. You wonder why. You begin a torrid affair with a studly construction worker and divorce.

The above example happened in my home town of Rochester, NY.

I saw another noteworthy example when I started my Freshman year at The University of Michigan. I mentioned earlier in these pages that Michigan had already entered a dark age when I got there in 1979. This describes the first experience out of many that has brought me to that conclusion.

I got delivered to the university by my Silent parents who were born in a rural area of the Midwest in the 1930s. I was assigned to a triple room and didn't know either roommate. The first roommate was already there and he was a spoiled kid from Fairfax, Virginia, a wealthy suburb of Washington, DC. The next one came from Birmingham, Michigan, a wealthy northern suburb of Detroit, at the end of the move-in period with his 37 year old divorced mother (again, born early 40s). She was quite a stunner and after they moved in she sat down with 4 or 5 of us kids, opened her purse, took a huge joint out, lit it, and passed it to the kids. I was the only one of the 4 or 5 who didn't partake (I've never used an illegal drug). To that point in my life, I hadn't ever seen a parent openly support drug use. After she left, the kid from Fairfax said the mother was "cool" and there seemed to be agreement on that from the rest of the kids.

My opinion on all that was different. I decided I would need to get out of that room. Within about a week, I had figured out a way to do that. I didn't ask for any help from my parents because I didn't feel they would be able to help.

[Higgenbotham]

A couple doors down, there was another triple room and in that room there were two kids from very wealthy families and one kid who was from Hamtramck, a predominantly (at the time) Polish enclave in the rapidly deteriorating City of Detroit.

The kid from Hamtramck was also Polish and his father worked on the assembly line at the Chrysler plant in Detroit. He was very nerdy and smart. His background gave him away. For example, most of the kids had backpacks but he carried his books to class in the plastic bag he got when purchasing his books. His clothes looked like they came from the Salvation Army thrift store. He made no bones about his alarm at the deterioration of Detroit and talked about that a lot. One day, he announced with alarm the news he had gotten from his home town that, "The (n-word)s have crossed Seven Mile!!!" One of his roommates was from Columbus, Ohio, the son of a Radiologist. The other was a Jew from Northbrook, a very wealthy suburb of Chicago, whose father was a meat broker. He later told me sort of in confidence that his father was a very smart guy because he had figured out how to inject water into the meat and that had made their family very wealthy (this was decades before this became mainstream knowledge). He would come down to our room to hang out with my roommates and make fun of the kid from Hamtramck. After a few days of this, I asked him in front of his newfound buddies if he would like to switch rooms. What could he say - that he wanted to live with that bigot from the slums of Detroit? He said yes, and I went down to ask the kid from Hamtramck if that would be OK. He responded, "As long as you ain't a queer!" and so we switched rooms.

It wasn't too far into the second semester that the kid from Northbrook told me he had moved out of the room and was seeking counseling at the university health clinic because he wanted to kill the kid from Birmingham, Michigan. I was sort of sympathetic but also aware my family didn't have the means to put me into alternative housing, whereas his family did.

Meantime, the kid from Columbus, Ohio was a miserable person who had a pretty serious addiction problem and would often come home so drunk we could hear him at night choking on his vomit. He kept his drug addiction under control until Sophomore year, when I heard he was taking bong hits 5 times a day.

[Higgenbotham]

I discussed some of this from a different angle back in 2012 actually.

Most of my peer group in college acted like idiots and, while of course I blame them, I also realize they were negatively impacted by what they witnessed as children. To give an example, Freshman year of college, I was put into a triple room with a couple idiots. I switched rooms with another guy but sort of remained friends with the idiots. We had a habit of walking into each others rooms if the doors were unlocked. So I walked into his room one evening (my old room) and with the door unlocked he was going down on his girlfriend and I was, like, oh, hey, I just came by to talk about the Chemistry exam. He said something like, oh, yeah, I'll stop by when I'm done here. So about 45 mintues later he walked into my room with a stupid grin on his face and said now we can talk about that Chemistry test. At the time that was the environment I found myself in and it was only later that I began to put 2 and 2 together and try to figure out how the hell something like that became "normal" behavior to my peer group.

Onto the new roommates, one of them would get so drunk that I'd frequently wake up at night to hear him choking on his vomit, so that wasn't much improvement, but some.

This was at one of the best universities in the world. My peer group was decrepit but they had some help getting into that state at such an early age. I'm just hitting a couple highlights, but could go on and on.

What I described wasn't the whole student body of the U but, nonetheless, in my view, it is totally unacceptable that things like that could have happened at all in the university provided living quarters of such an institution. Drug use was rampant. The kid who I mentioned with regard to the Chemistry exam was smoking pot with his mother when she dropped him off. She passed the joint to all the other kids. I was the only kid who didn't partake. His mother would have been born in 1942. My parents were Silents. They could not have imagined such a thing but the interesting thing about Silents is they like to minimize communication and stick their heads in the sand, so I didn't tell them. That dynamic would be why none of this got solved. The Silents who were kids during the Depression and the War wanted to hear that "everything is fine" and that's it.

