Off the Record (June 8, 2023)

CORRECTION: Last week’s interesting page 12 article about “The Honorable Occupation of Tie Hacking” was missing the byline. It was written by local historian and AVA Contributor Katy Tahja of Comptche. Our apologies to our long-time contributor for the oversight.

TALL PEOPLE, TOO: A new bill signed last Friday makes it illegal for employers and landlords to discriminate against someone based on their weight or height when it comes to hiring them or securing housing.

A MAN shot to death in Oakland last week became two men in the SF Chronicle, but a sentence later, still dead, returned to the singular: “Paramedics transported the victim to a nearby hospital, where they were pronounced dead, Armstead said. The victim has not been publicly identified.” 

ORANGE MAN has a legit beef: Donald Trump has loudly claimed that the FBI offered a former British intelligence officer $1 million to have him framed. The red-hot rhetoric comes after the publication of the Durham report, which found that the FBI improperly rushed into its investigation of allegations of collusion between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. “The FBI offered Christopher Steele One Million Dollars in order to FRAME me,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform last week. “Why aren’t all of the so called Special ‘Prosecutors,’ together with their bosses at the DOJ, doing something about this?” Trump’s claim about the offer to Steele—the ex-MI6 spy whose dossier played a key role in the FBI’s chimerical collusion investigation—appears to come from testimony made by a senior FBI analyst last October. FBI supervisory analyst Brian Auten said the FBI offered Steele “up to $1 million” if he could prove his allegations about Trump and Russia featured in Steele’s notorious dossier, but the money was never paid because Steele couldn’t prove the allegations.

THE 5-0 SUPE'S premature endorsement of Democrat-blessed Trevor Mockel for 1st District supervisor well prior to the primary election in March of 2024 is another reminder that the Democratic Party calls the political shots on the Northcoast, and obviously is also the shot caller for Mendocino County. Mockel’s sole bona fide is that he’s an aide to state senator McGuire, and that’s all it takes for the five prone Democrats sitting as supervisors. Even if the Party was in any way progressive, which the Supervisors bi-monthly meetings are evidence it isn't, the way the Party's cold, dead hand of relentless scamming, from the enormous fraud of the Great Redwood Trail, to the failure of the heavily tax-subsidized SMART Train to chug up the tracks to Cloverdale as promised 30 years ago, to Governor Newsom's statement last week that “wealth taxes are going nowhere in California,” that only here in Amnesia County could you find so many enthusiastic Democrats. But given the dysfunction of the Supes, their endorsement of Mockel just might doom his candidacy.

THERE ARE MORE than 2,000 (count 'em) concealed weapons permits in effect in Mendocino County. In San Francisco, there are maybe a dozen. The point? Where is the menace more menacing, Frisco or Mendocino County? 

THAT MEME going around advises, “Live so that if your life were turned into a book Florida would ban it.” Excluded for the past forty years from the precious confines of Mendocino's Corners of the Mouth, the ava doesn’t need to go to Florida to get banned. 

SID COOPERRIDER: It is with great sadness that I report that my father, Allen Cooperrider, passed on Monday May 22nd. A special thanks to John Canfield, Turtle Creek Fire Brigade and the CVFD for helping us get him transported to Ukiah Valley Hospital via Reach Helicopter. Unfortunately he suffered a stroke that he could not recover from. Allen passed away at 8 PM surrounded by his family.

The good part is, we worked together in the garden in the morning, played our usual three-handed pinochle game before I went to get ready for work.

He did what he wanted right up to the end.

He was a writer, a gardener, a biologist, a thinker, a fun-lover. He was modest, brilliant, funny, a great husband and father and so much more. Allen and Els were together 60 years. This is especially hard for Mom (Els) right now.

JIM SHIELDS: Got a kick out of your comments on the preciously PC “creative writing professor” slinging her bullshit to AVHS students, the vast majority of whom, most likely, are incapable of crafting a simple declarative sentence where subject and verb agree. How about conjugating a sentence? Get serious, dude. Another ongoing scholastic scam is that our K-12 schools are developing legions of “critical thinkers.” I realized the game was up and all was doomed when the educrats put the teachers out to pasture and replaced them with “educators.” Fortunately, my P.E./History teacher dad and Kindergarten teacher mom are R.I.P. And so it goes.

