part deux
Getting back to Paul Krugman’s foray into baby-boomer psychodrama:
If Barack Obama was not appreciate of the back-drift of 1960s culture war, he is getting a crash course on it right about now. I can’t say how his dismissiveness of The Weatherman issue plays out with “Okie from Muskogee”, but it probably plays well with everyone who themselves are dismissive. If you don’t think that weird Weatherman item is reverberating around some corner of this political sphere, understand that “Hannity’s America” weekend program of silliness is working that angle, as the word “Radical” keeps being used to suggest a radicalism beyond anything we’ve ever seen or heard.  (Though, that seems to have a weird racial component to it.)  There’s a standard form to these, and to the extent that Obama’s “post partisan” (witness the absurdity of “This is the moment we begin to heal the Earth.”) campaign is subtextually about dismissing “Baby boomer psycho-drama”, that puts him in a better position than John Kerry having to handle without fighting such a thing the residuals of Vietnam War battles occasioned by the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”.
I occasionally exchange emails with someone, I’ll identify as from a marginal Southern Swing State, who said this:
Obama would never have a better time to run (or any Democrat for that matter) but I just have to hope he can be a uniter in spite of his low preparation for office. I don’t have anything against him and see some plusses (to shut up Europeans about how the US is “so prejudiced” when they won’t confront their own version) but what was wrong with Bush more than anything was his being out beyond his depth and so I also partly dread the experience of some kind of repeat. Hopefully whether he or McCain wins, neither will not make the country even more polarized than it is.
I don’t really have an answer to this, largely because I don’t see this country as terribly divided. But I’ve seen here and there a fretful columnist pierce over this nation and say something along the lines of “Has this nation ever been so divided?” An ahistorical reference that ignores such periods in our nation’s history as … THE CIVIL WAR.
But this emailer, it occurs to me, is geographically planted in a place where that civil war played out, as well as much of the civil rights fight, and as such largely symbolic local political fights continue from the debris left over from there. And then there’s the fire coming out of the Bible Belt which is a lot closer than I am witness to.