Orcinus has a couple of posts up that illustrate something profound yet generally unspoken about US politics, the generational gap in politics. First is the consistently thought-provoking Sara Robinson who writes about right wing pundits preying on US senior citizens: and suggests that as with children, the political messages they receive should be monitored:
Revenge on the Grandma-Snatchers
— by Sara
The story of Rick Perlstein’s poor Billowashed grandmother has struck a plangent chord with a lot of us who have been looking at our beloved elders and wondering: Who Ate Grandma’s Brain?
Perlstein’s article has prompted a flood of comments, here and elsewhere, from anguished progressives whose mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and grandparents once instilled them with their liberal values — but are now estranged from their families and lost to the right-wing airwaves. It’s as though, while we weren’t looking, the body-snatchers snuck in through the pipe and made off with their votes, their brains, and (occasionally) their money.
Sara sees it terms of media leeches preying on old people, but I don’t – I think old people should not be absolved from blame from the political situation we find ourselves in. I can understand the need to see elders (because they are our well-loved relatives and parents and friends and neighbours) as passive victims of the media/televangelical spin machine – and many are, that’s undeniable – but many more aren’t.
Most of us are very cautious and circumspect about leaving our children’s developing minds to the tender mercies of the media. Those of us who care about the elders in our families might be equally vigilant about their media diets as well. We do not have to take the political hijacking of our seniors lying down, or assume that’s just the way it is. We just have to do what we do with our kids: make sure they’ve got consistent access to appealing, age-appropriate media that gives them hope, confidence, and truly balanced ways of seeing the world.
This approach denies senior citizens moral agency, as though age brings an inevitable incapability to think for oneself. In some perhaps, but mostly it doesn’t. Nancy Pelosi, for example, is 67 and no-one would say she should be excused responsibility for anything.
Since when has age conferred innocence?
People are are selfish assholes whatever their age. There’re other stations on the dial after all: what we watch or listen to is a choice and this is what old people choose. They are as morally responsible for that as the rest of us, as are those who vote or give political funding, whatever their age. (Let’s not forget the eldest of them are also the generation that brought up the one that’s in power so they have responsibility there, too.)
Besides what are you going to do, deny the vote to the over-70’s in case they vote wrong?
On age generally, it’s apparent when observed from a distance that the current leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties is, like the old Politburo, pretty aged; one might say they’re even decrepit. Most of them were born around or not that long after WWII (a few were actually there) – but despite their best efforts with exercise and botox and flattering camera angles and vaselined lenses, they are old, even the ones thought of as realtively youthful.
But like our own parents, off spending their retirement packages and real estate equity on jaunts around the world, rather than become wise, responsible elders of the kind they idolise they have carried the selfishness and solipsism of their youth into their old age while still expecting the respect due to seniority.
Our current political classes certainties and experiences were formed growing up in a time of plenty, peace and easy access to education, the civil rights movement and Vietnam war notwithstanding. On the whole they’ve never had to truly suffer for anything; in many cases the exact opposite, when you consider how many are children of privilege or who took advantage of Reaganomics and deregulation to make their own immense fortunes. In power they have carried on their blithe, entitled way without a single thought to how their politics, which is all to the benefit of their own friends and associates, will work out for succeeding generations, because you see, there is no-one else who matters but them.
Their contemporaraies, our parents and grandparents think this just fine on the whole – after all, they have voted overhelmingly to keep the status quo several times over in their lifetimes.
But there are generations yet to come – the generation directly below those in power at the moment (ie mine), were born or were children during the overt war on the Vietnamese and covert wars in Cambodia, Central America and elsewhere. Our political constants have been war, terrorism, worldwide recession and climate change.
Many of us see the glaring mistakes our elders have made and what we are forced to pass onto our own children as a result and we despise our current leaders because we can see the current cohort for exactly what they are – a spoiled, cosseted generation who’ve fucked up massively for those coming behind, and who are now trying to mask their failures by playing dress-up in their parents old achievements, beating their chests to proclaim their omnipotent masculinity. That goes for Dems as well as Republicans, women as well as men.
They have to try and cloak themselves in the heroic deeds of their own parents (which weren’t actually that heroic, rather necessitous: but they have to have the drama) because they know damned well they are unworthy of respect themselves. They are a busted flush of a political generation.
Yes, politicians have made fatal mistakes throughout recorded history, but this generation’s mistakes may stop us having any future at all. Now we should just brush off the responsibility for putting them in power because their supporters say “Sorry, we’re old, we were fooled'” ?
I don’t think so.
The second post at Orcinus is to do with that same ageing political generation’s crisis of masculinity:
Digby thinks the conservative movement, as its world crumbles about it in a crashing heap of bodies, is reverting to infantilism, becoming the Baby Party. But I beg to differ (a novelty, when it comes to Digby): I think it has a lot more to do with their creeping old age.
The current fetish with all things manly, masculine, and otherwise male is, like all right-wing talk, mostly meant to act as a cover for their private fears and inadequacies. These guys — guys like Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs, and Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh — like to talk a lot about manly stuff because for them, manliness is mostly about image. What they know about masculinity they got from John Wayne movies.
These guys like to think of themselves as part of the Greatest Generation, but really, this is the Viagra Generation: growing more impotent each day and feeling like they can’t really do anything about it. Naturally, they strike out in anger at perceived slights and threats — thus the current O’Reilly attack on the left blogosphere.
more…
You could say the whole Us foreign policy for the last 20 years, especially the Middle East fiasco from Gulf War I to shock and awe, is all about a nations’ crisis of masculinity. It’s another aspect of the wingerism of the aged that Sara described.
Western society is so fixated on youth that the old feel irrelevant and marginalised, even though their contemporaries are actually filling some of the most important positions in politics, the media and public life. So they get more politically extreme to have their voice heard.
Their contemporaries on tv and radio are also in thrall to the cult of youth – their jobs depend on it – thus the need to prove their potency constantly by also being more politically extreme. It’s a self-reinforcing loop between the broadcaster and receiver.
But if senior citizens are to be absolved of responsibility for adopting wholesale the views of these ageing, masculinity-challenged tv and radio pundits, so must the pundits themselves be absolved, because they too are victims of the media machine.
Where does taking responsibility for your political actions stop? Does age and exposure to media lies absolve one from sheer selfish diumbassery?
The answer has to be no, of course not – if we’re to absolve senior citizens for helping create the mess we’re in then we have to do the same for anyone who can say they were misled by the evil rightwing media. One of the reasons we are in that mess is because of that tendency to want to walk away from responsibility for our mistakes.
I’d like to see the so-called Greatest Generation and those who would claim that mantle say ‘Mea culpa’ not ‘Hey, don’t blame me’.
