9:36 AM
Charles Quinn
Eugene Robinson has an interesting commentary in today’s paper though I think his conclusion is off the mark. People are people no matter what political party (or race) they belong to.
I have had people treat me in ways that I thought were unfair. I have had people abuse me simply because they had the power to do it and in both of these situations I found myself plotting to get even. I never actually picked up a gun and went and shot anybody instead I plotted elaborate scenarios as to how I could ruin this person’s life but never be accused of anything. How common a reaction do you think that is? If I had to guess I’d say very.
Expand this situation to American politics and you have the gist of Mr. Robinsons article. Wasn’t it Plato that said ‘society is the individual writ large?’ I think that’s right.
What we have today in politics more or less started with Vietnam but it’s roots go back to the beginning of the 20th century when two successive generations had to fight two world wars.
It’s difficult to explain the way war changes someone to people who haven’t fought in one and unnecessary to explain to those who have. War creates a bond that is unlike any other. In those two wars everyone pitched in and worked together for the good of the country.
Men from all walks of life, with very different ideas about religion and race, about conservative and progressive, about right and wrong volunteered to serve something larger than themselves and their personal world view. They came from small towns and city slums. They lived in brownstone walkups and Norman Rockwell paintings. They worked in factories and on farms, on wall street and main street.
Those who stayed home bought war bonds and saved rubber. They volunteered in hospitals and USOs. They did without things they were used to having so the men at the front could be supplied. And they held on tight to each other knowing that they were all worried sick about their sons and husbands and fathers who were in harm’s way. Everybody had a stake in the outcome. They were all in it together.
When they returned to civilian life, went back to their cities and farms, their interaction with society carried the imprint of the bond they had shared. They had seen things and been places none of them ever imagined and as a result they were less restricted by their personal view of the world. They had fought side by side toward one common goal and realized that teamwork was the most important part of achieving their objective.
Translate that to millions of people shifting from war to peace and you find that every walk of American life was influenced by those wartime experiences. In politics it meant that even though you disagreed you found a way to work out those disagreements not only because it was the only way to get things done but because it was for the good of the country.
What followed was an unprecedented economic expansion precisely because these men and women worked together, just as they had during the war, for the good of the family, for the good of the company, for the good of the country. They had had enough of war. They never wanted to subject their children to the horrors they had to experience. They hoped, against hope, that they had fought and won the ‘war to end all wars’.
Then came Vietnam.
It’s impossible to think about politics today without Vietnam and it’s impossible to think about Vietnam without thinking about the baby boomers. So let’s start with them
From Wikipedia:
Seventy-six million American children were born between 1945 and 1964. In general, baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values. In Europe and North America boomers are widely associated with privilege, as many grew up in a time of affluence. As a group, they were the healthiest, and wealthiest generation to that time, and amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time.
One of the unique features of Boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about. This rhetoric had an important impact in the self-perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon.
One of the things that made them special, at least in their own minds, was their ability to forgo the rigid social constraints of their parents. This led to a signature aspect of boomers – finding themselves.
They were now free to experiment socially without regard to race or religion. They experimented sexually by abandoning what was widely regarded as the quaint notion of sexual abstinence until marriage. They discarded the traditional notions of hard work and getting ahead. Above all they weren’t about to go out and get themselves shot in a foreign country of dubious strategic importance.
While this ‘phenomenon’ was predominant in cities it was by no means limited to them. However, small towns all across America, particularly in the Midwest, were still living an American Graffiti life for the most part and their children had retained a much stronger alliance with the attitudes of their parents.
As the 60’s unfolded and war escalated an ever widening gulf opened between WWII parents and their children, between the city raised children and those from the country, between what now began to be called ‘the silent majority’ and everyone else.
Again from Wikipedia:
The silent majority is an unspecified large majority of people in a country or group who do not express their opinions publicly. The term was popularized (though not first used) by U.S. President Richard Nixon in a November 3, 1969, speech in which he said, "And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support." In this usage it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time, who did not join in the counterculture, and who did not participate in public discourse. Nixon along with many others saw this group as being overshadowed in the media by the more vocal minority.
Nixon's silent majority referred mainly to the older generation (those World War II veterans in all parts of the U.S.) but it also described many young people in the Midwest, West and in the South, many of whom eventually served in Vietnam. The Silent Majority was mostly populated by blue collar people who did not take an active part in politics. They did, in some cases, support the conservative policies of many politicians. Others were not particularly conservative politically, but resented what they saw as disrespect for American institutions.
