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davman
Lieutenant
Joined: 29 Sep 2004
Posts: 205
Location: Massachusetts
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 Posted: Thu Jun 01, 2006 6:05 pm Post subject: Iraq and the Liberal Baby Boomers |
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BY JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, May 31, 2006 4:14 p.m. EDT
Iraq and the Liberal Baby Boomers
In an essay on CBS News's Web site, the network's Dotty Lynch laments the lack of anti-Iraq sentiment among kids today:
| Quote: | As the war in Iraq rages on I keep asking myself: Where are the young people this time around? Where are the campuses? Where are the new Tom Haydens and Sam Browns and where are the Noam Chomskys, William Sloane Coffins and Daniel Berrigans?
For the past four months, I was at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, surrounded by idealistic young people and their liberal professors. There was virtually no support for the war (except for the offspring of a few famous neo-cons) but neither was there serious organized activity to try to stop it.
Large groups of students traveled to New Orleans to help rebuild it and another group went to Washington to protest the genocide in Darfur. But why so quiet about Iraq? |
Lynch, who says that as a lass during the Vietnam era she "was passionately against the war," then considers various theories to explain why Iraq is not another Vietnam. It's pretty trite stuff, but what's interesting is the underlying premise: that Vietnam is the norm--that in the usual course of things, as we put it a while back, "a war is supposed to become a quagmire, which provokes opposition and leads to American withdrawal."
America's defeat in Vietnam was a triumph for Americans of a certain ideological and generational profile. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, made this clear earlier this month in a commencement address at the State University of New York's New Paltz campus:
| Quote: |
When I graduated from college in 1974, my fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon. OK, that's not quite true. Yes, the war did end and yes, Nixon did resign in disgrace--but maybe there were larger forces at play.
Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.
Our children, we vowed, would never know that.
So, well, sorry. It wasn't supposed to be this way. |
This wonderfully encapsulates several elements of the liberal baby-boomer mindset. First, the self-congratulation: "My fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon." Even Sulzberger, however, is self-aware enough to present this with some irony: "OK, that's not quite true. . . . Maybe there were larger forces at play."
Then, the perversity of reveling in tragedy. To most Americans, the retreat from Vietnam and the resignation of Nixon were at best necessary evils; but to the liberal baby boomer they were, and at least to Sulzberger they remain, points of pride. The baleful consequences of Vietnam and Watergate--boat people, the Khmer Rouge's massacres, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the impeachment of Bill Clinton--go unmentioned in Sulzberger's speech.
But Sulzberger also makes clear that his generation's celebration of Vietnam and Watergate was not solely, perhaps not even primarily, malicious in nature. It was motivated by a kind of misguided adolescent idealism: "We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government," Sulzberger proclaims. "Our children, we vowed, would never know that."
As a newly minted college grad back in the 1970s, Sulzberger imagined that Vietnam and Watergate spelled the end of war and corruption. He still hasn't outgrown his disappointment that this turned out not to be the case. He knows his intentions were pure and is still wrestling with whether the world let him down or he let the world down.
In his new book, "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era" (available from the OpinionJournal bookstore), Shelby Steele reflects on the origins and endurance of this attitude:
| Quote: |
One purpose of youthful rebellion is to put one's self at odds with adult authority not so much to defeat it as to be defeated by it. . . . But if the young win their rebellion against the old, their rite of passage to maturity is cut short and they are falsely inflated rather than humbled. Uninitiated, they devalue history rather than find direction in it, and feel entitled to break sharply and even recklessly from the past.
The sixties generation of youth is very likely the first generation in American history to have actually won its adolescent rebellion against its elders. One of the reasons for this, if not the primary reason, is that this generation came of age during the age of white guilt, which meant that its rebellion ran into an increasingly uncertain adult authority. . . . It doesn't matter, for example, that there was honor in America's acknowledgment of moral wrong in the area of race. An acknowledgment of wrong was an acknowledgment of wrong, and it brought a loss of moral authority--and thus, adult authority--despite the good it achieved. |
In fact, the baby boomers were too young to be implicated one way or another in the civil rights struggle: The oldest of them turned 18 in 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. All of the credit for the triumph of civil rights, as well as the blame for what it had to overcome, belongs to earlier generations.
But the success of the civil rights movement might have fed the baby boomers' political delusions in another way. When Sulzberger was born in 1951, Jim Crow still prevailed. He was 2 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education and 12 when the Civil Rights Act became law. By the time he finished college at 22, American racism was history (though of course some of its aftereffects linger to this day).
The triumph of civil rights was the culmination of a struggle that began before the Civil War, but to a boy growing up in the 1960s and coming of age in the early 1970s, it must have seemed to have happened very suddenly. If this is so, then there was a certain logic to Sulzberger's triumphalism circa 1974: If America could so quickly abolish racism, why shouldn't it be able to vanquish war and corruption with equal ease--or, indeed, with greater ease, given how enlightened Sulzberger and his cohorts imagined themselves to be?
