Most Baby Boomers came of age in the 1960's, an era of unprecedented personal freedom (often crossing the border into license) and minimal responsibilities. My cohort was one of the first generations ever born who did not have to deal with privation and material need. ("Needing a good stereo" in 1968 did not and does not qualify as a "need"; needing shelter does, as the victims of Katrina have discovered.) Coming of age in an America which was daily producing more and more material goods, food, luxuries, meant that we did not have to deal with the Hobbesian reality much of the world still faces everyday.
Our worries were not existential; Vietnam was a distant country in which we were mired in a war that appeared to have no end, for reasons that were relatively foreign to our day to day concerns, but most of the children of privilege had college deferments through the late 60's. Most of us were much too precious to risk our lives on such a misbegotten quest in the service of people on the other side of the globe. Few even had the decency to feel ashamed when close to a million South Vietnamese died after we abandoned them to the tender merices of the communist "liberators".
Our parents, having lived through WWII, had unwittingly but understandingly, invested their hopes and dreams for a better, easier, life in their children; we were all "Sun Kings" in miniature. Because we never faced the kinds of existential dilemmas that almost all prior generations had to confront, we were not forced by reality to become adults. The outcome has been, and continues to be, a prolonged adolescence for far too many of my generation. This has had a powerful effect on our political discourse, continues to infect it with its own aura of irrationality, and suggests ways to approach our current inter-generational and intramural conflicts.
The privileged children of the elites and much of the middle class had the ability and the means to prolong their adolescence in some of the finest universities in the land. The universities rewarded competence with words and the ability to dexterously play with concepts over the need to actually produce anything real. I do not doubt that ideas can be among the most powerful forces in the universe, however, when there is a surfeit of people producing ideas rather than "real objects", as with any other endeavor, many of the products will be of inferior quality. Since the universities never had to test the ideas they developed in the real world, there was nothing to stop the proliferation of nonsense. In fact, there was no way to distinguish sense from nonsense. In the world that favors and rewards linguistic facility, ideas are evaluated by their elegance, not by their utility. It is no coincidence then, that so many of the products of these universities gravitated toward just those professions that reward linguistic agility: Academia, Hollywood, the Media, and law figuring prominently among them. The disconnect between those who produce things (cars, washing machines, wheat, roads, etc) and those who produce words has only grown over the years as the American and the global economy have become exponentially more efficient.
Bill Whittle, in his now famous essay divided the populace into tribes: the vast majority of sheep, the small minority of wolves, and the guardian sheep dogs (often, during peaceful times, confused by the sheep with predators.) I would add to his taxonomy another axis of those who are actors in the world, who create, directly or indirectly, tangible objects versus those who are essentially passive observers of the world; obviously there would be a great overlap between the active with the wolves and sheepdogs as well as between the passive and the sheep, but it goes further than that. Not every engineer is a sheepdog, but all of them are in a position to actually produce a product that is used and tested in the real world. It is an invaluable aid to the engineer who only cares if his product works, and can justifiably take great pride in his accomplishments when they do, at the risk of suffering blows to his self esteem when his products fail (hopefully in the testing rather than the using phase.) The person who makes his living by way of words and concepts rarely has an opportunity to test his ideas in the real world; as a result, failure has no consequences (beyond its effect on self esteem) and in fact is defined much differently than for the engineer (or the soldier, policeman, fireman, etc). The most important outcome of such an arrangement is that the wordsmith ultimately has very little power.
The Adolescent lives in a state of weakness and frustration. They have a minimal ability to create, and even less of an ability to impress their imprint on reality. Oh, they have plenty of ability to frustrate and enrage their parents and siblings, but that is hardly the kind of power that changes a society.
It should be clear where I am heading with this: If the Adolescent lives in a state of weakness and frustration, then the Eternal Adolescent lives in a perpetual state of weakness and frustration.
Bruce Springsteen once captured their dilemma perfectly when he sang:
I feel so weak, I just want to explode.
We see this impotent explosion everyday in our fading legacy media. Jon Ham wrote about this yesterday, A Gathering Storm for the Media. After describing some of the memes being used by the MSMocrats to discredit and attack Bush, he points out the danger inherent in the media's frantic efforts to obfuscate rather than enlighten:
Polls show that, unlike the media, the public does not blame Bush for the hurricane, the rioting, the looting, the stranded pets, the drowning deaths or the levee breaks. That means that the public doesn’t believe what the media are reporting. That’s the real gathering storm.
The loss of credibility of large parts of the old MSMocrats may finally redress an imbalance between the actors and the observers that was established at the end of the 60's and has carried over to the present. The era of perception trumping reality is fading, under assault by the forces of reality. The best evidence comes from the mouths of the young. Here, from Laura Curtis two days ago, is a story of an agenda driven journalist colliding with her 15 year old daughter; it is the sound of hope that the battle to re-establish reality's primacy is being won:
My daughter and I were watching a reporter in Baton Rouge - Stephanie Something-or-other - on WWL report on how long the power is expected to be out in New Orleans. This Stephanie said that she had discussed it with the experts, with the people responsible for getting the power back on, and they told her that they expected to have it on in 6-8 weeks for most of the metro area. Stephanie then proceeded to say that she just did not see how that was possible given what she has been told by other people reporting on this problem. She spent at least twice as long explaining that the experts were wrong, in her opinion - and even said, I'm no engineer, but I just don't see how this is possible. She offered no evidence whatsoever. Only a vague reference to her chats with other reporters and bystanders.
I asked my 15 year old daughter who is not a regular news watcher if she thought anything was wrong with the report. (We homeschool moms have to try to make a teachable moment out of everything. It's obnoxious, I know.) My daughter replied that she couldn't figure out why the reporter thinks she's smarter than the engineers and experts, and wondered why the reporter was trying to make things seem even worse than they already are.
The emperors of the MSM may have elegant clothes... but a child can see they have no clue.
Tomorrow: Treatment Options.
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