Crossing the streams with 14-15 and 17-18 doesn't sound like a good idea to a non-golfer. Is it normal? If they use a bridge in California, will there be homeless under it?
The left has their Stonewall myth, but let their be a real (polite, non-destructive) riot of golfers. Do you think Trump could ignore 1,000 golf carts on Pennsylvania Avenue?
What a grand year 1969 was. Funny that the left wasn't much interested in environmentalism until 1969. It was the year of the Santa Barbara oil spill and those photos of birds dying in oil. Planet of the Apes had come out the year before forewarning the ecological suicide of the Earth. The long forgotten duo of Zager and Evans came out with the song "2525" in 1969, a song about Earth's dystopian future. Charles Reich came out with the book "The Greening of America" a year later. Another event was the presidency of Richard Nixon began in 1969 just in time for the left to get all sour on America.
A good year for New York sports teams. The Jets upset the Colts in the third Super Bowl. The Mets won the World Series. And the Knicks 1970 NBA championship season began and they went 23-1 to start the season.
Bobby Orr also led the Boston Bruins in the 1969-1970 to their first Stanley Cup in nearly 30 years, capped off with a killer cup-winning photo.
The Bruins' drought doesn't seem that long compared to other teams in other sports, but that's before you realize the NHL only had about 6 teams in it during almost all of those 29 years, so the Bruins literally only had to be better than only 5 other teams once and couldn't do it for nearly 3 decades. Ironically, it was only after the NHL expanded in the late 1960s that the Bruins finally won.
Born in 1970, I’ll have to sit this one out. My only memory of 1969 is reading a copy of the 1969 World’s Almanac I found in my grandparents house. I still remember California finally passing New York as the country’s most populous state (19 million vs 18 million)!
Steve angrily posts a column before grabbing his golf clubs, throwing them in the trunk, SLAMMING the lid down and driving off to Sandpiper in his smoky, backfiring 1989 Honda Accord, swearing and gesturing to himself about his redesign of that hinky-dinky walking trail they call a golf course. 😡
I’m writing this comment from Pinehurst,NC this morning where I suspect more than 10% of the population cares about course design. Nature put lots of sand and gentle hills here which made it an easy place to build golf courses back when shovels and humans worked alongside mechanical excavation equipment.
The courses here lack the beauty of seaside views or the drama that comes with elevated tees, but they often have the natural flow from tee to green that is characteristic of the older seaside links courses of Scotland and Ireland, where you didn’t need much “design” to create the course. Out and back was a given, otherwise you were messing with land that mattered to the village or some farmers. Sheep helped keep the fairways trimmed.
There are still a few folks here who think golf was meant for walking, not riding in a cart with GPS and a screen to deliver advertising. We will soon be gone, and the spare moments between swings can be fully monetised.
I think it was just fashionable theory to them (the bo-bos in the 1970s). But you are quite right that their grandchildren, possibly literally my childhood neighbors' grandchildren, are out putting theory into practice as we speak.
I've seen it in my own family: the poseur liberalism of the elders gets magnified through the generations until the youngest put it into action in the most horrifying way.
Perhaps my children will one day recognize what their father's black-sheep turn to the right saved them from? Not taking any bets.
The fashionability allowed for recruitment. You're right, most of those people who bought that stuff were too cowardly to do anything, but it allowed those ideas into their homes and "normalized" it so that communists could get to the most favorable recruits easier and radicalize them.
I wrote a long series in 2001 about the construction of what became Trump Los Angeles Golf Club after the 18th hole fell into the Pacific and the pair of brothers who built it about 30 years after their father had tried went broke and they had to sell it to Trump. It also features the California gnatcatcher.
> "...Environmental Era is traditionally dated to Christmas Eve, 1968..."
My parents liked to recall an occasion in the late-1950s/early-1960s when they attended some kind of environmentalist shindig, probably at a university somewhere, where the featured speaker was a sort of Grizzly Adams-type character who had been living out in the wilderness most of his adult life.
After sitting through the warm-up speakers, who all punctiliously intoned “concern for the environment”, “care for the environment”, etc., the Grizzly guy took the podium.
