No manjaws, no tats, no blue hair, BMIs under 23 and glowing with feminine energy. These photos of Olde America are painful to look at, knowing how much we have lost since then.
Idle thought: how much influence does photography have on cultural continuity? Will photographs save America from the fates of other empires? When Rome was declining, Romans didn’t have photos of Olde Rome to remind them of what they were losing. They had myths, fading generational memories, and sculpture, but if they had photos would they have evaded their collapse?
If we had no mid-century photos, would we have forgotten by now what American women, and America, used to be? Would we be able to fondly, vividly, and instantly recall that America was once a shining titty on a hill?
Because we have photos and can look back at a better America, will it be the secret ingredient so many others before us were missing, that steels our hearts to save a dying nation? I wonder.
***
A reader writes,
Roman homes were full of busts and death masks of forebears which were worn at festivals and funerals. These and all sculptures painted to look lifelike. Oral family tradition strong. Household gods worshipped for a thousand years before Rome. The collapse took a long, long time.
But those were death masks. Ancestors captured in plaster and marble, stiff and quasi-monstrous in their facsimile. Today, we have photos, qualitatively different. We can see bygone America alive and happy and flush with confidence. The hit right to the feels is more visceral.
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Another reader,
The question is how well does it compete with the shitlib infested media and education monstrosities that attack the culture.
I like to think a faded photo of one smiling, height-weight proportionate 1950s woman can sweep away the lies of a million hate Whitey opinion pieces by our enemies.
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Another reader,
the marble statues and architecture gave them a false sense of permanence
Yes, ironically those statues might have had the opposite effect on Romans than what was intended: made them complacent instead of feeling the urgency of the loss.
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