Running for Your Life: Hey, Nostalgia, Been Nice Knowing You

M and I have been enjoying the FX series, “The Americans.”

I can’t help but feel nostalgic. Watching how the producers recreate the early ’80s, at the dawn of the information superhighway, that to protect themselves, a broken system of patronage and slough, Russian spies infiltrated science hubs in order to inform “the center” of what would be possible in terms of military – invasion, insurrection or both – actions to address the most worst outcome of a Reagan-led (read: Big American-owned business) attack on adversaries in foreign lands (aka despotic prisons of no hope).

It makes me wonder.

Will each generation be cheered by the nostalgia of a past era?

Don’t we equate nostalgia with what we would call simpler times?

Nostalgia for me glows most in the first decades of my human awareness, the ’60s and ’70s.

I wonder how my daughter K will look back at her nostalgia time, the’90s and ’00s.

I sense favorably in the ’90s, the days before the ubiquitous pocket computers. But the ’00s, post 9/11?

Ten years after 9/11 there was Occupy Wall Street.

She wasn’t an Occupant, but she was raised and schooled to question authority.

Will she be nostalgic about Occupy?

How about children born in 2018?

Will my grand-niece and grand-niece be nostalgic about the 2020s, the 2030s?

Is nostalgia not something that like novels will be written about as something that can be killed?

If so, who do we charge for its murder?

Next: Running for Your Life: Routine Is Boring. Really?

Running for Your Life: Got a Hero?

Have a hero? Subscribe to a tribe.

Act on a heroic idea in humility and quietude? Subscribe to better angels, the best about humanity.

America is founded on a principle, e pluribus unum, or “out of man, one.”

We have long fallen short of this idea.

In fact, thanks to the disrupters who monetize what used to be ours, or at least we could be persuaded to think that we were free to choose what we do, what we think, what we say, who we are influenced by, etc., without being mediated to the nth degree by the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (FANG!), we are reduced to being market units, carved up in smaller and smaller slices in the incredibly expanding universe that is the media and entertainment business.

(Not culture, BTW, entertainment; that is what stands for culture in the global marketplace. America First! Canada Last! Check out the new NAFTA, USMCA – only reason Mexico gets one letter and Canada two is to differentiate from the US Marine Corp. [USMC]. You can bet the Trump folks love this front-loading situation: Branding is 80% of the message, folks.)

My emerging calling? Disrupt the disrupters. We’ll be a small but lively band of pious folk who value humility and quietude over messianic grandstanding. But it’s where I see myself, come what may.

Next: Hey, Nostalgia, Been Nice Knowing You

Running for Your Life: Tax Facts

The New York Times doubled down on its Trump dissent with a gold-plated special section screamer this month (October) that outs the president’s family for decades of fishy tax-avoidance schemes, some of which stink of out-and-out money laundering.

No bodies turn up, so not mob-like in that way, but you get the drift.

Damaging? Yeah, but …

Much is made about the American Revolution.

Other notable political and social revolutions – French, Russian, Nicaraguan, Cuban – at least pay lip service to change that will address the problem of the poor, a lack of nominal justice toward them. How those revolutions evolved in trading one bad situation for another is beside the point.

Rather, the acknowledgment of the poor masses is central to the liturgy: Socialism is a pathway backed by pious priests (think the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador), a righteous approach to addressing the needs of the have-nots, a compelling theory for millions.

The American Revolution, by contrast, rises from a tax revolt.

Its leaders, the slave-owning landed gentry, balked at taxation without representation.

But central to this liturgy is a fear of Leviathan government, what happens with taxes collected. Where are they spent? Whom do they serve?

American frontier spirit isn’t with the taxman. The revenuer.

Run him off the land with your shotgun, your rural militia, drink corn whisky till you black out at freedom’s dawn.

Trump’s family cracks that code; it’s the American dream, a family getting the better of the revenuer.

What your average American family sees as the bedrock of our nation: the pursuit of happiness come hell or high water – even better if it’s done by sticking a finger in the eye of the revenuer.

Next: Running for Your Life: Got a Hero?

Running for Your Life: Unfunny Cartoon

Editorial cartoon (with the drawing)

Ornate paneled door, lintel sign: Justice Chambers

Left foreground, pinched-faced Justice Ginsberg, with faces of Justices Sotomayor and Kagan partially visible at margin.

Two speech balloons, one which contains these words:

“Yo, Notorious! Run out and get me an ice-cold can a’ Coke the way I like it – and a kegger of Sam Adams for my new friend here!”

The other balloon reads:

“Heh heh heh”

Next: Running for Your Life: Tax Facts

Running for Your Life: The Bay Ridge Half, Baby!

Results are in – and I’m pretty psyched!

Oldest dude (63) across the finish line at the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Half-Marathon, on Saturday, Oct. 6, breaking the 2-hour barrier (just! 1:59:55, thanks to a final kick of sorts), and not so worse for wear, leaving my return to Boston Marathon plans intact, shooting for the 65-69 age category qualifying time, in fall 2020, of 4 hours, 5 minutes.

Slowing some, granted, since I managed a personal best half-marathon of 1:43.12 in the 2011 Manhattan Half at Central Park, but I did manage to improve from last year at the Bay Ridge Half, a 2:05.37, when it was especially hot and humid.

It sure feels nice to be on the right side of 2 hours: 137^th finisher of 361 runners! Run for Your Life, all right! Still feeling I can reverse that age ... 

Running for Your Life: Unfunny Cartoon