Back in the day when people printed out the Internet every morning and handed the “House & Garden” section to their wives while they perused the latest news from Cuba, life was fine. Then the BlackBerry Machine came slithering out of Hell’s bowels and ruined everything, the end. This is the premise from which every Richard Cohen column proceeds. But hark, what about the days before the Internet, when Europe was riven by two World Wars and Jews had to flee horrible genocide and American citizens could expect to live out their “golden years” (age 35 onward) in abject poverty? Those times were truly great, because people were self-reliant.
The people of the 1920s and ’30s were tough, hard. They did not expect all that much from life, and they had learned to expect next to nothing from government.
In contrast, we are soft, coddled.
Yes! So soft and coddled with our Social Security and our interstate highway system. Why, back in the 1930s a gentlemen could just die quietly of influenza, penniless, in a ditch somewhere south of Oklahoma City, and nobody thought anything of it!
Also: Richard Cohen read a review of a book that sounded interesting. The book was written by a European Jew named Stefan Zweig who fled the Nazis and ended up “for some reason” in Brazil and killed himself in despair, like a man. What’s the book about? Who knows! But the review was great.
And last, of course, history is like a crazy zoo “beast,” “escaped from its cage.” You probably thought history was a kind of an ongoing thing, kind of like time itself, but nope, it only surfaces periodically, to eat people.
History Roars Back [Washington Post]
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I wish I was tough, hard.
Cohen also thought Jimmy Page got soft with Led Zeppelin as opposed to the middle period of the Yardbirds. Oh wait, that was Lester Bangs.
I love Cohen’s facial look; it looks like he had a three-hour makeout session with a snowman and a bag of flour. He, Fred Hiatt, George Will, and the rest of the hella-useless WP editorial staff can go eat a bowl of dicks in the Marianas trench.
Cohen can suck my Joad.
Old white guys: ruining everything forever.
“We actually thought that we could have a house we could not afford and a mortgage that we could not pay and that it would all somehow work out. This keeps being called the American dream.”
“This keeps being called….”??? WTF? How did Richie pass 5th-grade English?
Yeah, the Bonus Army expected nothing from the government. They just came to D.C. to view the cherry blossoms or something.
Yes, they went through tough, hard times and became tough, hard people… and realized just how much the process sucked and made the SSA to begin with.
Back in Cohen’s Oldie Ancient Moldy times, old people used to stand on their porches shaking their fists while yelling at the youngster whippersnappers to get off their lawns. Also.
It goes against my cultural background to harshly mock the old, but I make exception for Dick because he is the very embodiment of the saying, “There is no fool like an old fool.”
All those years on the planet Earth and that history/culture/knowledge just bounced off Dick’s brain pan like water off a duck’s back. Fucking waste of space and food.
Ah yes, the 20s, right around the time when women were finally allowed to vote, when coloreds used separate water fountains, and reefer madness was sweeping the nation. Let’s dance the Charleston atop a flagpole! Let’s have a ticker tape parade! It’s ragtime, old boy! No government dole for me! I love this crippling polio disease!
So BlackBerrys are the Nazis of today we are all condemned to dwell in a Brazil of despair and hideous reality until we finally kill ourselves?
Sarah, if you are going to read Richard Cohen, we will just have to organize to send someone by every time to hold you and say “There, there” while you curl up and rock back and forth in the corner.
You know, I’m not too sure that Dick Cohen is all that familiar with history, if he thinks that the 1920s were the sort of times that made people “tough” and “hard.”
The 20s were basically a combination of the economic exuberance of the 1990s and the laissez-faire fuck-em-all policies of the 00′s. It was the sort of era where people sat around wondering “where are the times that try men’s souls?” The sort of time when the 1920s version of Dick Cohen sat around bitching about how Americans weren’t tough and hard.
…ahhhhhhh, the 1920′s! When black people knew their place and women were nothing more than baby factories! Nostalgia!
So, like Job, we would be better off to curse life and die.
Wait, who told Job that?
It’s those own damn kids fault history got out of it’s cage. They shouldn’t have been taunting it. Why does Richard Cohen hate responsibility?