If this all sounds familiar it should. It’s slogans may have changed, the ferocity with which the fight is waged may be different but the foundation of today’s political conflict and subsequent ‘take no prisoners’ gridlock was laid here. The major distinction is the complete role reversal from the 60’s to now.
The final straw, the one that broke the ‘silent majority’s back, was Watergate. Then as now the facts were discarded in favor of a narrative which laid blame everywhere but at the President’s doorstep.
This brings us back to Mr. Robinson and to being abused. To quote the piece:
One thing that struck me from the beginning about the Tea Party rhetoric is the idea of reclaiming something that has been taken away. At a recent campaign rally in Paducah, Ky., Senate candidate Rand Paul, a darling of the Tea Party movement, drew thunderous applause when he said that if Republicans win, "we get to go to Washington and take back our government." Take it back from whom?
On Sunday, in a last-minute fundraising appeal, Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee implored his supporters to help "return American government to the American people." Again, who's in possession of the government, if not the American people?
So who stole the government? What makes some people feel more disenfranchised now than they were, say, during the presidency of George W. Bush? After all, it was Bush who inherited a budget surplus and left behind a suffocating deficit - I'm not being tendentious, just stating the facts. It was Bush who launched two wars without making any provision in the budget to pay for them, who proposed and won an expensive new prescription-drug entitlement without paying for it, who bailed out irresponsible Wall Street firms with the $700 billion TARP program. Bush was vilified by critics while he was in office but not with the suggestion that somehow the government had been seized or usurped - that it had fallen into hands that were not those of "the American people." Yet this is the Tea Party suggestion about Obama.
It’s taken the country more than 40 years to get here. As things generally go in cycles perhaps in another 40 the wheel will have turned again. There are several questions voters should be asking themselves as this election draws to a close.
The first is can we wait? Wait for jobs, wait for Congress to do their job, wait for change.
The second is – if we just wait and see what will happen to our children, to our grandchildren?
The last is – does history provide us a lesson, a path to follow that doesn’t require Washington?
I won’t hazard a guess as to the answers for one and two but as for number three – the answer is an emphatic and unqualified yes.
I have had people treat me in ways that I thought were unfair. I have had people abuse me simply because they had the power to do it and in both of these situations I found myself plotting to get even. I never actually picked up a gun and went and shot anybody instead I plotted elaborate scenarios as to how I could ruin this person’s life but never be accused of anything. How common a reaction do you think that is? If I had to guess I’d say very.
Expand this situation to American politics and you have the gist of Mr. Robinsons article. Wasn’t it Plato that said ‘society is the individual writ large?’ I think that’s right.
What we have today in politics more or less started with Vietnam but it’s roots go back to the beginning of the 20th century when two successive generations had to fight two world wars.
It’s difficult to explain the way war changes someone to people who haven’t fought in one and unnecessary to explain to those who have. War creates a bond that is unlike any other. In those two wars everyone pitched in and worked together for the good of the country.
Men from all walks of life, with very different ideas about religion and race, about conservative and progressive, about right and wrong volunteered to serve something larger than themselves and their personal world view. They came from small towns and city slums. They lived in brownstone walkups and Norman Rockwell paintings. They worked in factories and on farms, on wall street and main street.
Those who stayed home bought war bonds and saved rubber. They volunteered in hospitals and USOs. They did without things they were used to having so the men at the front could be supplied. And they held on tight to each other knowing that they were all worried sick about their sons and husbands and fathers who were in harm’s way. Everybody had a stake in the outcome. They were all in it together.
When they returned to civilian life, went back to their cities and farms, their interaction with society carried the imprint of the bond they had shared. They had seen things and been places none of them ever imagined and as a result they were less restricted by their personal view of the world. They had fought side by side toward one common goal and realized that teamwork was the most important part of achieving their objective.
Translate that to millions of people shifting from war to peace and you find that every walk of American life was influenced by those wartime experiences. In politics it meant that even though you disagreed you found a way to work out those disagreements not only because it was the only way to get things done but because it was for the good of the country.
What followed was an unprecedented economic expansion precisely because these men and women worked together, just as they had during the war, for the good of the family, for the good of the company, for the good of the country. They had had enough of war. They never wanted to subject their children to the horrors they had to experience. They hoped, against hope, that they had fought and won the ‘war to end all wars’.
