By DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI News and Commentary

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, WEEKEND EDITION, SEPT. 5-7, 2014) — One of the courses on The Old Professor‘s class schedule is “Tumultuous Decade: America in the 1960s.” Do we like it? Why, sir or madam, we have fallen in love with it. Imagine THE PLANET‘s delight to be able to walk in a room and get paid for pontificating on the subject of the 1960s, which by the way, we have defined in two ways.

Chronologically, denotatively, and literally, of course, the decade is that period of time defined by Jan. 1, 1960 and Dec. 31, 1969. Connotatively, figuratively, and emotionally, however, we place the dates as Nov. 22, 1963 to Aug. 9, 1974 — from the assassination of President John Kennedy to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

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The End of Privacy

Thursday in class, we asked a young student (18 or 19, we guess) if she, as an American, had the right to personal privacy. She hesitated before answering, which was revelation #1. Who would need to think about that? After finally offering a wavering “yes,” The Old Professor asked her “why?” Why didn’t the government have the right to look into her private life as much as it wanted (reading e-mails, listening to phone calls, and all the rest of it)? Then came revelation #2: She couldn’t tell us why. Then it hit: For Generation Y and younger, the notion of personal privacy has been all but obliterated.

This anecdote brings us to our previous column on the millennials. THE PLANET wrote it as a little experiment. We wrote it, partially, because we wanted to judge the reaction, thinking that of all the possible objections, no one would bring up the lame and intellectually  discredited “It’s Always Been that Way” argument — Semper est exortis aetas adfabre.

Sure enough, we had a couple of our dear commentators drag out Socrates, Hesiod, Plato, and Peter the Hermit. Somehow, they overlooked Play Dough and Herman’s Hermits.

Thus:

“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.” — Socrates

“When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint”. –Hesiod, 8th century BC

“What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?” — Plato, 4th Century BC

“The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint… As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.” – Attributed to Peter the Hermit, AD 12743

Apparently, THE PLANET needs to explain not only why these objections fall short but why they actually prove the points we made about the Gen Y younguns. You see, to dismiss the factual, data-driven analyses of the millennials — who are destined to be the most studied generation in history simply because they are leaving the greatest data trail — is to ignore the warnings and begin the slide down the slippery decline. In other words, if you’re arguing that the old have always had it for the young, you are admitting that each generation gets progressively worse.

ELVIS’ hip swivels scandalized in the mid-50s, but compared to smut of popular culture, 2014, it was tame stuff.

For example, in the 1950s, as we discussed Thursday in class, the nascent Civil Rights Movement and the beginning of Rock and Roll brought dire proclamations of cultural ruin and decay. Those criticisms were, relatively speaking, correct, except for the use of “ruin” and decay” as synonyms for “reshaping”  and “change.” The elders of that generation, correctly observing the waywardness of youth, were scandalized by televising Elvis Presley in a full, hip-swiveling body shot. Today, nearly 60 years and two generations later, we don’t blink at the latest Miley Cyrus crotch shot or the pornography and filth that makes it to prime time of TVand the Internet’s cesspool (online, it is always prime time).

Consequently, to bring up the tired cliches of Socrates and the rest, you make the case that each time’s “young” generation gets progressively more shocking and shameful. You are therefore agreeing that the current generation, which in our case happens to be the millennials, is everything we said they are.

Thank you for making our case so well, not that we needed it.

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The Country Once Known as the United States of America

SLUT & SMUT — “Oh, but Miley Cyrus’ crotch shots are simply more of what Plato talked about. Therefore, it’s OK.” No, it’s not, and that weak argument has long been demolished.

Related is our in-class notion of “privacy” and 2014’s dominance of the National Security State here in The Country Once Known as The United States of America. Our “smart” technology has created a generation of youngsters incapable of critical thought. Like the frog in the slowly boiling pan of water, they have become so desensitized to sanity’s need for personal, inviolate space that they willingly share constant updates of their location on networked devices easily tracked, hacked, with the data stacked.