I STILL REMEMBER, probably thirty years ago now, reading a startling quote boxed off on the front page of Monday’s Ukiah Daily Journal: “They can’t read. They can’t write. They can’t think well and they’re very angry. It’s time to do something about it school-by-school.” That was Phil Boynton, a Ukiah High School history teacher, complaining about students who arrive at the high school “without basic learning and social skills.” 

IT HASN’T IMPROVED, Phil, and the internet has made the country crazier, with young people wed to their magic phones, on which they can, and millions do, dial up all the crazy-making evil of the world.

THAT SAID, the few young people I see on a regular basis are smart and seemingly sane, despite the social-political context they’re making their way in.

WE GOT A LAUGH out of Supervisor Maureen Mulheren’s recent Big Ideas of how to save some County money:

“All costs are up and the Board and the Executive Office Fiscal Team are trying to find ways to save money, one way to reduce our expenses is to spend less money on vehicle expenses such as gas and maintenance. Are there ways your department could help reduce costs? Let me know! ‘We’re reducing vehicle miles by 20%. Before you grab the keys, ask yourself: Can I combine a trip with a co-worker? Can I combine multiple outings? Can this be a virtual meeting?’” (Mark Scaramella)

26 YEARS AGO, CLAY GEERDES, a long-time AVA contributor, died of cancer. Geerdes was a reliable chronicler of the Bay Area bohemia long gone over to affectation and costume. He was an undogmatic leftist who lamented the disappearance of a lively, independent press without which the truly unique voices like his have no place to be heard. 

I WAS THINKING of Geerdes as I re-read Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s new book of poems, “A Far Rockaway of the Heart,” and Jonah Raskin’s interview with the poet, which had appeared in, of all places, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, a newspaper opposed to pretty much everything Ferlinghetti had always represented. There was a time not all that long ago when people like Ferlinghetti and Clay Geerdes were on the top ten public enemies list. Now, with dissenting culture tidily cordoned off, their books get respectfully reviewed in suburban dailies whose primary function is to serve commerce. Raskin had interviewed Ferlinghetti at his City Lights book store, the last all-purpose, comprehensive, insurrectionary book store in the country where, incidentally, the ava can be found, thanks to the man himself. Ferlinghetti told Raskin, “There’s a growing ignorance of literary matters. It’s part of the dumbing down of America. When I go to universities to give readings, I’m astonished that young people don’t even know the names of modern poets.” Neither do their teachers, chances are. Ferlinghetti has always taken real risks for the literary and political culture in which the hordes of today’s posturers now thrive. As the old boys and girls go, much of the best part of the culture will go with them. Looking around the room at the art and the literature, and what passes for opposition politics, the lively intellectual world that Geerdes and Ferlinghetti knew is just about gone.

RECOMMENDED READING: “News of a Kidnapping,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez gets lumped in with “magical realists” who seem to this outback critic much his inferior — writers like Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, Isabel Allende, none of whom I’ve ever been able to read. There’s nothing obscure or precious about “News,” which is not only a gripping narrative of people taken as hostages in Colombia’s drug wars, it’s a terrific guide to the sociology of Colombia itself. 

A USEFUL BOOK by then-occasional Valley resident Moira Johnston is called Spectral Evidence, a salutary account of the awful hysteria inspired by an evil neurosis called “recovered memory,” which is also a fascinating account of the dangers of crackpot therapy, an especially pertinent cautionary tale for Mendoland where it seems like every third person is some variety of “healer.”

THE BOOK is a painful account of a wealthy and attractive Napa family, seemingly on top of the world in a conventionally superficial American way, but a family with all kinds of psychological termites gnawing away at the family foundation. 

THE LATENT family psychosis finally expresses itself when one of the daughters, seeking help for an eating disorder, went to a Masters of Social Work (MSW) therapist who also happened to be a fundamentalist Christian (we’re not talking scholarship and sophistication here) who talked the young woman into “recovering” memories of her clearly innocent father having molested her. Even the family dog got in on the perv-a-rama according to one particularly twisted recall dredged up by a helping professional, who obviously had some odd sexual preoccupations herself. 

