Oh....boy...everything old....

Reading through a post about the racist element of our voting patterns I came across this little nugget:

[A]t the time, people believed that jazz was the forerunner of the decline of Western civilization. The anti-jazz crusade was motivated by an apocalyptic fear. The anxiety that jazz was "endangering our civilization," as the populist William Jennings Bryant put it in the New York Times in May 1926, was the subtext to many of the voices. People felt, in other words, that the dawn of the Jazz Age heralded the decline of Western Civilization. An assessment in the New York Times pronounced: "The consensus of opinion of leading medical and other scientific authorities, [is that jazz] is harmful and degrading to the civilized races as it always has been among the savages from whom we borrowed it."

Really mindblowing. I for one believe lots of people harbor irrational racist/misogynist/xenophobic leanings, far more than would admit to it publicly, so it's not especially surprising that 16% of Pennsylvanians counted race as a factor in their vote and 54% of that subset said they would vote for McCain rather than Obama. That tells me that more than zero, but less than about 9 percent of people in PA are against electing a black man. Chances are a similar number are against electing a woman. Either way, they need to get the fuck out or wise the fuck up. Old white men have been both a blessing and a curse of this nation, there's no reason to let them have all the fun.

But back to the quote. It is really hilarious to think of jazz as the end of western civilization, and had it not really been a facade hiding a deep streak of racism, it would be laughable. But that was 1926, and the Brown vs Board of Education was 30 years off and The Voting Rights Act was ten years after that. We were hardly an elightened country. Hell, women only had the right to vote for a few short years at that point. And lynchings were still a relatively common event down in teh Bible Belt. Those were the glory years of old white men, and the beginning of the end.

The end can't come soon enough.