Posted by
Bill Crawford on Monday, June 07, 2010 11:53:16 AM
I bring this up constantly, in part it is a lesson I learned the hard way when I was younger.
The state of political discourse in this country is a joke. People are yelling at each other on the tube and on radio all the time. People talk at each other instead of exchanging ideas. My answer to that is, get used to it. It is a cyclical thing, and it is not primarily a political chasm.
It is generational. It is about values. The political differences are symptoms, the disease is culture vs. counter-culture.
It is the contemporary wave of a recurring phenomenon here.
There is a reason why we set our dinner plates like Europeans, with fork left and knife right, but unlike the folks across the pond, after we get done cutting, we switch the fork over to the right to eat. Do you know why this happens? Because circa 1770, the arguments between pro-independence colonists and Tories was so virulent that it became polite to eat with the knife in the weaker hand, so the table fights were less likely to cause injury.
Four generations later, the battles between the states rights people and the Abolitionists were legendary. Four more generations later, the battles between the isolationists and the New Dealers were just as viscious. In each case, the winners of the debate wrote the history, and the losers went to their graves kicking and screaming.
Well, here we are again. Pick an issue, pick a side. I have both feet set in concrete on the culture side of the new war, and you could probably predict my views on a whole host of issues. The point is, this will not be over until the bulk of the Baby Boomers are pushing up daisies, and that isn't going to be any time soon.
Each of the other three chasms culminated in a huge effort that allowed one side to "win" and write the history- the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and WWII. The losers never stopped grumbling and protesting, they simply became textbook footnotes.
Well, a defining crisis is almost upon us. I think it will be America and Europe finally dealing with the radical Muslim problem. When we finally decide to act, it will remove the left from political congruity in the national debate here, just as Senator Taft went from being a debate center in 1940 to a grumbling old man in 1944.
That will only take the top off the acrimony here. The center will wish the left just shut up while the crisis is being dealt with, but Boomers were born with open yaps and had nobody to slap some common sense into them when they were young enough to still listen.
After it is over, the winners will write the textbooks for the children and the losers will continue to spittle on their blogs and whatever talk shows let them on. By then, it will become less topical and more an annoying white noise for all of us to try and tune out.
For the record, the structure of this homily is based not on my work, but the astounding generation research of Neal Strauss and William Howe, which I am always conscious of when I push forward on my book writing. Their seminal book, "Generations" was first published around 1990 and they had no idea which direction the elder Boomers would go in.