“What’s all this ‘concern for the environment’ stuff?!? All my life, the environment has been the enemy!!!”
Nature, red in tooth and claw. Environmentalist wackos always ignore this.
Reminds me of that "Women will choose meeting a bear over a strange man in the woods" that went around last year, where many women online revealed their nasty misandry. Many of the women assumed the bears wouldn't attack them and might even protect them/cuddle with them.
On a serious note, the emergence of color TV in the late 1960s helped a lot of those images of the times to stick in people's minds--- it was new and fresh. Especially by 1969. According to some Wikipedia article, in 1964 only 3.1% of households had color TVs, but then in 1965 the networks all switched to color for all prime time shows, forcing the market and increasing sales, though it wasn't until the 1970s that color TVs finally outsold black and whites.
Thus, the images from the oil spill were much more dramatic than in old black and white. Ditto for Woodstock and for the moon landing. And since color was so "new" to people the first images stuck in their brains; this is similar how to everyone seems to remember GeoCities websites, the first blogs, and the first Internet memes. There's no "mental filter" up yet on how to process new technology, so such images are stickier.
Comedian Denis Leary made a point in No Cure for Cancer that you can't complain that Baby Boomers are addicted to TV, because they saw JFK get his head blown off on TV, so of course they'd never stop watching it after that (and I would add, they also saw on TV his assassin shot within 48 hours). Imagine if such video had been in color, and I think it would have created even more of a cult around JFK's life/death.
Every kid remembers The Wizard of Oz for that beautiful immortal moment when it switches from black and white to color. Even to a kid today, watching it happen is mesmerizing.
The subtitle says it all - the left has in one way or another been telling the middle class for at least a generation that they ought to be happy with less, and that’s also what they deserve.
The new “abundance agenda” is just trying to sell people on the idea that technocratic liberalism can improve their lives and please forget all about our last big idea about centering society on equity. But whatever slogan they come up with, it all comes down to redistribution and middle class guys definitely do not deserve nice golf courses or any sort of return on their contributions to society.
I don’t care a fig about golf course but I did live the reminder about The Whole Earth Catalog & I was still so very young, restless & naive about most everything!
Josh Barro makes the point that the Abundance guys need to bite the bullet and embrace energy production, rather than hand-waving their way into a low-carbon future:
10%? That sounds gay.
Crossing the streams with 14-15 and 17-18 doesn't sound like a good idea to a non-golfer. Is it normal? If they use a bridge in California, will there be homeless under it?
Just think; our great grandchildren will be reading about the California Revolution, and Steve's rallying cry of "FAIRWAYS AND GOLFERS' RIGHTS!"
The left has their Stonewall myth, but let their be a real (polite, non-destructive) riot of golfers. Do you think Trump could ignore 1,000 golf carts on Pennsylvania Avenue?
What a grand year 1969 was. Funny that the left wasn't much interested in environmentalism until 1969. It was the year of the Santa Barbara oil spill and those photos of birds dying in oil. Planet of the Apes had come out the year before forewarning the ecological suicide of the Earth. The long forgotten duo of Zager and Evans came out with the song "2525" in 1969, a song about Earth's dystopian future. Charles Reich came out with the book "The Greening of America" a year later. Another event was the presidency of Richard Nixon began in 1969 just in time for the left to get all sour on America.
1969 was a pretty amazing year.
I got my NYC hack license and drove a taxi the summer of ‘69. The short course in urban pathology. Learned a lot at the West 55th St. Taxi Corp..
“Midnight Cowboy”, Stonewall riots; Apollo 11; “Give Peace a Chance”; Woodstock…yes, quite a year.
I got my first real six string.
My Grandparents took me on a two-week vacation, the first week being in Daytona Beach. I watched the Apollo 13 rocket take off for the moon.
A good year for New York sports teams. The Jets upset the Colts in the third Super Bowl. The Mets won the World Series. And the Knicks 1970 NBA championship season began and they went 23-1 to start the season.
Bobby Orr also led the Boston Bruins in the 1969-1970 to their first Stanley Cup in nearly 30 years, capped off with a killer cup-winning photo.
