The End of Boomer Weirdness?

American Thinker ^ | September 06, 2008 | James Lewis

[neverdem]

At Wichita State recently, a college debate coach dropped his trousers after a foul-mouthed argument with the opposing coach in a debating tournament. YouTube shows it for the world to see. 

Coach William Shanahan, who sports a caveman beard reaching below his belt, said later that, yes, his reasoning might seem "convoluted," but his trouser-dropping act was intended a sign of respect for the opposing coach. 

""Obviously it got out of control, but to be honest I thought I was in a safe house," Shanahan said. "I thought I was part of a community that handled its problems internally and that recognized the dangers of exposing ourselves -- no pun intended -- to the rest of the country." 

Suppose these fine teachers were working for Governor Sarah Palin. How long would they stay in their jobs?

Right.

Believe it or not, this used to be a normal country. Maybe John McCain and Sarah Palin are a sign of a return to normal -- assuming the voters elect them instead of the comedy team on the other side.

"Boomer Weirdness" is the great eruption of irrationality that seized the West three decades ago, when the Boomer Left rose to positions of power.  I don't think the Boom Generation as a whole is any madder than other generations; but the Boomer Left ---  ah, now we're talkin' several curlicues short of a plumbline.

When the Boomer Left "Marched Through the Institutions" (as they called it) in the 1970s and 80s, you could actually see a sudden wild swerve in our news media, our universities and politics. The Democratic Party was seized by the Far Left after the 1968 Chicago convention. The New York Times went PC in the 70s, and you could actually see the new, Far Left orthodoxy lock down in a matter of months.  It hasn't recovered yet.

But it wasn't just the US. Today the old, high-brow Times of London reads like a tabloid, with girlie pics and all. Britain is now a shadow of its former self; nobody knows if it will ever recover.  Europe has become a defense parasite on the United States, and we tolerate it.    The Western world went from rational thinking to the Planet of the Weird. It's been slip-slidin' away ever since. Normal people watch it happening everywhere, and they feel utterly helpless to stem this epidemic weirdness, often rising to the level of criminality.

Our Leftist politicians are all kind of weird.   From Howard Dean's Scream to Obama's uncontrollable God Complex, from Hillary Who Must be Queen to Bill's sly seductions, all the way to John Kerry's delusions of Swiftboat heroics, and Algore's weird idea that NASA should launch a hundred-million dollar satellite specifically to beam TV pictures of a rotating Planet Earth back to all of us -- these people are not planted on terra firma.  They have little planetoids going around their heads.

Nancy Pelosi's bubblehead response to questions about oil drilling is "I'm trying to Save the Planet." Don't tell me that's normal. It's not even normal in the hare-brained precincts of San Francisco. This is the woman who took it upon herself to negotiate with Bashir Assad as soon as she was elected Speaker, while her sidekick Steney Hoyer went to the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, to the distress of the Egyptian government.    Barack Obama even sent Zbig Brzezinski over to Damascus -- to do what? Negotiate with Bashir Assad? Tell him that help was on the way?

This is madness. But running a separate foreign policy has been a Democrat routine ever since Ted Kennedy tried to undermine Reagan and House Democrats tried to aid the burgeoning Communist Sandinistas. But Cold War liberals like Jack and Bobby Kennedy would have called it treason.

The Boomer Left even gave its weirdness a pretentious name: Post-Modernism. Old-fashioned Modernism, according to this tale, is the height of rationality. The ideal of Modernism is good sense, objectivity, reason, logic, and tolerance for competing ideas.  Its symbol is the Empire State Building, square, tall, and built to minimize real estate costs on Manhattan. 

The US Constitution was built as a bulwark against untrammeled lust for power. The Founders didn't know Nancy and Harry in person, but they were pretty sure that power-mad demagogues would show up some time. They had studied history and understood human nature. As we can plainly see, they were right.

Post-Modernism leaves all that rational thinking far behind, like Alice tumbling through the looking-glass. The weirdness of the Left is not an accident; our hebephrenic media folk were taught flashy Po-Mo nonsense in their Ivy League classrooms, and they were dumb enough to fall for it. That is why they deliberately abandoned all those old-fashioned newspaper ideals of  truth, objectivity and fairness. (And that's why the Old Media are finally going bankrupt today. Hooray!)

Count Alfred Korzybski is not a household name, but he is relevant here. Korzybski was one of those eccentric Polish geniuses who come along every now and then. His useful contribution to this topic is one word: Unsanity. For Korzybski a society could be unsane without being insane. He wrote about that in his book Science and Sanity, which came out in 1933, just in time to watch the world go mad. His timing was impeccable.

We don't have to consult a psychiatrist to see that our culture today is at the very least unsane.  Just one little example:

We have more college-educated adults today than ever before. But our college grads are so superstitiously afraid of the little word "nuclear" that we have surrendered part of the very oxygen of our national life -- our energy supplies -- to the likes of King Abdullah, Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez El Loco de Caracas, and Putin the Poisoner.

That is unsane.

That's only one little example. There are hundreds, constantly infecting our national discourse, to the point that we take it for granted. It's just the way it is. Our national conversation has become polluted, sabotaged by media weirdness.