Baby-boomer liberalism, with its smug sense of moral superiority and its impatience with America's imperfections, is today the prevailing worldview among many of our elite institutions, not least the so-called mainstream media. This explains why Dotty Lynch is puzzled that Iraq hasn't become another Vietnam.
The answer to her question is that Iraq isn't Vietnam because "Vietnam" was the product of a peculiar set of conditions at an unusual moment in history--a moment that has long since passed.
link added/kate
Formatted to indicate comments quoted by the author, in the original/kate |
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GenrXr
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 1720
Location: Houston
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| Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 4:05 am Post subject: |
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Taranto, can I have a stab at it?
The parents of the 60's generation went through the depression and intolerable world wars, yet somehow provided for their malcontent spawn the white picket fence, color television and family programming.
With relative peace and calm during the 50's, how could the spawn set themselves apart? With lessening demand on work they began a downward spiral of ethic.
They rebelled against themselves. It was never a rebellion against the status quo, rather a hatred of their predicament of having it so good.
It was the battle of the know it all dumb ass scribe of no worth against as Hoffer says the practical men of action. The practical men of action chuckled and thought funny these busy little bees, yet with the help of the MSM a hive was born.
The difference today is alternative media and content. People in America realize through the mass dissemination of information that we do have it pretty good. Most people realize one million Tutsi's were hacked to death with machetes just a few years ago and today this is happening in the Sudan. Most Americans realize the Soviet system was a fraud as well as all the other egalitarian tries.
We are content in a nutshell.
_________________
"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy
Last edited by GenrXr on Sat Jun 03, 2006 5:18 am; edited 1 time in total |
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FreeFall
LCDR
Joined: 13 Aug 2004
Posts: 421
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| Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 5:05 am Post subject: |
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| The military is volunteer now, that's a big difference. |
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GenrXr
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 1720
Location: Houston
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| Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 5:11 am Post subject: |
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| FreeFall wrote: | | The military is volunteer now, that's a big difference. |
Hear Hear,
Practical men of action are never forced and always volunteer when something is worth fighting for.
_________________
"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy |
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Deuce
Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 19 Mar 2005
Posts: 589
Location: FL
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| Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 12:55 pm Post subject: |
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While usually spot on...Taranto on this one shows his journalist's brainwashed side....when he says | Quote: | America's defeat in Vietnam
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We here all know America WON the Vietnam War during the Tet Offensive, and then Walter Kronkite and Jane Fonda Kerry (KGB stooges) lost it during the next 3 years of lies, obfuscation, and propaganda to get their useful idiots to do their bidding. Which was followed by 30 years of rewriting history and the unrelenting trashing of an entire generation of veterans...
Just my sincere and honest opinion of the real pond scum ...
Deuce
McCarthy was right all along! |
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GenrXr
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 1720
Location: Houston
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| Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 1:42 pm Post subject: |
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| Deuce wrote: | While usually spot on...Taranto on this one shows his journalist's brainwashed side....when he says | Quote: | America's defeat in Vietnam
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We here all know America WON the Vietnam War during the Tet Offensive, and then Walter Kronkite and Jane Fonda Kerry (KGB stooges) lost it during the next 3 years of lies, obfuscation, and propaganda to get their useful idiots to do their bidding. Which was followed by 30 years of rewriting history and the unrelenting trashing of an entire generation of veterans...
Just my sincere and honest opinion of the real pond scum ...
Deuce
McCarthy was right all along! |
We did win every battle and completely wiped out the North Vietnamese during there Tet offensive, yet did lose the war due to our inability by political means to finish it.
3 million dead vietnamese and cambodians can attest to that.
_________________
"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy |
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AMOS
Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 30 Jul 2004
Posts: 558
Location: IOWA
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| Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 3:16 pm Post subject: Where is he? |
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McCarthy was right all along!
We could sure use McCarthy today. Ten or twenty of him, at the least. |
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Deuce
Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 19 Mar 2005
Posts: 589
Location: FL
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| Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 4:48 pm Post subject: Re: Where is he? |
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| AMOS wrote: | McCarthy was right all along!
We could sure use McCarthy today. Ten or twenty of him, at the least. |
Amos,
That would be a good start wouldn't it! Tho' I'm not sure that would be enough in the Senate....but you're an Iowan, as was my dad, so how can I disagree!
Oh, and GenXr, methinks we're just talking cross purposes...perhaps like taranto, you're referring to the fact that the Senate Shut Off Funding after American military had pulled out of vietnam. So yes, the Senate lost the war....but in my mind, the country of Vietnam could have won it...the Country of America did win the military victory before pulling out under treaty...then the NVA broke the treaty and the Senate didn't support the treaty they signed, thereby renigging on the victory, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!.... Or perhaps you could view it, as perhaps Comrade Kerry views it that the Senate, with help from USSR donations to the NVA, was obviously victorious in the end thereby offering up the opportunity for the dominos to fall...killing fields...boat people...reeducation camps (wonder if Kerry visited one during his trips to vietnam???)...and other communal delights!
yep pretty much a Senate thing in my mind...
Deuce |
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