Reelin' In The Years

Over the last few years, I've tried to avoid casting political issues in generational terms, even as age has become a greater and greater influence in our politics. One reason I've done so is that, obviously, not all Boomers (or Silents, or any other age group) share the same views. This site is populated with Boomers who emphatically don't share the views of many of their compatriots. That's why they're here and not watching Rachel Maddow or Wolf Blitzer--or Tucker Carlson. There seems no way to talk about the widening chasm between most people younger than 45 and most people older than 55 without making people feel attacked, and I have no desire to attack people with whom (IMO) I stand in solidarity.

Another problem with talking about the political division between the generations is that the media are already talking about it--with venom, as they talk about most things. At this point, the "mainstream" media are basically a large network of machines whose purpose is to destroy and distort ideas inconvenient to their owners, while advancing ideas that maximize the control their owners have over society. The owners are trying to create a world in which no one can tell them "no," and they've figured out that the best way to do that is to control human perception so that alternatives to their wishes are inconceivable.

The amount of damage the media do to an idea--or to a set of interrelated ideas--depends on how much that idea threatens their owners' venture. The amount of damage they do to a person, the same. It is, by the way, on these grounds that they feel the need to destroy Bernie Sanders. Where he is powerful against them is not so much at the ballot box, which the elites control pretty well, but in the internal ballot box of the American mind. It seems apt that one of their chief talking heads is named Blitzer, since their activities resemble a cultural Blitz. After the 2016 election, our culture, to my eye, looked like this:

Of course, they--or their bosses, which comes to the same thing--want to fracture the American public along every conceivable axis. This allows them to cry crocodile tears over the divided electorate, blaming it for our political ills, while they profit on every level from the American people's diminished ability to stand together. The way they've been discussing age is possibly even more toxic than the way they discuss right vs left. At least there are some shreds of truth in their discussion of right vs left ideology, even if they are scant. Their linguistic assault on "the millennials" has about as much substantive reality as the Dean scream.

But this attempt to set generations against one another has more motivating it than a general desire to poison the civic well. They know that large percentages of the young--or of everyone under 50, who are now defined as "young" (!)--do not go to the Big Five media corporations for their news. They know that large percentages of people under 50 believe that "the news" is thinly veiled bunk. In 2018, the median age of a CNN viewer was 60. The median age of a MSNBC or Fox viewer was 65. It's essential, therefore, that they gaslight the "young," or their perception management project will fail.

You've been telling me you're a genius since you were seventeen
In all the time I've known you I still don't know what you mean

The weekend at the college didn't turn out like you planned
The things that pass for knowledge I can't understand

I bring this up because of a discussion that arose in the comments of Stephen D's excellent diary on Chris Matthews (https://caucus99percent.com/content/chris-matthews-compares-bernie-commu...). It's the first time (I think) that I've been able to articulate what really bothers me about the way so many people over 60 have been reacting to politics since late 2015. It may not be politic to say so, but many of them are practically foaming at the mouth about an existential threat to the country--Trump, right-wing rednecks, neo-Nazis (apparently the last two became threats only with the advent of Trump). Yet the two existential threats that haunt nearly every waking moment for me appear to barely dent their consciousness. They can apparently navigate the threats of climate change and nuclear war with aplomb, while freaking out about the fact that Donald Trump is a bullying bigot (as if he were the first bully or bigot to occupy his position).

To paraphrase Steely Dan, The things you think are scary I can't understand.

Here's how many liberals over 60 deal with climate catastrophe. The people I'm talking about are loyal Democrats. A loyal Democrat stating a belief in climate change is like a Catholic genuflecting when he enters a church. It's a way of signalling which faith one belongs to, and has a lot less to do with rationalism, science, and material change than it has to do with group identity. Rather than implementing rational climate policy, which might get them into trouble with their donors, Democratic politicians have made belief in climate change into an expression of team spirit. Good people (Democrats) are rationalists and believe scientists. Bad people (Republicans) are faith-based and believe preachers and talk radio hosts.

