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You Might Be Writing Evergreen Material and Not Realize It
Wait long enough and change some names, and what was old is now new again.
While we’ve seen certain things we have never seen before in the last few years, some subjects seem to go in cycles Energy prices are an example of this. When gasoline prices explode, politicians on the right will scream, “Drill Baby Drill,” while those on the left will talk about the need for alternative fuel sources.
Well, old guys like me have a backlog of material about high energy costs. I break it out every decade or so. While this situation is deplorable, it does lead to recycling. Of stuff I’ve written before.
It also leads to recycling of old lines of political rhetoric, which in the words of Shakespeare, are “full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”
Some things have become taboo.
In years gone by, politicians could be fit into stereotypes and become the targets of jokes. For example, Bill Clinton was categorized as a womanizer and a guy who liked to eat. Today jokes about womanizing are pretty well off the table and eating jokes are a little dicey themselves. As Jerry Seinfeld said, “not that there’s anything wrong with that.” But the landscape is different.
