Sunday, October 24, 2004
Seventeen Flavors
For a country nine days from apocalypse (one way or the other), it sure seems quiet this weekend. Oh, yeah, Dick Cheney reached new heights of drooling gooberhood by suggesting that if John Kerry had been president in recent years, the Soviet Union might still exist. (And also instant replay might not be used in the NFL, the Wonderbra might never have been invented, and Baskin-Robbins might have only 17 flavors.) And we have had the inevitable report of arrests reinforcing fears of terrorist attacks to disrupt the election. Plus, there's still a sense that the big October Surprise is yet to come, any day (or possibly any minute) now.
But up here in Madison, the Wisconsin Badger football team is 8-and-0 and we're all a bit giddy, so my first thought was that maybe we're distracted. Except it's not just here where things seem quiet. Even Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly took a break from politics last night to blog about proper behavior in public. The comments on the post sparked some discussion of the concept of a public square--a place, often metaphorical, that we all share in common, and that requires a certain standard of behavior respectful of the rights of all who come into it. That concept is sadly in decline. We have been conditioned, through advertising and through our religious adoration of "self esteem," to believe our lives are exclusively private spaces to be fixed up precisely the way we want them, and that it's the job of other people to adjust to us, and not vice versa. And so, many of us take the ornaments of our private spaces--loud cell-phone conversations, monster SUVs--into the public square with the attitude that if anyone has a problem with them, that's an infringement on our personal freedom. While we can't rightly blame George W. Bush for this, we can, to a certain degree, blame his party--it's only within the last generation, since the rise of Reagan, that "I'll get mine and it's up to everyone else to get theirs" has become the driving engine of American life. Except it was the driving engine of the Clinton years, too. The difference was that Democrats don't possess the active dislike of the have-nots that characterizes Republican politics. In the Clinton era, you could get yours--but it was assumed there was enough for everybody to get some. Today, it's a zero-sum proposition: If you get yours, that means there's less for me to call mine, and I want as much as I can get. So I'll vote Republican to make sure I get all of mine--and plenty of yours.
As a satire of the Bushian ethos, one comment on Kevin's post is worth reading in its entirety. If you have to ask what's happened to civility, well, you're in a pre-9/11 mindset.
Recommended Reading: There was one development that should have knocked the Earth off its axis over the weekend but did not: Sinclair's Friday-night "documentary" was actually--dare we say it?--fair and balanced. That the program wasn't a complete hatchet job on Kerry--which is what Sinclair thought they could get away with, their protestations to the contrary--is a flat-out victory for those of us who put pressure on advertisers and local stations, and to the stock market and stockholders for hitting the company where it hurts.
For a country nine days from apocalypse (one way or the other), it sure seems quiet this weekend. Oh, yeah, Dick Cheney reached new heights of drooling gooberhood by suggesting that if John Kerry had been president in recent years, the Soviet Union might still exist. (And also instant replay might not be used in the NFL, the Wonderbra might never have been invented, and Baskin-Robbins might have only 17 flavors.) And we have had the inevitable report of arrests reinforcing fears of terrorist attacks to disrupt the election. Plus, there's still a sense that the big October Surprise is yet to come, any day (or possibly any minute) now.
But up here in Madison, the Wisconsin Badger football team is 8-and-0 and we're all a bit giddy, so my first thought was that maybe we're distracted. Except it's not just here where things seem quiet. Even Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly took a break from politics last night to blog about proper behavior in public. The comments on the post sparked some discussion of the concept of a public square--a place, often metaphorical, that we all share in common, and that requires a certain standard of behavior respectful of the rights of all who come into it. That concept is sadly in decline. We have been conditioned, through advertising and through our religious adoration of "self esteem," to believe our lives are exclusively private spaces to be fixed up precisely the way we want them, and that it's the job of other people to adjust to us, and not vice versa. And so, many of us take the ornaments of our private spaces--loud cell-phone conversations, monster SUVs--into the public square with the attitude that if anyone has a problem with them, that's an infringement on our personal freedom. While we can't rightly blame George W. Bush for this, we can, to a certain degree, blame his party--it's only within the last generation, since the rise of Reagan, that "I'll get mine and it's up to everyone else to get theirs" has become the driving engine of American life. Except it was the driving engine of the Clinton years, too. The difference was that Democrats don't possess the active dislike of the have-nots that characterizes Republican politics. In the Clinton era, you could get yours--but it was assumed there was enough for everybody to get some. Today, it's a zero-sum proposition: If you get yours, that means there's less for me to call mine, and I want as much as I can get. So I'll vote Republican to make sure I get all of mine--and plenty of yours.
As a satire of the Bushian ethos, one comment on Kevin's post is worth reading in its entirety. If you have to ask what's happened to civility, well, you're in a pre-9/11 mindset.
Recommended Reading: There was one development that should have knocked the Earth off its axis over the weekend but did not: Sinclair's Friday-night "documentary" was actually--dare we say it?--fair and balanced. That the program wasn't a complete hatchet job on Kerry--which is what Sinclair thought they could get away with, their protestations to the contrary--is a flat-out victory for those of us who put pressure on advertisers and local stations, and to the stock market and stockholders for hitting the company where it hurts.
