“Oh, the masters...make the news for the wise men...and the fools
–– I got nothin’ Ma, to live up to...”
It was another time, another age, and I’m paraphrasing. Dylan was very young then, we all were. In those days there was a chasm opening in the world, mostly between the generations, a crack in the earth on either side of which was a people the other believed to be dangerous and unstable.
It occurs to me, in juxtaposing two present, ineluctable facts, that we have come ‘round to that time again, not a new age but the natural continuation, after a relatively brief interregnum, of a historic revolution.
I suppose there are plenty of reasons to dismiss this suggestion. The sixties, if you believe the intellectuals and news-makers, was an abberation, a short and especially loony time in America, crazy social and sexual experimentation, violence in the streets and on campuses. I do not believe them.
The sixties, in the larger context of human evolution, were the first collisions between two ages, the industrial and the electric. My generation grew up during the first wave, the first explosion of electric information; we experienced the world as a very different being. We understood a commonality, probably borne of the photographs of earth from space, a sensory elevation, the sharing by millions of identical television transmissions.
A President arose who resonated with that new time, and the political events of the sixties, from the Bay of Pigs invasion to the Cuban missile crisis to Berlin and the Test Ban Treaty, to Dallas, and afterward; from the Montgomery bus boycott to Birmingham jail, to the March on Washington, to Selma, and afterward. RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The old world does not surrender gracefully, not especially to historical imperative, and there was a fight for control of the country. The murders of Robert Kennedy and King in 1968 sealed the deal. Or so many thought.
Well, maybe not, as it turns out. The generation now coming of age in America, I think, is the direct descendent of my own, and it is carrying with it the same seeds of a changed planet.
This may be hard to see. I’ve heard and read commentaries which deny any parallel, which point out the vacuousness of modern culture, the shallowness of modern values, the widespread decline in western literacy.
True, the culture itself, as expressed by the dominant forces in media and politics, is laughable. I don’t need to cite examples. As the fellow says in LeCarre’s “Tinker, Tailor”, “(America) today, man, all you’ve got to do is look out the bloody window.”
But, now to the ineluctable facts promised a moment ago. One is that the political landscape, as described and promoted by the mass media, is barren of substance and contested by remote figures who must pass various “toughness” tests. So we witness the continuing spectacle of Hillary Clinton pretending to “experience” she doesn’t have and making bizarre statements about nuking Iran. The last televised “debate” has been defended by its “journalist” progenitors as having asked “tough” questions, especially of Barack Obama.
These important questions, the kind Americans need answered before we make the critical electoral choice between McCain and, presumably, Obama, include why the Senator does not wear a flag pin in his lapel, what he was doing sitting on a community board in Chicago whose membership included Bill Ayers, and whether he thought Jeremiah Wright loved America as much as he does.
The media aftermath generally found Obama wanting. He’d been distinctly uncomfortable under the onslaught; he hadn’t even seized the few openings available to nail Clinton about Bosnia, or something.
He’s taken a lot of these hits lately, Wright and Ayers and the “bitter” comments. This is what the mass media refers to as “vetting.” The thing is, vetting , if one is to use a term which has an odor to it, I’m not sure why, ought to apply to real questions, the questions Americans whose brains have not decomposed entirely are asking. You know: Iraq, unemployment, health care, poverty, the environment, education, immigration...
So, the mass media is now using all the little whoopie cushions being handed them by Clinton – hey, the last ‘debate’ was actually run by Clinton’s people; Stephanopolous asked the numbing question about Jeremiah Wright – and you’d figure that the Senator from Illinois would be cracking from the pressure. You’d figure that his poll numbers would be sinking like bank stock. If so, you would be wrong.
We are finally to ineluctable fact number two:
None of that bullshit, the video loops and threads of anything remotely associating Obama with radicals, or worse, has made the slightest difference in his national support numbers, nor with respect to his prospects in November.
I worried about that after each new episode of “American Gotcha”, there would be a deep loss, Obama’s “newness” catching up to him finally. But, except for a few minor tremors, that hasn’t happened.
ABC’s shameful low in red-baiting journalism was not only denounced in an unprecedented column by a fellow named Shales, who is evidently the pre-eminent television critic in the country, it was buried by an overwhelming, instantaneous, and thoroughly pissed-off popular response. Hundreds of thousands of calls and emails within hours.
National tracking polls over the next three days showed Obama’s numbers rising again, his margin over Clinton growing. That’s the second fact.
Wouldn’t it be funny if it turned out that the new generation, just as mine, found the mainstream media hopelessly corrupt and useless as an information source? And wouldn’t it be funny if their alternative – as ours had been “underground” newspapers – turns out to be a world-wide electronic net, capable to making the corrupt forms of the past irrelevant?
How it all turns out is still in the balance, but I’m encouraged because I recall something we took as an article of faith forty years ago. We knew by 1969, certainly by 1971, that we’d lost. The powers who run nations do not yield easily to little things like the popular will, and we had only ourselves. If we could get a second generation, we thought. If only our parents could be brought around. It didn’t happen.
But now there are two generations.
The one in between, well, their task turned out to be weathering the painful re-entry of my own after the losses of that decade, and the political backlash of cretins and fools.
The reason that Obama’s poll numbers won’t suffer from ludicrous media-hyped “errors” and trivial “issues” is that he embodies the change everybody in the new generation instinctively yearns for. He, like John Kennedy, summons people to hope, and appeals to that which is best in us.
In a few hours, the polls will open in Pennsylvania. Regardless of the outcome, the Democratic Party will nominate Barack Obama in August. Forty years after 1968, a second chance has turned up. If he lives, we may finally get there.
