Tea Partying

One of the advantages of being old ... probably the only advantage among many disadvantages ... is the length of memory ... actually a blessing and a curse. Reading or viewing the news is like deja vu all over again.


For instance: The Tea Party Movement.

The thing to understand about his so-called phenomenon is this: It is nothing new. We have seen them many times before in our lifetime and the lifetime of our country.

Whether you believe the polls that claim that the participants have more income and education than the average American (which is contrary to previous polling which showed that most opposition to Obama from supposed independents and Clinton Democrats came from white, low middle class, high school education, lower income middle aged suburbanites and small town occupants),

anyone in my age easily (but chillingly) recognizes these people as the survivors of the half of our generation that Nixonians used to call their "silent majority"; that is, the ones who favored the Viet Nam War, who abhorred all the vocal movements of the 60's and 70's that were considered too liberal.


They were terrified by "Women’s Lib" and its associated demands for reproductive rights and equal rights in the workplace. They were on the wrong side of the civil rights movement in the South and the North. They opposed laws and courts actively enforcing voter registration, housing, employment, education (including busing). They have resisted and resented the changes in social consciousness that modified our language, customs, attitudes for the past half century.

What they mean when they claim to be defending "traditional American values" is that they prefer everything that existed in the 1950's, including racial and gender discrimination, mostly the domination by WASP male values.

The Mad Hatter is their hero but "Mad Men" is the culture they want to reinstate.

One thing is different, upside down really.

The Tea Partiers claim to be a coalition of several disparate movements unified by one principle — a general distrust of the government. This too is deja vu all over again. But in a twerped sort of way, because back in the day, these people were bitterly opposed to the coalition which was on the other side of the political spectrum who were deeply suspicious of the government.

That opposition to the government was called "unpatriotic": The bumper stickers that appeared were: "Your country: love it or leave it" and "I love my country — right or wrong." Opponents of the government were considered "anti-American".

I can understand the shock caused by the images of election night, 2008. I felt it. Barack Obama's election in my lifetime was as shocking as the Berlin Wall, the walk on the moon, the darkness of most faces of Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Texas university football and basketball team members.

But the warm, fuzzy glow I felt on Inauguration Day, the optimistic sense that this was a better world we had long wished for, a feeling that at last, my generation had gotten it right ... that feeling soon proved to be premature.

The "forces of reaction" - as my father, whose memory of The Depression were , warned - can never be defeated.
Eventually, like monsters in horror movies, they revive from their stupor, and renew their age old complaints.

In the 19th century, they were the Know Nothings. In the 20th, they were the isolationists, America Firsters, John Birch Society, Minutemen, Christian Coalition.

Here Lies My Generation (1968-2008) R.I.P.

To use an old "Ghostbusters" phrase, the streams of crime and politics crossed this week with nearly cataclysmic results.

In Pennsylvania, a young white woman who claimed to be a McCain worker played a nasty race card, trying in her sadly psychotic way to "work" for her candidate. Conspiracy theorists didn’t need to sound paranoid to question whether she was a designated "suicide bomber" for her cause rather than a weird sick kid acting alone. Certainly, it can be reasonably argued that in the least, she was inspired to her crime by the panicky rhetoric of her candidate’s supporters.

Maybe I’m a bit paranoid to suggest that a shiver goes up my spine imagining what would have happened if the cops believed her story and if she had picked some black man from a line-up, but I don’t think so. I’ve seen too many such cases end up with long prison sentences.

It didn’t take Nostradamus to foresee that Barack Obama’s presence would stir thousands of ugly and dangerous vermin to rise from the substrata where they hibernate. Such creatures thrive during hard times. Economic distress releases forces that drift on the air, demanding scapegoats for the coming bloodlust. It is possible to read too much into the shouts of "terrorist," "socialist," and "kill him" that have been heard on the fringes of crowds or in blogs. But the law doesn’t think so. It is a crime in California and most states to threaten death or injury even if there is no intent to actually carrying it out if the person threatened can be said to be reasonably placed in fear. (Penal Code section 422).

Campaigns of the recent past haven’t stirred such juices on any side. I haven’t seen this much emotion since 1968, and I think I know why.

The screams are the death rattle of a generation, at least the half of the generation that fought the central wars of the last half of the 20th Century from the Right.

The Cold War, The Civil Rights struggle, and The Viet-Nam War each revealed (or caused or exacerbated) traditional cultural divisions in our country. Most people aligned themselves on the same side of all three issues. If you were anti-communist, you were against "radical" solutions for racial equality, and certainly against terminating the Viet-Nam War without "victory" and "honor".

