Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Beaver Cleaver, Phone Home
The idea that things today aren't as good as they once were must be hard-wired into the human species. As long as people have been writing, they've been complaining about it, even at the height of ages we now think of as golden. In fact, I am pretty sure that the third generation of cave people told their children that the world of 456,349 B.C. was going to hell, and that it was better when they were young.
In our own time, at least since the days of Reagan, many Americans--Republican voters, mostly, but not necessarily--have had their own myth of a lost American Golden Age. It was a time when there was full employment for dads and moms presided over a blissful domestic existence at home, like on The Donna Reed Show, where the kids were always well-scrubbed and polite. Minorities were rarely seen and never heard, everyone went to church and flew the flag, and nobody had sex except for procreation. And our society today represents a terrible backsliding from that solid and upstanding era, and It Must Be Put Right.
According to Publius over at Legal Fiction, that's what the culture war is broadly about--those who want to "arrest the slide" versus those perceived to be responsible for it. The current lame brouhaha over "Merry Christmas" is just the latest micro-level manifestation of it. This is one of the best blog posts I've read anywhere all year, so go there, read it, read the links, and read all the comments, too.
More Recommended Reading: The ACLU has released a bushel of confidential memos written by FBI agents about conditions and procedures at Guantanamo Bay. As bad as they are, what's worse is that the authorization for these conditions and procedures--this torture of prisoners accused of no crimes and not permitted legal counsel--most likely came from Donald Rumsfeld and Bush himself. Read the memos and forward the link, so this doesn't get lost in the holiday rush and the cable channels' obsession with the Robert Blake trial.
Also worth reading today is Russ Feingold on the road in Alabama, and reporting in Salon.
The idea that things today aren't as good as they once were must be hard-wired into the human species. As long as people have been writing, they've been complaining about it, even at the height of ages we now think of as golden. In fact, I am pretty sure that the third generation of cave people told their children that the world of 456,349 B.C. was going to hell, and that it was better when they were young.
In our own time, at least since the days of Reagan, many Americans--Republican voters, mostly, but not necessarily--have had their own myth of a lost American Golden Age. It was a time when there was full employment for dads and moms presided over a blissful domestic existence at home, like on The Donna Reed Show, where the kids were always well-scrubbed and polite. Minorities were rarely seen and never heard, everyone went to church and flew the flag, and nobody had sex except for procreation. And our society today represents a terrible backsliding from that solid and upstanding era, and It Must Be Put Right.
According to Publius over at Legal Fiction, that's what the culture war is broadly about--those who want to "arrest the slide" versus those perceived to be responsible for it. The current lame brouhaha over "Merry Christmas" is just the latest micro-level manifestation of it. This is one of the best blog posts I've read anywhere all year, so go there, read it, read the links, and read all the comments, too.
More Recommended Reading: The ACLU has released a bushel of confidential memos written by FBI agents about conditions and procedures at Guantanamo Bay. As bad as they are, what's worse is that the authorization for these conditions and procedures--this torture of prisoners accused of no crimes and not permitted legal counsel--most likely came from Donald Rumsfeld and Bush himself. Read the memos and forward the link, so this doesn't get lost in the holiday rush and the cable channels' obsession with the Robert Blake trial.
Also worth reading today is Russ Feingold on the road in Alabama, and reporting in Salon.