So liberals loyal to the Democratic party intone "I believe the science" with all the piety of a six-year-old learning her catechism. (The idea that faith without works is empty appears not to have occurred to them). But there seems to be no sense among them that we are facing the end of human civilization, billions of needless deaths, an 80% extinction rate. No real fear. What fear there is is, sadly, not based on a rational apprehension of the science, because no rational apprehension of the science could result in the following statement: "Worried about climate change? Then you'd better vote Blue, because Trump won't let us sign onto the Paris Accords."

May I use a metaphor? Imagine that climate change is lung cancer, and the use of fossil fuels is smoking cigarettes. The Paris Accords, in this analogy, would be equivalent to telling the doctor you intend to cut back from three packs a day to one or two. You may not actually do that--there is nothing binding you to do it--but you intend to, and probably will, smoke fewer than your current three packs a day. When the doctor tells you that your plan is insufficient, and will leave you likely to die of lung cancer, you get mad and accuse him of being a purist. Then you get very upset because a bully busts into the doctor's office and tells you you aren't allowed to say that you might reduce your smoking by a pack or two.

The bully may indeed be a peremptory egotistical shithead. But his perfidy does not make the patient's behavior remotely rational.

Boomers, Silents and Greatest Generation can say, quite accurately, that they are not the only ones behaving in this way. But it is undeniable that, just as there are many more people over 60 watching corporate news, there are many more people over 60 believing in one or the other corporate party line. If you look at the group of liberals over 60, you will find many more people who believe something along the lines of the "Think Green Vote Blue" bumper sticker I saw recently, many more who make a big deal out of Trump's refusal to sign onto the Paris Accords, who basically draft the climate change issue, rather mendaciously, into the service of Democratic party politics. Are all people over 60, or all left-wing people over 60, like this? Observably, provably not! It's quite possible to note a trend without tarring every individual in a group with the same brush. But that doesn't stop me asking myself "What the hell happened to those older people I used to march with in the 80s?"

It gets even worse when you look at the behavior of corporate-minded Boomers in regard to nuclear war. And here I do broaden my focus to include some of my own generation, GenX, in my critique. Everyone who was of age during the Cold War shares the responsibility to remember its lessons. For the two generations who were born and came of age during the Cold War (Baby Boomers and GenX), the obligation is particularly keen. It is an abdication of responsibility for us to flush every lesson of the Cold War down a memory hole. In fact, it's shocking that it's the young, who never experienced the Cold War, who are more often getting this issue right. It should be us!

A lot of Boomers act like lining up NATO troops--including German troops!--on Russia's western border while our politicians constantly talk up what a threat Russia is and even say that we should treat "cyberattacks" the same as military attacks--is a correct and patriotic way to conduct ourselves in the world. Here we are, the people who remember what it was like to fear the end of the world and our lives in a missile attack, ignoring the reckless endangerment that comes from such behavior and rhetoric. How can so many of us ignore the way this political rhetoric and behavior inches the world closer to World War III, how likely it makes it that we will end up being shadows painted on the wall of some building?

You wouldn't even know a diamond if you held it in your hand
The things you think are precious I can't understand

Here's an example of what I'm talking about--but this sort of politics has not diminished since the 2016 election. Not at all.

This sort of shit would have been shoved to the margins as extremist nonsense even in the eighties--unless it came directly out of the mouth of Reagan himself, whose Teflon qualities made it impossible to criticize him for some reason (he was such a nice guy, dontcha know). This is Pat Buchanan-level bullshit! I know what rightists were saying back in the 80s about Russia, because I had a friend who was one. We had many debates on the Cold War, on nuclear arms, on proxy wars. But his position on nuclear arms was deterrence! His (horrible) position on proxy wars was that it made it possible for us not to have a catastrophic hot war between Russia and the U.S.! Nobody was arguing that nuclear superpowers should go to war, and nobody (except doofus Reagan, who thought it was funny to joke that he'd picked up the red phone and called in a nuclear strike on Moscow--on a live mike), was saying or doing shit that might upset the apple cart and bring about the end of human civilization! To do or say such shit immediately marginalized a person as a dangerous extremist.

Now, apparently, lots of the people who stood against such nonsense--and even against Reagan's "there's a bear in the woods" paranoid xenophobia--, people who spoke out against the gigantic military budgets, are advocating for worse than what their 80s opponents supported!

Are you gathering up the tears?
Have you had enough of mine?