If you favored rapprochement with the Soviets and opposed support for dictators, even if anti-communist, the odds were that you supported civil rights and liberties, and also, you protested and opposed the Viet-Nam War.

All of the ancillary battles of the era generally found the same alignment. Your attitudes about The War also predicted your feelings about women, gays, immigrants, crime, welfare, drugs, abortion, and often seeped into many other tangential cultural issues, including parenting, religion, education, rock music, fashion, entertainment, movies.

Of course, race was the initiating wedge issue. Nixon's southern strategy of 1968 and 1972 was premised on the South's resistance to racial progress, and bled into every other cultural issue we live with today.

The cultural divisions were so bitter that they colored every election since until each side was polarized, manipulated by hot button wedge issues. Throughout the next thirty years, the generation was split down the middle on virtually every issue and presidential candidate. The more or less permanent 45% to 45% permanent split reflected in divided government for most of the time, with the "swing" 10% of "independent" voters in a few states becoming the deciding vote, sometimes tweaked by third party nuisance candidates (like Perot and Nader).

George W. Bush’s pitifully flawed presidency with its disastrous policies and incompetence has caused severe mental depression for the aging pro Viet-Nam half of the generation. They are almost too old to have the energy to fight back this time. Katrina, Iraq Cheney, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Libby, and all the other blows have taken most of the fight out of them.

This happened to the Left after Carter’s debacle laced presidency, with oil crises, inflation, high crime rates, the Iran embarrassment, leading to Reagan "democrats" crawling to the right, until redeemed by a triangulating centrist, Bill Clinton, who cruised barely left of center, co-opting some previously divisive issues by conceding them (welfare, fiscal restraint, crime).

The Crash of 2008 is the final crushing skull exploding blow to the other half of my generation. They must now go hat in hand and beg BIG GOVERNMENT to save them so that they can crawl away into retirement.

Yet, I see a weird, almost tragic irony to McCain’s status. He reminds me a bit of Hubert Humphrey, a man with a reputation for decency, a pioneer of civil rights, who found himself running in 1968 as the supporter of the war despised by his own party. He became an object of ridicule, an anachronism on the wrong side of generational shifts.

But John McCain is no Hubert Humphry. He is psychologically incapable of disassociating himself from his side of the '60's generation struggle. He remans a prisoner of war.

McCain sees "victory in Iraq" as a way to disprove the truth of Viet-Nam, to justify his life. He represents the last gasp of his frustrated and terrified lost generation. That is why, for all his obvious deficiencies as a perfect candidate, for these unreconstructed survivors of the "Silent Majority" of the 60's and 70's, he is the appropriate symbol.

Then again, maybe this election is also the last best hope for my side of the generation war as well. Obama seems like JFK reborn for many of us, and maybe it is wishful thinking. But we haven't got too much time left to wish or to dream impossible dreams. One last gasp of optimism is all we have. So we're going all in this time.

Passages

There are event that cause you to pause and see where you’ve been and where you’re bound to go. For me they are the landmark birthdays — 21, 30, 40, 50, 60 — when I’ve found myself imagining or remembering what my father was at those ages.

It is often a shock to think about such things, sometimes uplifting as when it occurs to me that my father at 50 (I was then 19) seemed so old while I at 50 didn’t feel that way.

My father died 20 years ago this week. By now, most of his generation have passed. My father’s kid sister is the sole survivor of his five siblings. And this week I attended the funeral for my sister’s father-in-law, who made it to 93. My own father-in-law is about 96. No one can be certain of his exact age because he was an unreliable reporter long before his memory began oozing away.

At the memorial service, watching my generation’s children as they experienced their own rite of passage — the loss of the last of their grandparents — and watching my brother, sister, our contemporaries, it struck me that we are the elders now.

How absurd! Even when I feel old, tired, used up, achy and sore, I never conceive of being an "elder" anything. And yet I know it is undeniable.

At the dinner tables in my youth, I remember being awestruck when my grandfather spoke of seeing President McKinley, San Francisco after the big ‘quake, Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey.

My father spoke of his own boyhood experience of seeing Babe Ruth hit a home run, my mother of winning a Charleston contest, mourning Russ Colombo, seeing the Empire State Building being finished.

How is it possible that the events I relate to my son and nephews: McCarthy, Jackie Robinson, the Kennedy assassination — are as far back to them as those ancient events were to me?