Then came Vietnam.
It’s impossible to think about politics today without Vietnam and it’s impossible to think about Vietnam without thinking about the baby boomers. So let’s start with them
From Wikipedia:
Seventy-six million American children were born between 1945 and 1964. In general, baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values. In Europe and North America boomers are widely associated with privilege, as many grew up in a time of affluence. As a group, they were the healthiest, and wealthiest generation to that time, and amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time.
One of the unique features of Boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about. This rhetoric had an important impact in the self-perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon.
One of the things that made them special, at least in their own minds, was their ability to forgo the rigid social constraints of their parents. This led to a signature aspect of boomers – finding themselves.
They were now free to experiment socially without regard to race or religion. They experimented sexually by abandoning what was widely regarded as the quaint notion of sexual abstinence until marriage. They discarded the traditional notions of hard work and getting ahead. Above all they weren’t about to go out and get themselves shot in a foreign country of dubious strategic importance.
While this ‘phenomenon’ was predominant in cities it was by no means limited to them. However, small towns all across America, particularly in the Midwest, were still living an American Graffiti life for the most part and their children had retained a much stronger alliance with the attitudes of their parents.
As the 60’s unfolded and war escalated an ever widening gulf opened between WWII parents and their children, between the city raised children and those from the country, between what now began to be called ‘the silent majority’ and everyone else.
Again from Wikipedia:
The silent majority is an unspecified large majority of people in a country or group who do not express their opinions publicly. The term was popularized (though not first used) by U.S. President Richard Nixon in a November 3, 1969, speech in which he said, "And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support." In this usage it referred to those Americans who did not join in the large demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the time, who did not join in the counterculture, and who did not participate in public discourse. Nixon along with many others saw this group as being overshadowed in the media by the more vocal minority.
Nixon's silent majority referred mainly to the older generation (those World War II veterans in all parts of the U.S.) but it also described many young people in the Midwest, West and in the South, many of whom eventually served in Vietnam. The Silent Majority was mostly populated by blue collar people who did not take an active part in politics. They did, in some cases, support the conservative policies of many politicians. Others were not particularly conservative politically, but resented what they saw as disrespect for American institutions.
If this all sounds familiar it should. It’s slogans may have changed, the ferocity with which the fight is waged may be different but the foundation of today’s political conflict and subsequent ‘take no prisoners’ gridlock was laid here. The major distinction is the complete role reversal from the 60’s to now.
The final straw, the one that broke the ‘silent majority’s back, was Watergate. Then as now the facts were discarded in favor of a narrative which laid blame everywhere but at the President’s doorstep.
This brings us back to Mr. Robinson and to being abused. To quote the piece:
One thing that struck me from the beginning about the Tea Party rhetoric is the idea of reclaiming something that has been taken away. At a recent campaign rally in Paducah, Ky., Senate candidate Rand Paul, a darling of the Tea Party movement, drew thunderous applause when he said that if Republicans win, "we get to go to Washington and take back our government." Take it back from whom?
On Sunday, in a last-minute fundraising appeal, Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee implored his supporters to help "return American government to the American people." Again, who's in possession of the government, if not the American people?
So who stole the government? What makes some people feel more disenfranchised now than they were, say, during the presidency of George W. Bush? After all, it was Bush who inherited a budget surplus and left behind a suffocating deficit - I'm not being tendentious, just stating the facts. It was Bush who launched two wars without making any provision in the budget to pay for them, who proposed and won an expensive new prescription-drug entitlement without paying for it, who bailed out irresponsible Wall Street firms with the $700 billion TARP program. Bush was vilified by critics while he was in office but not with the suggestion that somehow the government had been seized or usurped - that it had fallen into hands that were not those of "the American people." Yet this is the Tea Party suggestion about Obama.
It’s taken the country more than 40 years to get here. As things generally go in cycles perhaps in another 40 the wheel will have turned again. There are several questions voters should be asking themselves as this election draws to a close.
The first is can we wait? Wait for jobs, wait for Congress to do their job, wait for change.
The second is – if we just wait and see what will happen to our children, to our grandchildren?
The last is – does history provide us a lesson, a path to follow that doesn’t require Washington?
I won’t hazard a guess as to the answers for one and two but as for number three – the answer is an emphatic and unqualified yes.
