Just how strange IS this period?

Great Debates
1

In Cecil’s new-ish column on Leo Strauss, Unca Cece says:

That got me to wondering … how does this period in American history stack up, strangeness-wise, against the Red Scare of the early 1950s, or the Prohibition Era of the 1920s, or even the Civil War period?

I mean, sure, today we’ve got the War on Drugs, and a huge international terrorism scare, and a rather flimsy set of excuses for a big war in Iraq – but is that any stranger than McCarthyism, or the Volstead Act, or a war over state secession? Or, heck, is it any stranger than the Flower Children?

2

tracer, while this may technically be a comment on Cecil’s column, I think the topic you raise will probably get more response (and more focused response) in Great Debates forum, so I’m moving it there.

3

I’m only 33, but this sure does feel like the strangest time I’ve lived through.

The words that come to mind when I try to succinctly sum up the current “vibe” as I feel it is: Mean Spirited.

Lots of what I hear coming from public servants, and regular folk, is just plain nasty these days. I have no cites. It’s just my feeling.

4

Public servants? Heck, I’ll bet the folks at the DMV have been mean spirited since the vehicle licensing was first invented. They never want to be nice to you.

5

The “Crazy Years”

6

First of all, define “strange”…All throughout American history, from the Revolution onward, there have always been stories of subversive, “cult-like” groups in the government (I think I remember seeing something like that on the original George Dubbyah somewhere…and that guy didn’t even belong to a bloody political party!). The names and faces have changed, and their specific goals may have changed, but they have always been in existence and in the background.

Honestly, if you want a historian’s word on this, you aren’t going to get one. Historians look at the past through the lens of the present…wait about 30-70 years at least for some sort of commentary from a historian.

7

I lived through the sixties. Really, this is nothin’.

8

I hate to argue with Cecil, but in my opinion, these times aren’t nearly as crazy as the '60’s were. (Let’s, for the sake of argument, say that the period known as the '60’s started with JFK’s assassination and ended with Nixon’s resignation.)

I’ve lived through both, and I much prefer to be in the present.

9

I think this period is remarked by lack of transparency, separation of powers made a joke by having one party virtually controlling all branches, a war on terror corrupted for personal reasons and ideologies, and a press that in reality is not doing its job.

While the Nixon situation was a strange period, it was IMO weathered properly because the separation of powers took care of him, (including the fourth power: the press). Today, that lack of separation of powers is getting very little attention.

Even though I appear as a leftie, I am really more pragmatic and a skeptic; and yet, the left did not use to make this much sense before, worse: I am finding evidence that they are right in many subjects!

All that shows to me how strange this time is.

Strange mind you, not crazy. For that, wait until (if) Bush wins in the next election…

10

It’s hard to come to grips with Cecil’s statement, because he doesn’t say what it is about these times that’s so strange.

  1. Is it because of George W. Bush? Look, you can love Dubya or hate 'em, but there’s very little about the man that’s strange. If anything, the most common criticism of Bush is that he’s too simple-minded and literal and sees everything in black and white. Richard Nixon was strange. Lyndon Johnson was pathologically strange. Dubya? No way.

  2. Is it because the government is encroaching on our civil liberties? The only strange thing would be if it wasn’t! From the Alien and Sedition Acts through Lincoln suspending habeas corpus through the 1919 Red Scare through the McCarthy Era through COINTELPRO through the War on Drugs through the PATRIOT Act, this runs like a leitmotif throughout American history. I can’t think of anything less strange!

  3. Is it because a few presidential advisors follow some crackpot academic? My God, you should have seen some of the people Henry Wallace consorted with! In earlier times, crackpots like Edward Bellamy and Henry George found admirers in government. Academics writing opaque prose attract an audience in every era.

So what about this era is so strange?

11

[hijack]I like how Lazarus Long’s timeline extends off both ends :smiley: [/hijack]

I think this time is only strange to us because we’re living in it. I mean, 50 years ago we were fighting a war on two fronts, and nuclear bombs were being dropped, and our enemies were killing people in friggin’ concentration camps. Twenty years before that, Europe was devastated because of the death of an Archduke, after quite a long peacetime at that. I suppose all times are strange to some degree, but in comparison things have been a lot weirder.