The Bruins' drought doesn't seem that long compared to other teams in other sports, but that's before you realize the NHL only had about 6 teams in it during almost all of those 29 years, so the Bruins literally only had to be better than only 5 other teams once and couldn't do it for nearly 3 decades. Ironically, it was only after the NHL expanded in the late 1960s that the Bruins finally won.
The Canadiens, the Maple Leafs and the Red Wings dominated the post-War NHL. The Bruins and Rangers were doormats.
Additional doormat: Blackhawks
The Blackhawks did win the Stanley Cup in 1961. Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita's only Cup. The Blackhawks choked in 1970 or 71, I forget which year.
Graduated from high school in ‘69.
We've come full circle. It's 2025 and all the left cares about is jamming as many people into the landscape as possible.
http://compassrosebooks.blogspot.com/2009/10/edward-abbey-on-immigration.html
As long as they vote Democrat.
> "Planet of the Apes had come out the year before forewarning the ecological suicide of the Earth."
It's funny how people attribute themes to "Planet of the Apes" it didn't have.
The message wasn't environmentalism or No Nukes, it was that a civilization ape-ifing itself will inevitably collapse to ape-level.
Hint: "Apes" ≠ apes.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-colossus-by-emma-lazarus/#comment-1746215
Born in 1970, I’ll have to sit this one out. My only memory of 1969 is reading a copy of the 1969 World’s Almanac I found in my grandparents house. I still remember California finally passing New York as the country’s most populous state (19 million vs 18 million)!
Steve angrily posts a column before grabbing his golf clubs, throwing them in the trunk, SLAMMING the lid down and driving off to Sandpiper in his smoky, backfiring 1989 Honda Accord, swearing and gesturing to himself about his redesign of that hinky-dinky walking trail they call a golf course. 😡
I paid a $124 to play it in 2007. Man, what a letdown.
I’m writing this comment from Pinehurst,NC this morning where I suspect more than 10% of the population cares about course design. Nature put lots of sand and gentle hills here which made it an easy place to build golf courses back when shovels and humans worked alongside mechanical excavation equipment.
The courses here lack the beauty of seaside views or the drama that comes with elevated tees, but they often have the natural flow from tee to green that is characteristic of the older seaside links courses of Scotland and Ireland, where you didn’t need much “design” to create the course. Out and back was a given, otherwise you were messing with land that mattered to the village or some farmers. Sheep helped keep the fairways trimmed.
There are still a few folks here who think golf was meant for walking, not riding in a cart with GPS and a screen to deliver advertising. We will soon be gone, and the spare moments between swings can be fully monetised.
With your climate, that's all irrelevant. We're talking Califoenia here.
Any essay that mentions zeitgeist is good by me.
Thanks Steve.
eBay will get you a copy of the original Whole Earth Catalog for 413.00.
That's the same as the original $4 in 1969. What a racket he discovered.
He was on to something. I imagine there were folks who had it on the shelf next to the Anarchist’s Cookbook.
The bohemian-bourgeois neighbors of my childhood had it on the shelf next to ... what was it ... "The Collected Works of Saul Alinsky" perhaps?
Reading how to subvert The Establishment rhetorically? Right On!
Actually going out and Molotov Cocktailing something? Whoa man!
Their grandchildren are currently firebombing Teslas and burned down cities in 2020. I don't think they were bluffing.
I think it was just fashionable theory to them (the bo-bos in the 1970s). But you are quite right that their grandchildren, possibly literally my childhood neighbors' grandchildren, are out putting theory into practice as we speak.
I've seen it in my own family: the poseur liberalism of the elders gets magnified through the generations until the youngest put it into action in the most horrifying way.
Perhaps my children will one day recognize what their father's black-sheep turn to the right saved them from? Not taking any bets.
The fashionability allowed for recruitment. You're right, most of those people who bought that stuff were too cowardly to do anything, but it allowed those ideas into their homes and "normalized" it so that communists could get to the most favorable recruits easier and radicalize them.