They had S&H green stamps, and unusual lumps from licking the adhesive.
I’m pretty sure every single generation, upon reaching its, er, older years, thinks that the younger generations are soft and coddled. I’m sure you could go back to the Great Depression and find a bunch of Civil War vets (there probably were some around, right?) who thought the 20-30 year olds were fucking weaklings and pansies who were coddled.
Presence FTW!
N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-no…body’s fault!
Yes, everything was better back in the Good Old Days. For example, newspaper opinion columns were expected to contain thoughtful, well-articulated ideas supported by arguments containing coherent logic and some discernable structure.
How the FUCK can he make a sweeping generalization to say people of the 20′s & 30′s were “tough” and “hard”? How in the bloody hell would he know?
And even if that were true, which it ain’t, isn’t it a good thing that we as, you know, humanity, try to evolve and advance our lifestyle?
Fucking dickhead. Go shave your beard.
And back then, people didn’t have cushy jobs pontificating on their fat, “soft” asses…well into retirement age.
What is it with people born in the 1940′s and 1950′s “looking back with nostalgia” on the 1920′s and 1930′s? Is it because we’ve conveniently run out of people who actually lived back then that can come out and say “You’re no Jack Kennedy?”
Did Cohen have to walk uphill both ways in hip-deep snow to file this shitfest?
[re=256740]AngryBlakGuy[/re]: Word.
Bah, I am self-reliant every night the missus has a headache. Or is pouting. Or is Daubed by the Red Menace of Pulchritude.
[re=256749]magic titty[/re]: I think the whole point of FDR’s “we have nothing to fear…” speech is that people were, you know, scared. People are people. They weren’t magically tougher or harder back in those days.
>>we are soft, coddled.
I look forward to Mr. Cohen giving up his soft lifestyle and living off of polluted rainwater and deep fried dirt to become “tough” and “hard.”
[re=256754]Guppy06[/re]: No, it’s because fascism hadn’t been discredited yet.
[re=256740]AngryBlakGuy[/re]: Hard, tough baby factories. And when Negroes knew their hard, tough place.
Actually, I’m a little weirded out by Cohen’s article, because I’m not entirely sure that he has any idea what he is talking about. He’s starting to sound like Grandpa Simpson. Next, he’ll be wearing an onion on his belt.
In olden times, white families sat around the table and worshiped the oddly shaped black phallus.
Assuming they’re still publishing a dead-tree version, does WaPo put Cohen’s column on the comics page, like they usta do w/Jack Anderson?
Well, probably not, since Anderson actually did some real journalistical-style reporting: you know, calling people, leaving the office once in while, gathering leaks from disaffected bureaucrats. That wasn’t funny, whereas Cohen is just kidding w/this shit, right?
It’s just sickening the way white people think olden times were better because the dining car waiter was so polite. Just listen to those happy darkies, singing their spirituals as they harvest the cotton. They’re so happy! Not like Michael Steele!
Ironically, Cohen couldn’t have written this article without cutting and pasting huge swaths from Wikipedia. Methinks he protests too much?
[re=256769]Mac W Cheese[/re]: Presence is so underrated (courtesy of it not being that good).
[re=256723]norbizness[/re]:
“I love Cohen’s facial look; it looks like he had a three-hour makeout session with a snowman and a bag of flour.”
I will never look at Cohen the same again.
The people in the 1300s were tough and hard. When they got the plague, leprosy or Saint Anthony’s Fire, they shrugged it off, crawled into a fucking hole and died. Not like you people, what with your whining and your crying at every candy ass sniffle.
[re=256774]StrangelyBrown[/re]: …or, perhaps, Conservapedia. Witness gems like this:
[Zweig] went from being at home anywhere in Europe to being on the lam, a Jew fleeing the Nazis.
Yes, because Jews had it ever-so-sweet in Europe until those pesky Nazis came around. Too bad that Hitler had to go and invent anti-Semitism where none had existed before, right?
Die Welt von Gestern is Central Europe’s Gone with the Wind. Also.
THose 1920s and 30s guys must’ve been from Scranton.