MOM RAMONA is an attractive blonde whose husband, Gary, is an executive with the Mondavi Winery pulling in half a mil a year when his and his family’s world collapsed courtesy of Therapy Land. Pop worked hard and was gone a lot. Mom did nothing but play tennis, enjoy a clothes allowance of many thousands a year, fritter an equivalent amount on her hair and general physical maintenance, and generally live the life of a decorative Napa Valley sybarite. 

ALL POP seemed to want was for Mom to look good at wine fests. He also seemed to love her and, in a bumbling, touching but totally naive way, was devoted to what he thought was his perfect family which, unfortunately for him, came complete with a maternal mother-in-law straight out of the Borgias. You don’t have to be a psychologist to figure out that this woman’s daughters felt enormous pressure to look like their showcase mother, hence the craziest daughter’s bulimia. (She’s now a therapist herself, of course.) 

THE THREE RAMONA GIRLS — terminal ingrates, every one of them — enjoyed trips to Europe and every other extravagant indulgence yup pups are born into these days. There was no hint of in-family weirdness as the girls grew to maturity and none substantiated when pop had had the courage to take the incompetent therapists who’d basically destroyed his family into court. 

MR. RAMONA was the first person in the entire country to sue the bastards victimized by “recovered memory.” 

AUTHOR JOHNSTON’S impartiality is absolutely scrupulous throughout, in a carefully researched book amounting to an important public service, putting the lie to what amounts to an hysteria equivalent to the Salem Witch Trials (where spectral evidence was finally disallowed when the hysteria reached into a local big shot’s household) and as a cautionary tale of the dangers of stupid and malicious therapists, of whom there are literal thousands in California. 

RUMMAGING through a box of old bummers, I retrieved this three-page ad from a New York Times: “Let’s see now. What’s a simple way for business people to understand the difference between the two companies Monsanto is becoming? For 96 years, Monsanto has been known as one of the world’s leading chemical companies. But now we’re spinning off our chemical businesses. To focus on the business of life sciences. Our commitment is to provide better food, better nutrition, and better health for all people. We’re dedicated to developing breakthrough products that link the fields of agriculture, food, and medicine. Like insect-resistant crops. And innovative treatments for life-threatening diseases. At Monsanto, our future is about fulfilling people’s hopes. Hope for environmentally sustainable solutions. Hope for a healthier planet. That’s how we’ll be growing in the century to come.”

TRANSLATION: One company, Monsanto, will make herbicide (Round Up) and the other will spray it on GE crops. Absent some reliable testing service, we will all be eating more glyphosate. 

AND THIS ONE: We reported on this hideous episode at the time, assuming that the Adventist medical combine would elude murder charges for the death of 11-month-old Cody Burrows of Lake County. Which it did, initially. Dr. Wolfgang Schug was the on-duty emergency room doctor at the Adventist-owned Redbud Hospital in Clearlake, on February 23rd, 1996 where the tragedy began.

DR. SCHUG had treated the Burrows infant for an ear infection. But the baby got worse, suffering from constant diarrhea and vomiting. The Burrows brought their suffering boy baby back to Redbud three times in as many days; each visit saw the child in worse shape. On the final desperate visit to Schug and Redbud, the young parents were handed a road map to what is now called Sutter Medical Center in Santa Rosa, nearly an hour and a half from Lakeport. 

THEIR DYING BABY dumped by the Adventists, his young parents drove frantically to Santa Rosa where alarmed doctors received the dehydrated child and shipped him immediately off to UCSF for specialized treatment. (Or also dumped him.) But it was too late and Cody died in San Francisco. 

TWO YEARS LATER, Dr. Schug was arrested and charged with second degree murder, charges that were eventually dropped. The doctor posted bail of $75,000 and went back to work at Redbud where he is today, I’m told. 

ALTHOUGH ADVENTIST hospitals, and other for-profit medical complexes, of course deny that their ER doctors steer difficult, i.e., no- profit-in-it-for-us-patients to public hospitals, but they do.

THE ADVENTISTS finally settled for $750,000 when testimony revealed that Schug had failed to rehydrate the infant, a mind boggler of dereliction, I’d say.