Perhaps Mao’s Little Red Book.
an online calculator tells me it would $34 today
It was a joke.
O/T
R.I.P. George Foreman (76.2), former heavyweight boxing champion
You can be a good commenter, but you just have to get your (relatively randomly directed) hostility under control.
To save the Sandpiper Pigeon from choking on golf balls, the course will eventually be shut down so that it can host homeless tents and RVs.
Spielberg sure liked naked women in the ocean. Up periscope. Also, Morro Bay is Central, not Northern California.
Wonder how Trump got his golf course built in Palos Verdes?
I wrote a long series in 2001 about the construction of what became Trump Los Angeles Golf Club after the 18th hole fell into the Pacific and the pair of brothers who built it about 30 years after their father had tried went broke and they had to sell it to Trump. It also features the California gnatcatcher.
> "...Environmental Era is traditionally dated to Christmas Eve, 1968..."
My parents liked to recall an occasion in the late-1950s/early-1960s when they attended some kind of environmentalist shindig, probably at a university somewhere, where the featured speaker was a sort of Grizzly Adams-type character who had been living out in the wilderness most of his adult life.
After sitting through the warm-up speakers, who all punctiliously intoned “concern for the environment”, “care for the environment”, etc., the Grizzly guy took the podium.
“What’s all this ‘concern for the environment’ stuff?!? All my life, the environment has been the enemy!!!”
Nature, red in tooth and claw. Environmentalist wackos always ignore this.
Reminds me of that "Women will choose meeting a bear over a strange man in the woods" that went around last year, where many women online revealed their nasty misandry. Many of the women assumed the bears wouldn't attack them and might even protect them/cuddle with them.
Such stupid, evil creatures are women.
https://x.com/fitnessfeelingz/status/1903837377254056440
Steve's substack strategy:
-Post 3 banger posts in a row just begging for engagement in the comments, but put them behind a pay wall so non-payers can't comment.
-Post 1 free article on golf course architecture to troll the non-payers.
ISWYDT. Brilliant.
On a serious note, the emergence of color TV in the late 1960s helped a lot of those images of the times to stick in people's minds--- it was new and fresh. Especially by 1969. According to some Wikipedia article, in 1964 only 3.1% of households had color TVs, but then in 1965 the networks all switched to color for all prime time shows, forcing the market and increasing sales, though it wasn't until the 1970s that color TVs finally outsold black and whites.
Thus, the images from the oil spill were much more dramatic than in old black and white. Ditto for Woodstock and for the moon landing. And since color was so "new" to people the first images stuck in their brains; this is similar how to everyone seems to remember GeoCities websites, the first blogs, and the first Internet memes. There's no "mental filter" up yet on how to process new technology, so such images are stickier.
Comedian Denis Leary made a point in No Cure for Cancer that you can't complain that Baby Boomers are addicted to TV, because they saw JFK get his head blown off on TV, so of course they'd never stop watching it after that (and I would add, they also saw on TV his assassin shot within 48 hours). Imagine if such video had been in color, and I think it would have created even more of a cult around JFK's life/death.
1974 “Total Football” Dutch side at World Cup : author of <Brilliant Orange > argues that color TV added to the mystique of the side
Would not doubt it.
Every kid remembers The Wizard of Oz for that beautiful immortal moment when it switches from black and white to color. Even to a kid today, watching it happen is mesmerizing.
The subtitle says it all - the left has in one way or another been telling the middle class for at least a generation that they ought to be happy with less, and that’s also what they deserve.
The new “abundance agenda” is just trying to sell people on the idea that technocratic liberalism can improve their lives and please forget all about our last big idea about centering society on equity. But whatever slogan they come up with, it all comes down to redistribution and middle class guys definitely do not deserve nice golf courses or any sort of return on their contributions to society.
I don’t care a fig about golf course but I did live the reminder about The Whole Earth Catalog & I was still so very young, restless & naive about most everything!
Josh Barro makes the point that the Abundance guys need to bite the bullet and embrace energy production, rather than hand-waving their way into a low-carbon future:
https://www.joshbarro.com/p/abundance-liberals-have-a-carbon