Blackberrys, cell phones, and watches are tools of the devil.
If you can’t exist outside a social framework then you don’t exist at all.
Columnist know from toughness who are the toughs and who are the weaklings because they type and drink and lunch and that’s a tough life for tough-ass columnists. Hey Dick — when you take up mining, then you can tell me who the tough guys are, you horribly spoiled piece of shit.
Every single column by this geezer has to be prefaced by some Holocaust story…jeez, get over it, you weren’t there…
Oh, good, I’m glad I’m not the only person to recognize the album cover.
Sorry about all the typos. For some reason they are always more common when I find myself swearing by the end of the comment.
Ah, give me a ditch and pennilessness, and I’ll die happy!
We are so soft compared to back then. Then, we had to band together to bring down large game like mammoths. And there was none of this ‘cloth’ clothing: barely cured or uncured skins were good enough for everybody. Bah, metal. What we couldn’t make obsidian rock do as tools! And we just died around age 30, none of this ‘growing old’ nonsense.
Wait, how old is Richard Cohen?
My grandfather was tough all right. He was a tough old cold-hearted bigot. Good times!
Well, Cohen does have a point.
But he’s also got an onion on his belt, so surely he doesn’t expect us to take him srsly?
“The people of the 1920s and ’30s were tough, hard. They did not expect all that much from life”
Except that their children would lead a better life than them by getting educated and not having to depend on 40 acres of overworked land to produce enough sugar beets to get them through the next year.
He makes it sound like we all got soft and lazy and that we would all be better off if American society just stagnated back in the thirties and skipped the 70 years of progress we enjoyed so that we would be tough an hard enough to endure the 3 or 4 years of bad economic times we are now looking at.
Well, fuck that. The only thing I don’t expect much from is a Richard Cohen by-line.
Between Cohen at WaPo and Bono at NYT………well, just, jeebus.
[re=256765]AnnieGetYourFun[/re]: Ohkay. Next time I’ll read through comments before I whip out my ever-ready onion.
[re=256736]Lionel Hutz Esq.[/re]: I volunteer.
[re=256822]Lascauxcaveman[/re]: [re=256765]AnnieGetYourFun[/re]: In those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you’d say!
Science and technology are naught but crutches. I say, back in my day we raised barns by just eyeballin’ the darn thing. Sure, more often than not they’d collapse on themselves and kill a bunch of folks, but, by God, we didn’t dabble in any o’ that there black magic. I yearn for the days when men were MEN (and white) and we made decisions with our GUT, unlike them queers and their fancy “books.” Feh.
I wont believe any of this until Peggy Noonan sees someone who is poor. … ohh, .. wait.
If they thought they had it bad back then, and we are just weak bits of washed up lint on the shores of Lake Michigan well I got news for YOU. There was a piece in the Chicago Tribune this morning that reported that a Law Firm is no longer giving out free coffee! Now that will whip us back into shape. Depression? Bring it on baby!
Cohen and his ilk are the best evidence we have that the “marketplace of ideas” is frozen. The same chattering cathys spouting crap and getting it wrong 90% of the time — yet they keep appearing in the broadsheets and on the TeeVee over and over. Wouldn’t an effective, efficient market eliminate those who write drivel or who had Hillary winning the nomination as late as July 4th? (Yeah, I’m talking to you, Dick Morris.)
Of course, back in the 20s, no one named Cohen would be writing for major newspapers, certainly not lovable papers like the Dearborn Independant. In those days, they were tough, they didn’t expect anything from governments, since all the men had been killed in the trenches from mustard gas after that pesky world war. Fun times to be nostalgic for!
And in those great days, you could still throw a putsch in a beer hall! Our wimpy spoiled society would only organise its fascist insurrections around bottled water!
I thought Colonel Sanders died.
They’re crispy, crunchy little cheesy critters – ’cause Pepperidge Fahms Rehmembas!
I forgot ‘fishy’.
“The people of the 1920s and ’30s were tough, hard. They Women, Coloreds, Immigrants and Natives did not expect all that much from life.”
Fixed!