BETSY CAWN NOTES: Viz. Adventist Corp, I am in pretty close contact with an insider at the Adventist Hospital Clear Lake, and have been observing the changes since the old guard was deposed by the new young bucks a few years ago. AHCL is the only hospital in the “region” (in this case, part of the “Napa” region, not the mostly-Mendo division) that has actually made money, substantial amounts of it (“not-for-profit” status notwithstanding), but the new kinglets fired the CEO who brought all of the successes to this hospital for the last decade or so and reduced the local operators back into their subservient fiefdom roles. One consequence has been the rise of tribal health service empires — but the lack of primary docs, local basic specialists, and overall poor health status of Lake County’s population has rendered the community hostage to the yupscale Napa board of directors. Adventist combine, indeed.

MICHAEL TURNER, MD: “The executive board that governs Adventist Health statewide is insulated by several layers of administration and largely escapes public scrutiny. Their strategic decisions take place in secrecy. For whatever reason they changed their regional strategy about ten years ago. Though never articulated publicly, the result has been to drive primary care providers from poor rural communities across the State, not just Mendo and Lake Counties. I’ve been in the room with regional administrators who were quite vocal about the unimportance of primary care from a revenue point of view. What got them excited was changing the focus to big ticket items such as advanced imaging, and orthopedic and cardiac procedures. Almost all administrators and many employees belong to the Adventist church. It’s not hard to see that their small community benefits from this strategy while the wider one suffers. There’s now here an epidemic of untreated, even undiagnosed, chronic diseases such as hypertension and diabetes. I would guess that the percentage of the health care dollar that ends up in Adventist coffers far exceeds the amount going towards community care. This is to be expected from a cultish culture where non-Adventists are typically referred to as the “Worldly People.” 

CHANGE OUR NAME FORT BRAGG, a local non-profit organization, handed out checks totaling $1500 to two Fort Bragg High School students on Saturday in an award ceremony held at the Pacific Textile Arts patio in Fort Bragg. The rigged contest invited students at FBHS to write on either of the subjects of their choosing: either (a) The name of Fort Bragg High School should be changed or (b) The name of Fort Bragg High School should not be changed. The contest kicked off in February 2023. The First Place essay was written by Carmen Velazquez who won $1,000 and the Second Place essay was written by Josephine Erickson who won $500. Ms. Velazquez read her winning essay to the gathered crowd of 30+ name changers at the bogus event. 

PHIL ZWERLING, PhD, Corrupter of Youth and True History, is pied piper for Change Our Name, which is organized as a  non-profit organization. The professor (ret), handed out the money to two Fort Bragg High School students in a private awards ceremony held at the Pacific Textile Arts patio in Fort Bragg. The first place essay was written by Carmen Velazquez who won $1,000 because her essay was pegged to the false history of Fort Bragg promulgated by Zwerling and the anonymous neo-Stalinists he functions as pied piper to. “Hello, history? Get me re-write.”

FROM ZWERLING'S totally wrong version of why Fort Bragg's name should be changed: “The word ‘Fort’ stands for the theft of tribal land and the murder of Indigenous people thus it memorializes a racist and genocidal past. Though it was never the wooden stockade beloved of motion pictures, the small Army garrison was meant to protect the White settlers … protect the White settlers while they stole the land, labor, and children of the Native people. Some of those structures still stand in the center of our town.”

PROFESSOR ZWERLING, as always tending to hysteria, followed up his false history of Fort Bragg with a blast at a commenter who dared say that he wanted Fort Bragg to remain Fort Bragg: “That’s right, we’ll just sit here in our little enclave by the sea with the last municipality named for a Confederate and enslaver in the state of California and the only public schools (FBHS and FBMS) in the entire state also named for a Confederate and enslaver and pretend everything is right with our world. And memorializing a ‘Fort’ that played its part in the Indigenous genocide is ok too, I guess.”

THE PROF’S logic and history are way off. It's a big leap on the prof's part to assume an innocent commenter approves of genocide simply because he thinks Fort Bragg's name change isn't happening, and the prof still doesn't seem to know, or care, that Fort Bragg was established to protect Indians, not murder them.

BRAXTON BRAGG was a consensus bad man who did his bad in the early-to-middle 19th century. Stop the next ten Fort Braggers you see on the street and ask them who Braxton Bragg was. No one will know or care, so the best Zwerling and his posse of historical fact expungers can do is distort the true history of Fort Bragg and, by extension, the history of Mendocino County.

