Doom and Gloom

I find the sources MassMarrier cites in his Can Darwinism Rescue Dems? troubling for several reasons. One is that I'm now living on a medication that includes depression amongst its many side effects. Another is that I don't look back on the repression of the fifties with any nostalgia or pleasure, with or without pills. Whenever I get over my initial fears of a lust for authoritarianism in the modern age, I recall that that sorry era is the destination of today's unhappy public fantasies, more than, say, the France of Louis XIV.

Why should the fifties be the good old days? Let's think. Gee, could it be the demographic predominance of my somewhat idiotic generation? Apparently most of my peers had a
wonderful time growing up, or at least a good enough time to enable repression of the undesirable features. We also have the demographically modest Generation X, hard-wired to react negatively to the period of their childhood even as they emulate many of its features. There is a new generation rising, though, and I wonder to what extent they will carry on the trends that environics sees in my peers. They have no exposure to either the imagined sweetness of the fifties, or the imagined evils of the Age of Love. For once their general lack of historical knowledge is a blessing, since most of them know both eras solely through oldies tunes.

Surely, a good number of the new generation have bought into the disturbing mainstream mindset that environics detects. Many others, though, care little for the issues that so energise the American mainstream. They don't care what other people do in their bedrooms and don't think government should, either. They appear more interested in more public values issues, such as corporate and political corruption. Their religiosity very often takes the form of inchoate spirituality, New Age, or alternative beliefs, rather than the rather stale nostrums of recognised
faiths. A good number don't seem to be especially religious. (Environics seems to have spoken with their parents, not with them. I'’m not as old as all that: I remember having opinions put in my mouth by trendspotters talking to my parents.)

If the Democrats mean to recover some momentum, they need to consider both the immediate situation and the future. Environics seems to have tabbed the grim present rather well. All this lot are very good at projecting the present indefinitely into the future. Such forecasts nearly always incorporate the implicit or explicit disclaimer, "if present trends continue."

Present trends, however, never do.

The new generation has been eligible to vote for several years, and boy, are they pissed. I suspect that many of those who passed on the 2004 election, either from self-absorption or due to John Kerry's chronic inability to inspire, won't make that mistake again. Don't listen exclusively to my peers. Listen to our children, and listen now.

Offlist, the Marrier provided comfort to the gloomy in the form of an apposite Garrison Keillor review of 'American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville,' by Bernard-Henri Levy. Trust the Prophet of Lake Wobegon to skewer the absurdity that distinguishes punditry from more ethical forms of expression.