Gary says
Gary resting his foot on a lava bed on the Big Island of Hawai‘i (photo taken May 2008).
Gary comments on a NYT op-ed piece.
This is a great little piece. It doesn’t say that much, but what it does say is very on-point. We have a “tanks for the cash” Obama & Michelle postcard on our refrigerator and I think we fully qualify as Obama customers, and one of the things I like most is that he is not a member. And it’s not just that (as some commentator I forget who pointed out) he wouldn’t be admitted in Karl Rove’s country club even if he applied. He’s not a belonger at all. To the list of things Obama is in but not of, the writer of the NYT piece could have added the Democratic Party.
I liked the following passage:
If you grew up in the 1950s, you were inclined to regard your identity as something you were born with. If you grew up in the 1970s, you were more likely to regard your identity as something you created.
It’s a simplistic but fundamentally pretty accurate remark. Interestingly this graph leaves out the Boomer peak and the largest voter cohort, people coming of age in the 60s. This is the age group squarely between Obama and McCain in age. Mike and I have long called us the “New Frontier Children” because we took the whole brunt of the New Frontier ethos that dominated public schools from elementary to high school grades and sent an unprecedented wave of middle and lower-middle-class kids into colleges and universities honestly expecting to “ask not what,” “light a candle” and “have a dream,” to borrow some speech snatches. New Frontier kids were prepped and primed to draw their identity neither from their place of birth nor from self-construction. New Frontier kids were taught to draw their identity from the movements for social change that surrounded them and dominated the public scene from the mid-50s to the “end of movements” in the late-70s malaise era and the rise of the still-dominant reactionary period. You didn’t build identity—it came to you gratis—a lot of it on the radio–but it did not come from the past, it came from the (presumed)incipient future and ultimately from the rise of the FM band that freed us from Dick Clark. A perfect local-to-UVA image of it might be the way the lapel buttons from very first Earth Day were simply inverted and worn as makeshift Peace Symbol buttons at the Kent State rallies that spontaneously broke out the next day. The NFs were members and joiners par excellance and in a big hurry to be the first whenever possible—first to oppose Vietnam, first to use college degrees for digging wells in Filthistan for the Peace Corps, first feminists, first environmentalists, first affirmative actionists, just like so many of them were “first in their family” to go to college, to have a professional degree, to make over $20,000 a year and on and on. We were literally groomed to be barrier-smashers in the most premeditated way and the beneficiaries were literally supposed to be other (oppressed, repressed or otherwise dressed) people. The process of turning 30, and seeing the geek who hosted Death Valley Days for the Borax Corporation fundamentally re-convert the whole sphere of public policy back to serving the rich at the expense of everyone else, set off the Great Disllusionment a.k.a. the Coming of the Shadow, and the various legions of the New Frontier marched off in all directions–though to be sure all roads seemed to lead to consumerism somehow.
All this operative history is yet another milieu Obama doesn’t fit into. He’s not a crusade and not a frontier, and his rhetoric is about verbally framing the shells of policy—what they call “positions.” As he constructs and reconstructs his positions we can’t help but unconsciously recognize that this is not how any of the old Movement veterans (an HRC, for instance) would have done it—and, like R.E.M. or Pearl Jam or any of the other new groups, we might discover that we like this music but it sort of “comes after our time.” It’s understandably hard to be completely comfortable about that since we New Frontierists are supposed to still be so goldarned permanently young, after all.
The following exchange is between Gary and his friend Mike.
Mike: Wow, dude, very interesting thread! I was struck by the image that Brooks went to great lengths to construct for us. He pointed out that Obama continuously was in, but not of, many endeavors, and venues. I believe Brooks is showing off his framing skills. I read the piece, and was impressed by Brooks’ thesis. I finished the piece with the recognition that the writer had made his points, and well, too. Then, I read your piece, Gary, and I love how you voice our past. I also found truth in the identity paragraph, remembered the resonant feeling of truth. So I give Brooks cred for that. But, as I reread the article, I kept feeling like this was sophisticated character assassination. A recitation of accomplishments, poisoned with the apparent attempt to further the “elite” meme. Identifying BO as the “OTHER.” I mean, from where I’m standing, Brooks is disparaging some of the very qualities that make for an eminently qualified leader of people. I am glad that BO moved on from his past, and wonder what our country might be facing if he had stayed a community organizer, or college professor. The campaign wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as it has been.
I’m glad I read Brooks’ article. Your follow-up was real good, IMO. My only quarrel is with Brooks’ framing. He still is a neo-con shill, and his slime trail is long. In case you’re wondering why I don’t like Brooks, I have read enough of his whining and double-think to last a lifetime. These pieces by Raimondo will work:
Joan Walsh
The real disappointment in all of this for me is to realize how much knowledge and wisdom had to be ignored for anyone to think that this pack of larcenous aliens we call our government wouldn’t leave us so screwed up we can’t even hold our head up. Before I found out what a dialectic is, I guess I thought that civilization could ratchet all its members higher, by conserving knowledge and experience, or wisdom. But, sadly, there apparently is no way for the human race to collectively say “Mo more violence, let us settle our differences peaceably, that our people may prosper.” Of course, war-industry leaders are not likely to take cake-baking lessons anytime soon, and bake sales won’t support the 10,000-man payroll, so let’s make the guns of war.
Joan Walsh raises most of my points, but does it much better than I can.
Gary: Thanks for the kind words. It’s all true. What I called the “Great Disillusionment” was inevitable but not justified—it’s the nature of things to put a lot in and get mixed results. To hot-wire a different thread, we were just talking about the change in meaning in the word wilderness, but consider the words conservative and liberal. In 1960 a Virginian who thought Negroes should be allowed to vote was a liberal. A moderate would have thought black people “had” to be allowed to vote “and we’ll hope for the best.” A conservative would have said, Lincoln already forced a constitutional amendment on us, and that’s bad enough—why tolerate any enforcement of it? And schools were still segregated. As usual, the idea that any ordinary person would openly oppose the ordinary practices of society was, well, deviant (in fact, that’s the very definition of deviant). In short, the revolution actually won. But victory did not look familiar, nor did it come with any sense of gratification. There was, in the end, no sense of reward. That may be why the smart cookies all play for money.