AS A MATTER of verifiable historic fact, Fort Bragg was founded to protect Indians from the first wave of white settlers — a grim collection of all-male fugitive criminals, Indian slavers, and general lowlifes — not murder them, an honorable pedigree for any town, and one of many reasons to keep Fort Bragg as Fort Bragg, a name placed on the remote Coast outpost by one of Bragg's military colleagues who seems to have admired Bragg. (Bragg is considered the most incompetent of the Confederate generals.) 

IT'S OBVIOUSLY UNDERSTANDABLE that Southern black people would want to remove statues from public places which honor Confederate generals and I, for one, am happy that they've done it. Overall, though, erasing reminders of America's bloody history is a bad idea because it also erases the truth of what happened. (The removed statues weren't destroyed; they were packed away in museums, which is as it should be.)

BUT OUR ATROCITY-PACKED history is one more reason to celebrate our unprecedented, magnifico country, that despite its depraved, murderous history, America has grown, prospered and done much, and continues to do much, to atone for the sins of our fathers. Viva Fort Bragg!

MORE HYPE and history re-writes from a fax advertising an album called “Who Bombed Judi Bari?” featuring “twenty-three selections of her greatest speeches, plus assorted newsclips and songs comprise this 72 minute treasure trove of cutting edge wisdom and wit, available on CD, vinyl and cassette.”

IN A CONVENIENT marketing conjunction with Boogie Two at Carlotta years ago, Darryl Cherney released an album of enviro songs by famous singers called “If A Tree Falls” — If A Tree Falls, Two Bucks Fall Into My Pocket might have been more like it.

THE JUDI BARI record hype comes with a nearly complete re-write of the truth about who she was, what she did and what she accomplished. “Judi didn’t preach from the ivory tower of intellectualism; she talked the language of the streets, the woods, and the working class from which she came.” In fact, Judi was an intellectual who became an anti-intellectual, succumbing to the New Age rituals, time capsule hippie-ism and the pseudo-mysticism of many of her constituents she privately ridiculed. JB’s gifts as a speaker and writer inspired Redwood Summer but she wasn’t enough of an intellectual to get past the adulation of toadies, and not enough of an intellectual to make the movement grow.

JUDI BARI did not come from the working class, loosely defined here as people who work for wages. She was a daughter of securely middleclass parents who had been communists in their youth. Nor was she a union organizer. Judi helped organize one wildcat strike among post office workers in opposition to the existing, conservative postal union. Most condescending of all to the memory of the old girl is this fatuous statement: “She introduced many to the notion (notion?) that it was the industry owners and not the workers who were responsible for forest destruction. She built bridges with (sic) the loggers and millworkers, helping injured sawmill workers start an IWW labor union at a nearby Georgia Pacific mill.” Even the dimmest flower child understands that loggers aren’t responsible for corporate policy. Judi did try to get past the snobbery infecting many of the more privileged environmentalists who’ve never lived with the wolf at the door. Her bridge-building from hippies in the hills to the 8-5 people was much over-rated because it’s impossible to “organize” people from outside the work place. 

THE IWW organizing was farcical (as is the IWW these days) and conducted solely to get some grant money out of the present day romantics dominating the organization as they trade on the lives of much braver men and women. Judi wrote a fine account of an L-P mill worker — George Alexander — who was nearly killed at L-P’s Cloverdale mill when a piece of debris flew off the huge sawlog blade at his work site, almost decapitating him. Alexander, a young Hopland guy with a strong sense of himself, refused L-P’s attempts to take him on the road as a professional victim of environmental terrorism. L-P wound up fighting Alexander for injury benefits after they’d loudly put it falsely out everywhere that the debris that had nearly killed him was  an Earth First! tree spike.

WHOEVER wrote the record promo hasn’t even taken the time to get Judi Bari’s best efforts down correctly. Judi Bari, like Cherney, had a genius for self-promotion. Her legacy, for the worshippers who think in terms of legacies, is mixed, to put it gently. A serious political person, after all, would have set up her foundation to carry on political struggle, but Judi Bari’s foundation collects money to benefit her daughters, both of them are well protected by the wealthy families of both their parents.

ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] Remember the song “Feelin’ Groovy’, by the group Harpers Bazaar’, from back in the day? FEELIN’ GROOVY! Do you think people dosed on Tranq & Fentanyl stumbling around Kensington in Philadelphia are “Feelin’ Groovy’? Fentanyl appears to kill you, Tranq turns you into a Zombie, then kills you. If some of the 60s icons (and a little later) who promoted drug abuse — Ken Kesey, Tim Leary, Jerry Garcia, Lou Reed, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Andy Warhol’s crowd — could come back now and take a look around, would they be ‘Feelin’ Groovy’? But Marlin, Kesey & Leary were all about hallucinogenics, that’s all. Maybe. But Corso & Garcia died heroin addicts, ‘Feelin’ Groovy’ to the end. TPTB don’t seem too determined to stop the inflow of fentanyl that is killing roughly 2000 young people per week in the USA. It’s coming across the Mexican border, & Sec. Mayorkas appears to be under orders to keep the border wide open.

[2] Mr. Boynton was an excellent teacher. As for kids not being able to read or write, presumably because of their schooling before high school: the trick to getting kids to read is to give them a wide variety of reading experiences when young children, by reading to them, and reading not just the most popular new books but some older ones as well. They then become “literate”‘ in that they are okay with many kinds of literature. They also develop the patience needed to plow through “difficult” books.

Also, book banning is probably not helping the situation. We should be adding more choices, not taking away books.

In addition, not all parents have time to read to their kids, or sometimes even the inclination. That is a situation that is pretty hard to remedy. We need to find a way to encourage “older readers” (parents of young children) so that they love reading and set an example to their kids. Sound hopeless, due to the current trend toward more online activity and TV? If we want smarter kids we are going to have to figure it out. Maybe elementary schools could sponsor groups of parents meeting for reading and discussion. I know, that is ridiculous since parents have their hands full after school. However, maybe the kids could do art projects or have tutoring and study groups while the parents are enjoying a little time safely away from them, even if it does involve reading and discussion. Then, when kids observe their parents reading and enjoying books at home, they may become curious and therefore motivated. If books are anathema at home, how can we expect kids to get into reading on their own?

[3] I had a friend with whom I would often debate political issues. One day we talked about prepping for the supposed coming collapse of everything. I mentioned having food storage and asked if he was working on his food storage. He looked at me and with what could only be interpreted as “coldness” in his eyes, said, and I quote: “Why do I need to store food, I could just come get yours.” He smiled and laughed it off but deep down I knew he was serious. My advice? Don’t tell people about your food storage or prepper supplies. Keep it a secret. The fewer people who know the less likely you’ll be robbed or killed for your supplies.

[4] Banning guns might or might not lessen violent acts. But either way, this won't stop the large number of murders committed by other means. Putting focus only on banning guns, keeps us from addressing the most important factor: why do we have so many violent crazy people out there and how do we prevent, treat, or stop the violent crazies. Disclaimer: I only am speaking from a standpoint of logical analysis. I have never and would never own a gun and I don't advocate others owning guns. 

[5] Ah yes, “the current mode of living”. I was fortunate enough to be born at a time that I could see the working remnants of “another mode of living” that didn’t involve electricity and automobiles. A great grandfather of mine was successful in business with a small factory he owned, and in the 1890’s built a victorian style small mansion for his family. Five bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, and 12 foot high ceilings so that hot air in summertime would gather up on the ceiling, leaving things a bit cooler below. The house had working shutters on the windows and almost each room had fireplace in it that was set up to burn coal or wood. It was a state of the art home for 1890 and he thought he was living like a king. The interior had a lot of machine carved oak woodwork and long banisters for kids to ride down on. It was grandma’s house when I was a small child, but by the 40’s it had been upgraded of course with modern plumbing, electricity, and central heat. 

The point of all this is that the lifestyle enjoyed by affluent people 130 years ago would be completely unacceptable today. My great grandma came from humble origins and she couldn’t have imagined a life more splendid than the one she enjoyed in the beginning decades of the 1900’s. 

But today’s woman would find her life with no electricity, no car, and a 2 digit phone number in a small town to be absolutely unacceptable. If forced to live like this today I can see a lot of American females going barking mad, hysterical, crying and whining constantly, and then maybe after a few months or years of this killing themselves and getting what they perceive to be misery over with. 

Yet people will repeat over and over about how much better we have it today. That we are so much better off than our forebears regarding lifestyles. 

What a bunch of gaslighting bullcrap!