They have willingly surrendered the most intimate details of their lives, unaware of and oblivious to the growing list of businesses and government offices collecting it in the form of Big Data. When Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg declares that the erosion of privacy is to be embraced as a desired cultural norm, these kids don’t object. They can’t even frame the argument. That’s how Gen Y’s Saint Mark amassed a net worth of well north of $30 billion. Yeah, kiddies, and there’s the sign up ahead: “This way to the egress.”

Consider this from iCare Consulting, a web service company:

Not only is social media a means to steal personal information, it is also a way to spread gossip, harmful misinformation, and further abuse. There is no way to really check for what is happening in a photo or video, except through user voting and reports. This means that if a humiliating photo taken at a party is posted, the individuals in the photo have no knowledge that their reputation is being hurt. They will likely not find out until it has reached an enormous audience and has harmed their reputation badly. Employers have recently started checking their employees and prospective employees Facebook pages for opinions, habits and other subjects that could make them reconsider hiring or continued employment. This means that personal data leaks are all the more dangerous. Employers looking through their employee’s pages or data also has a negative impact as they will have access to the most intimate personal data, what their friends are like and what kind of person they’re hiring or have hired. Employees can and will post what they think of their jobs, coworkers and bosses, which may get some more expressive employees fired for their opinions. Not only are employees responsible for keeping their opinions out of their statuses, they are also judged by who they are friends with, needing to clean up or delete friends’ comments and posts on their pages.

This is to say nothing about the implications that privacy’s loss have on civil liberties and the growing menace of not just Big but Biggest Brother. The recent revelations of Edward Snowden, a true national hero, are only the latest in a spate of information that establishes, conclusively, that The National Security State is upon us. As the all-knowing computer tells us in the chilling 1970 movie Colossus: The Forbin Project: “Freedom is an illusion” (incidentally, spoken by THE PLANET’s all-time favorite voice artist, Paul Frees).

This is Much a Local Issue

THE PLANET will not draw out how this affects all of us locally. We hope you can do that on your own. (we know you are not of Gen Y). The defeat of freedom leads to the defeatism of apathy. People from an earlier different time — Gen X and Boomers, primarily — begin to tune out the civic responsibilities with which they grew up. The youngsters have been brainwashed by technology and the glorification of celebrity not even to realize the importance of involvement. They don’t even know they own the government. It’s perfect for the skunks to invade.

That’s how a once thriving, robust city such as Pittsfield turns into the wasteland it is today — through apathy and a failed, inept, and corrupt leadership.

Yes, my friends, we are in the early stages of what will become the takeover of constitutional government. This long-running opera, Wagnerian in its scope and tragedy, began at the end of World War II, when the U.S. for the first time in its history followed a war by failing to revert to a peacetime economy. Its trigger and tipping point came on that awful day on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas.

Sourcewatch.org lists the following characteristics of the National Security State:

1. The military is the highest authority.

2. Democracy and constitutional republicanism are viewed as political enemies.

3. The economy is heavily controlled by the military-industrial complex.

4. An “obsession with enemies.” The enemies of the state are everyhere. This keeps us in a perpetual state of war, which is great for the oligarchic technocracy, since it quiets them with lavish amounts of money. Young Mr. Zuckerberg won’t be fomenting revolution or political change anytime soon.

5. These “enemies” (defined by the state) are cunning and ruthless. Therefore, whether internal or external, they must be controlled.

6. Public debate is discouraged. Popular participation in government is restricted. This is done through secrecy (The Empty Suit comes to mind here, on a local level) and the establishment of small, exclusionary inner circles (The Suits, anyone?).

7. All aspects of public life, especially “the church” and religion, are “expected to mobilize [their] financial, ideological, and theological resources in service to the state.

Don’t look for it coming, friend.

It has arrived.

You are there.

That’s the true tragedy of Gen Y and those younger.

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“Well, get out in that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans.” — Jesse Stone, under the songwriting name of Charles Calhoun, (1954).

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.