[re=256775]Colander[/re]:
May you be smothered in the ultra-tight pants of Robert Plant!
They were tough! Hard! They wouldn’t have a black man for President! They much preferred a genteel cripple. They precipitated an environmental disaster in the Midwest and starvation in the streets of the cities, and liked it too. Our antibiotics and government regulation have made us weak. Back in the good old days, men died of syphilis and market-induced despair/suicide, like God intended. Truly, a Golden Age of Our Republic.
This Cohen guy and Dame Nooningtonshire should get together and have torrid 1930s nostalgia sex in the backseat of a Studebaker. She could dress as Eleanor Roosevelt and he could dress as Al Capone.
“History, like an animal escaped from the zoo, is again out of its cage”
Actually history flows like a river and op-ed columnists pretend it stops long enough for them to ‘capture’ what they believe is the zeitgeist. But you can’t capture something that’s constantly moving.
And the media calling the situation in Iraq a civil war made news because it was they first time they found the spine to report the truth.
But we all miss those days of polio, Father Coughlin, and racism.
Isn’t that a Led Zeppelin album cover?
Those people in the 20s and 30s were also discontented with their tough hard lives. They went on strike a lot and sat down on the job (the lazy sods). They would have eaten Cohen for breakfast for three reasons:
a)They had more political nous than current generations and recognised bullshit when they saw it.
b)Were tough, hard people who expressed their discontent readily by said sit-downs, riots and (a little bit later) invading Normandy.
c) They were hungry.
Achilles Last Stand. best zep song evar.
Sooo, you escape the Nazis and ‘for some reason’ end up on a beach in Brazil and THEN kill yourself? Sounds pretty damn soft to me. Mind you, since I have only read DickCo’s reference to his memory of a review of the book, it’s possible this is a misinterpretation.
[re=256904]McDuff[/re]: It’s not even just bad ideas. It’s astounding laziness. I mean, how lazy do you have to be to write the words in the last paragraph of that column, that Stefan Zweig ended up in Brazil: “for some reason”? Was it too “tough” and “hard” to spend 30 seconds on the internet to gather some minimal information? Beyond that, did he ever actually read the book, or did he just cop a feel off the review? A million unemployed people would like your job, Richard Cohen.
” . . . people in the 20′s and 30′s” doesn’t mean even mean anything. It’s as if decades were places.
At least the Greatest Generation is dying off. Although you wouldn’t know it from watching the History Channel, or reading Cohen.
[re=257006]Gallowglass[/re]: They wouldn’t have a black man for President! They much preferred a genteel cripple.
And only then because he was so upset by his condition that his whole government and the media went to great lengths to ensure nobody knew he was in a wheelchair. Flaunting it would be indecent.
[re=256776]Terry[/re]: I’ll never look at a bag of flour the same way again!
Zweig was the son of Moritz Zweig, a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida (Brettauer) Zweig, from an Italian banking family. He studied philosophy and the history of literature, and in Vienna he was associated with the avant garde Young Vienna movement. Religion did not play a central role in his education. “My mother and father were Jewish only through accident of birth,” Zweig said later in an interview – yet he did not renounce his Jewish faith and wrote repeatedly on Jewish themes. Although his essays were published in the Neue Freie Presse, whose literary editor was the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, Zweig was not attracted to Herzl’s Jewish nationalism.
During the First World War, he took a pacifist stand together with French writer Romain Rolland, summoning intellectuals from all over the world to join them in active pacifism, which actually led to Romain Rolland being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Zweig remained pacifist all his life but also advocated the unification of Europe before the Nazis came, which has had some influence in the making of the European Union. Like Rolland, he wrote many biographies; he described his Erasmus of Rotterdam as a concealed autobiography.[citation needed]
Zweig fled Austria in 1934 following Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. He then lived in England (in Bath and London), before moving to the United States. In 1941 he went to Brazil, where in 1942 he and his second wife Lotte (née Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann) committed suicide together in Petrópolis, despairing at the future of Europe and its culture. “I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth”, he wrote. His autobiography The World of Yesterday is a paean to the European culture he considered lost.
Took ten seconds on the google.
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