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Nextavenue ran this article about how one of the more pleasant surprises expats report is that living abroad in places like Panama is that it reminds them of what it was like when they were growing up in the US or Canada.

 

Why Expat Retirees Feel Like They’re in 1950s America

http://www.nextavenue.org/expat-retirees-1950s-america/

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  • I agree with you, Jim. Living in a rural semi-area (or sub-suburb) anywhere in the developed world is like living in the 50's but with all the modern conveniences and reliable infrastructure at your fingertips.

  • Interesting one Chuck. I recall someone telling me years ago that living here was like the US in the 50's except that there is Internet and cell phones.

    Well since I was born in the late 50's hard for me to say but sure, there have been times when I understood the anology.

    It's changing though - for good or bad. The rapid growth here is incredible but then again, is it any different than what I saw in South Florida all the years I lived there? I think that is a hypothetical question.

    I do remember when David had only one traffic light though LOL. Sure many others do too!

    Saludos
    • Hi, Val.  Thanks for your comment.

      Of course, it's not meant to be a perfect analogy, and the reason I wrote it is to point out certain aspects of life which do have some similarities, which both you and I picked up on.

      Have a great day!

  • No. It is similar here to the mid and late eighties in Spain. I worked in Spain from 1975 till 1989. 

  • Wallowing in nostalgia isn't productive. While the occasional pleasant memory of something in the past is comforting, the wholesale longing for a different era is meaningless and whiny. Moreover, it's usually accompanied by total forgetfulness of all the things not pleasant or admirable about that particular time. When pining over the fifties, for example, McCarthyism springs to mind. Wasn't this also the era of the "little woman" staying home and cooking and cleaning in her high heels, a la Mrs. Beaver?

    • With the passing to time, sometimes we learn things about the past that we didn't know at the time. Here is an example:

      WASHINGTON — Although Joseph McCarthy was one of the most demonized American politicians of the last century, new information — including half-century-old FBI recordings of Soviet embassy conversations — are showing that McCarthy was right in nearly all his accusations.

      “With Joe McCarthy it was the losers who’ve written the history which condemns him,” said Dan Flynn, director of Accuracy in Academia’s recent national conference on McCarthy, broadcast by C-SPAN.

      Using new information obtained from studies of old Soviet files in Moscow and now the famous Venona Intercepts — FBI recordings of Soviet embassy communications between 1944-48 — the record is showing that McCarthy was essentially right. He had many weaknesses, but almost every case he charged has now been proven correct. Whether it was stealing atomic secrets or influencing U.S. foreign policy, communist victories in the 1940s were fed by an incredibly vast spy and influence network.

      The conference, a gathering of old McCarthyites and younger scholars, commemorated the senator’s first speech, in Wheeling, W. Va., 50 years ago, when he first held up a list of names of employees of the State Department whom, he said, were major security risks. McCarthy questioned how, in six short years after America’s winning of World War II, the communist world was triumphant and had expanded to include 800 million people.

      Of the lists, a key one consisted of 108 names from a House Appropriations Committee report, of persons declared as “security risks” in the State Department — the Lee List. The House committee chairman had complained that State wasn’t bothering to do anything about the suspects. Details of the list and its accusations were presented at the conference.

      Speakers detailed many of the cover-ups used to smear McCarthy. Veteran journalist and teacher Stan Evans, director of National Journalism Center, told of the Tydings Committee, which had investigated McCarthy’s charges of communists in government. Its report had exonerated everybody. Among the accused it stated categorically that there was no evidence against Owen Lattimore, a man McCarthy said was a major figure in the communist conspiracy. Lattimore had been Roosevelt’s key advisor on China policy. Yet Evans showed evidence from 5,000 pages of FBI files on him — files released only a few years ago to the public, although the White House had access to them.

      However, evidence before the committee showed that Lattimore had supported Soviet policy at every turn, even declaring that the Stalin purge trials in Russia, “sound like democracy to me.” With then-Vice President Henry Wallace in Russia, Lattimore compared concentration camps to the Tennessee Valley Authority, and later urged Washington to abandon China to communism and to withdraw from Japan and Korea. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who had fed information to McCarthy, broke with him afterwards, fearing McCarthy would prejudice FBI sources of information for its criminal prosecutions.

      Although most of McCarthy’s cases involved actual spies and “security risks,” the really important issue was that of communist influence over American foreign policy, argued Evans. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest advisor who lived in the White House, had regular contacts with Soviet intelligence. He helped bring about the disastrous Yalta and Pottsdam agreements. The Morganthau Plan, to prevent German reconstruction and starve the Germans to make them desperate enough to go communist, was the product of Laughlin Currie and Harry Dexter White at the Treasury Department. The abandonment of Chiang Kai-shek by denying military support was the product of “China Hands” led by John Stewart Service, John Patton Davies, and Lattimore. Evans described other major spy networks — in England, the Burgess Maclean group which infiltrated Washington as well as London.

      Reed Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media, told how he himself had been a leftist in his early career. He had been against McCarthy, but McCarthy’s speeches had made him think and start to read “evidence that I had avoided.” He described how all during his military career as a Marine officer and later in Japan with the U.S. occupation he had never hidden his leftist views and later had even been offered a job at the CIA. Irvine argued that real communists were only in the hundreds, but that thousands of leftists, such as he, all feared McCarthy and had wanted him discredited.

      Pulling all the latest evidence together was luncheon speaker Professor Arthur Herman. His new book, “Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator,” and featured in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, shows the vindication of most of McCarthy’s charges. Herman, who is also coordinator of the Smithsonian’s Western Heritage Program, said that the accuracy of McCarthy’s charges “was no longer a matter of debate,” that they are “now accepted as fact.” However, the term “McCarthyism” still remains in the language.

      • The NY Times Magazine article is an interesting read; thanks for pointing it out. Your points are well-taken, and, of course, parallels can be drawn with the current political climate in the U.S. To my mind, "McCarthyism" has principally meant bullying and hectoring. The dictionary adds to that an element of insufficient information on which to base bullying and hectoring behavior.

    • Many "good old folks" reminisce about the "good old days". Today they do via PC or with a smartphone in hand...

      It's a bit like the protesters at a "save the forests" rally holding up huge cardboard  posters...:-)

  • Yeah, kinda......but I dont remember computer smart phones in everybodies hands at all hours of the day and nite........You can hardly get anybodies attention anymore cuz theyre already bizy chattin or gabbin........you have to whatsapp em to get a response.........but I suppose it is a universal phenomena....altho I do think its worse here in Panama for whatever reasons you may surmise.........And for the most part the kids dont come lookin for jobs here like we did in "Leave it to Beaver" era.......paper routes, mowing yards in the neighborhood, washing cars........they dont wanna work here........theyre much too bizy foolin around on their phones......I seriously think smart phones are "weapons of mass destruction".......jaja....

    • Unfortunately, in Panama, kids under 18 are not permitted to work.  That should be changed.   It has the effect of "forced equality."  In just about every society there are some people with more motivation to work and make money to be able  to have things they want or need. To disallow that is sort of an extension of wearing school uniforms, maybe.  As with some governments and political parties, maybe it's a matter of equal misery instead of equal opportunity.

      The law may be related to the generally low incomes  among the lower economic groups.  Kids working could depress wages.  I don't know what the rationale was.

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