As far as what you said, those same people would be 50 years old now and have kids your age. Whereas my parents may have had visions of an orderly living arrangement similar to the way they had lived in college, the early X'er pigs I am describing are probably envisioning behavior more similar to their own or at least what they may have witnessed in college, which was not so good in my experience.

It was possible for me to find some good roommates in later years, but that first year was an absolute nightmare. Looking back on it, I'm surprised that I got through it with a pretty decent GPA and without getting sick.

I thought of something else I saw in the dorms but I don't want to gross you guys out.

[John]

** 06-May-2023 World View: The Worst Generation

Now I understand why you've said that
the Boomers were the Worst Generation
because of streaking.

[Higgenbotham]

Doing a little streaking is like printing a little bit of money or making a little bit of porn available.

** 02-Feb-2021 World View: Fake Woke Zoomer culture

> Free love, radical identity politics, anti-war, eco doom porn
> green frenzy, glorification of drug use, open love of communism
> and hating America and Western civilization. Where did those come
> from? I learned it was the boomers of the 60s/70s who brought us
> those wonderful, cultural enriching gifts. Who controlled
> politics, education, business since the 90s? Who allowed education
> to become an indoctrination camp? You act like the red-headed
> Gen-X/Millennial/Gen-Z culture came from some other dimension. The
> original SJW communists were the boomers. We now have Nancy,
> Chuck, Mitch, and Joe running the show, what generation are they
> from?

You forgot to mention streaking.

I really have to laugh. Yeah, there were problems with Boomer
culture. But compared to your sick culture -- today's zoomer woke
culture? It's like a paper cut compared to a nuclear bomb.

Have to agree with Zoomer here. Today's culture didn't come from nowhere. But the real question in my mind now is are we entering a new dark age. I believe we are.

[Higgenbotham]

This doing a little bit of something reminds me of a conversation I had with a Boomer from San Francisco who was quite liberal. We were discussing around the year 2000 whether the Internet bubble was really a bubble. He said it wasn't in the sense that it was a real technological innovation, that there was something very real there. I asked him about pornography on the Internet and whether that was a problem in his opinion. He said no, that watching pornography and making it freely available doesn't really hurt anyone. Well, go to the forums now and read the posts from young men who have pornography addictions and can't even get an erection being with a woman. The only way they can get an erection is from pornography. Or read the posts from women whose husbands are sitting on the toilet jacking off to porn when they walk into the bathroom (and in some cases laughing at them).

Likewise, I posted about people from my generation showing a little bit of disrespect toward women in the 1980s. I didn't post that to demonstrate how funny and harmless I was. Showing a little disrespect toward women as I did (and as we did) was not harmless, in my opinion.

The State of Marriage as Seen Through my Eyes Through 50 plus Years

When I say I saw these things, it doesn't mean all of these things were necessarily mainstream. But I saw them multiple times for a brief time and it was only a characteristic of that time in history.

1985: Born early 1960s (my friends - 2 real life examples). You graduated college just a year ago and landed a good job. Multiple girls are already hunting you. I'm talking to a friend of mine at a party and an attractive girl I've never seen before walks up him and asks why he didn't call her when he had promised to. We are drunk. He starts lying through his teeth and the lies are so ridiculous I start to laugh. She walks away disgusted. I apologize to him for laughing and he says don't worry about it. That same year, another friend and I go out to a bar. An extremely attractive girl has been sort of stalking him. She is a new teacher at the high school. She "finds" us and he tells me he has to go take a piss and to "blow some shit at" her. I sit down with her and tell her that several girls had asked Mike to dance but he had said he is with her now and wouldn't dance with them. This is a complete lie but I am very convincing. He eyes open wide and she says, "Really? REALLY?!" I assure her that it is true. A year or so later he gets a promotion to Dallas and they get married and have a family. The first guy gets another job in his home town of Minneapolis and he gets married and has a family too.

[Higgenbotham]

Also, I've been intending to comment on the 6 excerpts I posted from his book but haven't gotten around to it yet. I posted those to provide another view on the coming dark age and also because many of the topics he covers in those excerpts have been discussed and debated here.

The 6 excerpts from Marc Widdowson's book The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age, in the order posted, discuss these topics:

Characteristics of Economic Descent
World Economic Order and Whether the Dark Age will be Global
Neo-Barbarian Invaders will Destroy the West
Fragmented Spirituality of the Descent will Leave People Wanting
Giant Firms will Fail and there will be an Informal Economy
When the Descent Culminates in Collapse, Every Remaining Nuclear Warhead may be Exploded

[guest]

Characteristics of Economic Descent
World Economic Order and Whether the Dark Age will be Global
Neo-Barbarian Invaders will Destroy the West
Fragmented Spirituality of the Descent will Leave People Wanting
Giant Firms will Fail and there will be an Informal Economy
When the Descent Culminates in Collapse, Every Remaining Nuclear Warhead may be Exploded

Better dead than grovelling in Zimbabwe.