Would You Like to Take A Survey?
WHAT HAPPENED? Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Hamilton. Things were going well. Then Ford, Quayle, Mondale, Agnew, Nixon, Clinton, Dole, Bush I, Bush II. What happened? — George Carlin WWJBTPC p 52
Note the final paragraph of this article.
By age group, Clinton is favored by the youngest (18-29), Reagan by the 30-49 group, Kennedy by the 50-64 baby boomers, and FDR by the elderly.
I ponder how it is that people’s sense of history is destroyed to the point where they hark back to the president they most directly experienced during their formative years — whether this is the state of things in nature or due to the fact that High School History is frequently taught by Football coaches that regard teaching History as a side project. But it seems that people’s sense of history is directed to the immediate now. They like the president they grew up with… or at least, the ones that left triumphantly. Keep in mind that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter all left in disgrace of one sort or the other– so we have this huge gap between Kennedy and Reagan. The warm and fuzzy feeling associated with one politico or another is likely divided between Kennedy and Reagan.
I recall a survey result heard in the corner of my ears in the summer of 2001 that an increasing number of youngsters, coming of age during Clinton, regarded themselves as “liberal”. (Leave aside how far liberal the actual president Clinton really was.) Which works in well with the 1980s Reaganites (Michael J Fox’s character on “Family Ties” epitimizes the standard). On election day 2004, Tom Brokaw or Chris Matthews called our new batch of crappy Republican Senators as being “Reagan’s Children”, and we received a number of comparisons to Politicos from the 1950s who were “Roosevelt’s Children”. (That Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn makes absolutely no sense to me either underscores or is beside the point.) Grover Norquist believes that the dying out of the generation that grew up with Roosevelt will allow us to go onward and upward to the great Gummint-Less State — what, historical memories of what wrought the Great Depression and what was needed to get by during trying times having been vanquished. He’s probably right to some degree.
Today’s children get to admire Bush II (as I guess I’m supposed to gravitate toward Clinton), which brings us back to these survey results:
One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.
The survey of 112,003 students finds that 36% believe newspapers should get “government approval” of stories before publishing; 51% say they should be able to publish freely; 13% have no opinion.
Asked whether the press enjoys “too much freedom,” not enough or about the right amount, 32% say “too much,” and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.
It is all starting to make sense to me. At least my age group gets to parse out the meaning of “oral sex”. (Though, this is another general sense of the Children of Clinton… and that makes sense to me as well.)