>Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> "It's odd how that Beloit list, and some of the punditry it inspired,
>seems to assume that you have to have had personal experience of a
>historical event to know anything about it."
>
> Well, it sure helps! Vietnam was a profound, consciousness raising
> event for me, because I was old enough to think and happened to be living
> in Berkeley; whereas the Korean war slid right past me, because I was too
> young. Vietnam, the assasinations of the 60's, the invasions of Grenada,
> Panama, the Contra wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, made in indelible,
> incontrovertible impression on my generation no books could equal.
>
> BobW
yeahbutt. My mom and dad lived through all that and the impression it made on them... squat. I remember a convo with mom, right after 9/11, when I said something about, "How can you forget all the lies of the 60s and 70s? How can you necessarily trust anything the government is telling us?"
She gestured as if to cover her ears and said, "I don't want to remember that. I want someone to pay for this." She took it all pretty hard, a nurse in Vermont, who was at a hospital that's on standby in any major medical emergency that hits NYC. But dad was the same way, though less vindictive in his reasoning. He was a lot more like my friend, V, from India, who thinks Bush is doing a grrrrrrrrrrrreat job because, when you are attacked, you have to stand up and fight, be macho.
V has since changed his mind about that, living her and interacting with me, my partner, and our friends, a guy who was a co-worker for awhile, along with his wife, a guy I'll call Jerry. Although Jerry and my partner grew up in conservative leaning households, they both hate Shrub with a passion right now. Jerry, a black guy and son of a NC sharecropper who somehow made it as a government employee in service to Dick Cheney, pretty much takes a rather republican view of foreign affairs and ain't too liberal on the rest, given his father's and his own antipathy to the race riots that broke out in the 60s -- which his how he and his wife met: both were opposed to the riots. At any rate, after dinner conversations with Jerry, his wife, me and my partner have convinced V that all is not so hot with current foreign policy.
But back to my dad who, like V, thinks it's alla bout the importance of macho posturing on the world stage. Unlike mom, who saw it as a mission of retribution alone, dad's all about the notion that a nation has to act tough or it'll be perceived as weak. But even for him, his views are pretty shallow, mainly tied to the popularity of these ideas among his buds in the Elk's club and the like. I think Carrol's right about how the counter is our own similar kinds of one-to-one or small group exchanges where you relative to people on a small scale level. In which case, this is often why it's counterproductive to dwell on snarly thoughts about what idiots these people are or how terrible their habits and faddish pursuit of various of life's pleasures served up by the media these days.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org (NSFW)