After finding the origin of ringers in this 1927 volume of Vanity Fair I started reading the rest of the magazine.
1927 was the peak of a Share Value boom, so it was like 2017 as measured by aristocrats. The two booms are drastically different as measured by peasants.
1927 was overgrown from a REAL ECONOMY. Peasants had real jobs making real cars and appliances and clothes, and they were earning REAL MONEY from their REAL JOBS. Peasants could buy houses and cars and stocks. Men were useful.
The Bush Boom that started in 1990 is based on pure abstract numbers, debt created with no collateral. Our men no longer make things, so the boom is pure vapor, serving ONLY the aristocrats and slaughtering the peasants.
The wages that previously went to AMERICAN men have been going to CHINESE men, raising their standard of living tremendously.
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On an intellectual level, 1927 was diametrically opposite to 2017. Each month of Vanity Fair included an essay by Huxley, stating facts about human nature that are TOTALLY FORBIDDEN now. He discussed Woke Karens, reason vs taste, intellectual vs real enjoyment, creation vs evolution, and a dozen other subjects. In each case he tried hard to stay above partisan teams, tried to highlight his own bias. This must have been especially hard with evolution, since his Grandpa Tom was the man who turned Darwin’s careful and reluctant hypothesis into a juggernaut of doctrinal tyranny.
Modern “independents”, including me, are trying to recapture this level of thinking. We often believe we’re fresh and original. We’re not.
More importantly, an aristocratic magazine like Vanity Fair no longer carries the slightest hint of “independent” thinking. In 2017 Huxley’s essays would appear in offbeat websites, subject to instant cancellation, and totally shadowbanned by all major media.
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Cars, both then and now, are BIG and UNORIGINAL. In boom times carmakers don’t need to create new styles or invent new technologies, so they don’t. After sobriety struck in 1932, carmakers instantly started to diverge in style, and instantly started to “invent” new technologies that had been sitting in the patent registry since they were ACTUALLY invented in 1906.
A sampling of identical cars….
Auburn:
Buick:
Chrysler:
Dodge:
Franklin:
Locomobile:
Packard:
Rolls:
Stutz:
Note especially the headlights.
This scrumptious Pierce interior shows where the inventive energy was going:
A similar set of pics from 1957 would show tremendous variety in exteriors and rigid conformity in interiors.
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Finally, one reassuringly unchanged product, still made in America, brings another language surprise:
Printanier? Hungry Pressman Soup? No, it’s an old French word for spring vegetables. The old spelling of spring, printans, was close to French pronunciation, then later hypercorrected to slip in the Latin spelling of tempus.
Polistra's Mill 