Now, if the next elections were “postponed”/cancelled, and the Bushistas lived up to their nickname and started taking over the rest of the Middle East, and large numbers of dissenters here were being punished for sedition and stuff – then things would be really strange.

12

Well, lacking an idea of quite what Cecil meant by strange, other than that Strauss character (and Bloom was his disciple? Double yikes!) I’ll just say that it’s not quite as dangerous now as it was under Nixon, but we could get there should Bush be re-elected.
It’s true that there were many more checks and balances back then, and a far more skeptical attitude towards authority. Now we’ve got a supine fourth estate with one piece - the most popular piece at that - being an actual propaganda organ of the state in everything but name, which is just too bizarre.
Nixon tried very hard to hijack the state and failed. Bush could, if he wanted, try the same thing should he win a second term, and the difference this time is that I’d lay almost even odds that he could succeed. Not because he’s more dangerous than Nixon, but because there’s quite literally, in my view, very little to hold him back should he try.
We could finally get to the point that Ben Franklin prophesied many years ago, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, when he said

In an era when the most popular news channel on television is a mouthpiece for the Administration and whatever lie it chooses to tell today, we’re a lot closer to the above state than I’m comfortable with.

13

Just IMO, but the fact that a sizable chunk of the American populace is willing to disengage their brains and believe whatever the Powers That Be tell them, without any sort of scrutiny or questioning.

I mean, it’s not a big secret that the Niger yellowcake documents were discredited months before Bush put them in his SotU address; nor that al Qaeda and Iraq never had ties to each other; nor that Halliburton got a multi-billion-dollar, no limit, no-bid contract for Iraqi reconstruction work; nor that the outgoing Clinton Administration gave the incoming Bush Administration ample warning about the growing terrorism threat; nor that the threat of Iraqi WMDs was vastly overstated; nor that the Bush Administration Cabinet is filled to the rafters with pro-business lobbyists; nor that the deficit is now ballooning to unprecedented heights; yadda yadda yadda…

…the weird part (again, just IMO) is that the populace is letting all this happen, without so much as a momentary pause to wonder if the President is sending us all up the creek without a paddle. Did the nation OD on stupid pills or something after the 2000 elections?

14

After?

15

It’s really hard to pin down what would be strange in terms of American history; ideally you’d look for stuff that has not happened before, even in another form. I’m not sure if we really would be more strange than other periods, because a lot of groundbreaking things have occurred in many other periods as well. World War II was a unique event in world history in terms of size, the realistic potential for world domination, and the use of the Atomic Bomb; surely that was strange? We put a man on some place other than Earth for the first time (as far as we know) in the history of mankind; surely that was strange? Alcohol was made illegal in 1919 for the only time in US history; surely that was strange?

What would be so strange about our era?

Selling a foreign adventure with some shifty reasoning is certainly nothing new. The war on terror is kind of like the fight against the Communist menace. The internet is a new medium and has certainly changed the way people live, but it’s not really more groundbreaking than the introduction of the telephone, TV, etc., is it? Mass communication, and politics by TV have been around for quite some time, so it’s not really a huge paradigm shift. The world of art has its popular forms (pop music, hollywood movies), as always, but perhaps the off-the-mainstream forms are growing in importance, and people’s tastes more splintered? In the case of music, so many sub-genres are emerging and distribution is getting easier (hello, Internet), so perhaps we are in the midst of the death (or decline) of the music pop star (which has been around since at least the old school crooners, no?). In terms of social aspects, I don’t think today has a gap between rich and poor that is more extreme than at other points in history. We have a civil rights movement (for homosexuals), just as there have been in the past.

I dunno, it doesn’t seem all that strange to me. By the way, the media has been complicit in some of the government propaganda before, no? And it’s not like all of the media today is spouting the government view; there is still a sizable contingent that is critical, though these sources may not be as popular with the populace today.

16

Cecil has begun to view the halcyon days of his youth through the myopia of age. I was there, too, but sleeping through the 80s and 90s left me refreshed and youthful and with clearer memories of the old days. The present ain’t got NUTHIN’ on the late 60s/early 70s. Man, things were truly f*cked up back then. :eek:

17

It feels like wierd times to me.

I’m a young’un. My generation was in high school during Clinton-era prosperity. The cold war was over, Britain and Ireland were getting along, even the Middle East seemed pretty tranquil. Welfare reform was the most controversial issue we could think of. We entered college hearing stories about companies setting up recruitment tents on the beaches during spring break. We all thought when we got out of college, we’d get we development jobs and spend our time staring at our flat panal moniters and shopping at Ikea. It’s not that we all expected to be dot com millionaires, but we were all pretty optemistic about our future and our place in the world.

But then things got wierd. First the economy broke. My computer-engineering grad friend just got a job selling vacuum cleaners door to door. He’s the only person I graduated with in June to have a full time job. We’re all bight graduates of a decent school with mostly sensible majors. And yet we can’t even afford intercity bus trips to visit each other. It’s all kind of bizarre. Like a mini neo great depression for the young (who were disporportionally hit by the dot-com collapse). This generation of recent college grads is particularly aimless and confused.

Then the government got all wierd. September 11th was surreal, but the proliferation of American flags afterwards was wierder. six years ago, stuff like the patriot act and “homeland” security would have felt like conspiracy theory stuff. But now it’s real.

And then we pludge headlong into war with Iraq. We all knew it was going to happen, and it felt unstoppable, and somehow it managed to be unstoppable. Just about everybody admits it was started on a false premise, but that just doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Even Democratic senators seem okay with the idea. Like it’s perfectly normal to invade countries based on blatant and unrepetent lies. This is especially shocking to the generation that grew up listening to Clinton’s impeachment. Here one president tells a lie about a blow job and he’s impeached, and another president tells a lie about WMDs pointed at the East Coast, invades and overthrows an entire country, and everyone applauds. It’s like the bizarre premises for this war went right down the memory hole. It’s just wierd.

And somehow that all ads up to this guy that was elected by a narrow margin just a few years ago looking at a landslide victory. We were all convinced he was a one term president, and thats before he started talking about Nigerian Uranium and “the axis of evil”. It’s as if the more outlandish and bizarre stuff he does, the better people like him.

In the eighties and ninties protesting whatever was going on was a pretty normal thing to do. Activism was trendy for a while. We saw the AIDS march and the Million Man March and envirnomental clubs being formed in our schools. I remember wearing black armbands to high school in protest of Clinton’s bombing in Iraq and nobody said a word. Then suddenly anti-war protesters are being called antiquated phrases like “un-American”. I’ve been shocked at the pure hatred and disgust aimed at current protesters.

And it’s like the left just disappeared. Strange times.

Then there are the little oddities. The Terminator is my governor. Prayer in schools doesn’t seem that far away. People are voting against gay rights. I might see the end of legal abortion in this country. The weather just keeps getting inexplicably warmer each year. The RIAA is sueing people at random. It feels so topsy turvey.

18

Sure, it’s a little strange now, but in my view it’s nothing compared to the 1960s. Heck, look at 1968 alone…

Here is a partial list of the strangeness of 1968:

The Soviet Union under Brezhnev keeps the Cold War going strong.
The Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia.
The Pueblo (US Intelligence ship) is seized by the North Koreans.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution is still going strong.
The Vietnam war is in full swing. The Tet Offensive takes place. (with the famous photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong soldier)
Robert Kennedy is shot and killed only a few years after his brother John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Martin Luther King is assassinated.
Airplanes are being hijacked right and left.
American campuses erupt in anti-war protests.
American cities are literally ablaze with race riots.
The Democratic National Convention is interrupted by riots and violence.
The summer Olympics are boycott by 32 nations protesting South Africa’s participation.
O.J. Simpson wins the Heisman trophy.
Nixon wins the presidential election.
Laugh-In is the number 1 television show.

(OK… these last few are a bit tongue-in-cheek, but…)

War, riots, and assassinations. Sheesh. No one who was not alive during this period can truly understand the national crisis that was boiling over into the streets. And from personal experience I can tell you that tear gas is a mighty nasty substance.

19

Fox News may be the most popular, but it doesn’t represent the majority of the newswatching audience. CNN is still a major player right behind 'em, and I’d bet that all the regular old TV-network-affiliate news programs combined still pull in more viewers than Fox News does by itself.

20

All I have to say is, I went to the hospital today and while waiting in the lobby was treated to a huge monitor with four different screen-in-screen jobbies, and the news one was…Fox.
Like it’s a respectable newschannel, instead of the right-wing Pravda it in fact is. When did being a news organ of the state become respectable?