This is where the McCain/Palin ticket may be of historic importance, because both the Senator and the Governor are quite sane folks. You can't survive five years in the Hanoi Hilton if you don't have a pretty firm handle on concrete reality. You don't grow up hunting moose in Alaska if you confuse polar bears with teddy bears, as our eco-freaks seem to. Alaska is the polar opposite (so to speak) of Marin County.

If McCain and Palin win this election, we may be able to push the culture back to a level of sanity we haven't seen for thirty years. Our colleges could start teaching reason and logic again. That would be wonderful.

That is not to say that John McCain doesn't have his faults; he does. We can all give a list of serious mistakes, like the  campaign finance law, which has now whip-lashed McCain's own campaign. But McCain is solid on energy and national security, on the economy and taxation. He may turn out to be exceptionally good on fiscal responsibility. John McCain takes abortion seriously, unlike our Left, which has trivialized fetal extermination so completely that we aren't even allowed to talk about it any more

On the great issues of the day McCain and Palin just seem a lot more rational than the opposition. They can think straight. After almost two years of national exposure, Barack Obama is a bigger blank slate than ever; if anything he has deliberately confused Americans even more.  Nobody knows what he would do if elected, and his potential appointees are freakier than Clinton's. As for Joe Biden, over 35 years in the US Senate he solidified his rep at the biggest loose cannon on that wildly careening deck. Between Robert Byrd and Joe Biden, the Senate has become as weird as the Oprah Show.

Our choice in the fall will come down to two pretty normal people who seem to think straight, versus two Lefty oddballs.

Weirdness has its entertainment value, of course, and public comedy may be the biggest contribution politics ever makes.

But when it comes to steering the ship of state, I'd rather go for steady character and strong values than for the wildly gyrating compass of Barack O'Biden.

They will call me weird, of course.

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com

[AndyJackson]

I am trying to have an argument, but the fat-gutted gutless wonder wardaddy will only call names and not debate the point in contention - namely the toxic cultural baggage carried by boomer leftists, which is the point of the article.

Great contributions of boomers - let's see:

Unix - oops that was create by Ritchie et al, who were pre boomers.

Oh, the integrated circuit - whoops - Robert Noyce - born 1927.

Oh - Genetic engineering - PCR and Kary Mullis - whoops a pre boomer.

But that great boomers Bill Gates did invent Windoze. Wonderful product. Absolutely wonderful - not.

Actually, I have not denied that boomers have done things. But political leadership? Common. Name one. And I dare you to toss out the easy skeet shot GWB and the good ol boys he brought to town.

[NewRomeTacitus]

can’t hunt or fight...what the hell good are they?

Hey now.

[NewRomeTacitus]

What we have here is a failure to communicate...

We have to place a certifiably mentally unstable person in the White House to insure that the first female President is a definitive Conservative. Boo yah and amen.

Queen of the Forest all the way so long as she keeps true.

[caver]

“when I see kids like this I thank God for the ones I have...”

Amen

[razorback-bert]

the toxic cultural baggage carried by boomer leftists

The leftists of your generation are just as unsane and I do believe there are more.

[AndyJackson]

The leftists of your generation are just as unsane and I do believe there are more.

While I am awfully tempted to let your attacks ad hominem just lie there, I am concerned for the state of your soul and that of others who might be suckered in by your glib accusations, and therefore I am going to address this. It is not clear exactly where to start, since you and your partner in warcrimes here have put an awful lot out there.

First, if you want to evict me from your milieu - even though I date from the early 1950's - that is just fine with me. I consider my generational colleagues to be a hugely and embarassingly parasitic and foolishly deluded lot and wish I could repudiate the generation I was born into.

But the real issue is the philosophical poison that our milieu has put forth, that has seeped into the canals of our ears and courses through the blood flowing through our brains. And, when I say my milieu, I grew up with and went to school and college with those who are among the worst of the leftist radical leadership. They were born into radicalism, baptized into radicalism, and live and breath radicalism. These are the folks who deliberately rejected classics as texts written by dead white males and the bible as just one point of view. While their/our teachers were schooled in Karl Marx, our radical generation rejected even reading Marx, whose writings are densely academic, instead reading 2nd and 3rd generation derivative slop. These are the guys, who when they were done not serving in Vietnam trashed our military, tried to make common cause with the Soviet Union against Reagan, and make common cause today with Radical Islam. These are the guys and gals who were masters of the spin-cycle we experienced under Clinton, where what dominated the senior levels of the DC establishment was not substance, but control of what appeared above the fold in the Washington Post. It was a poor substitute for the thrill of the 60s, but you had to take your action where you could get it.

And this same philosophy, based on a generational self-referential temper tantrum against the WWII crowd, cast loose from the anchor of eternal truths, redefined modern economic life, organizations where productivity matters much less than Dilbert like jibber jabber, where the risk off too much debt is offset by too many derivatives, and invented the service economy, and the information economy, all built on new finance which involves getting folks overseas to do the heavy lifting while we stuff their bank vaults full of green tinted paper with pictures of dead white males on them - such is the value of our dead white males.

That it all came apart in the last couple of weeks, with the hangover of Bear Streans, the hair of the dog of Freddie and Fannie, and a young lady wagging here moose killing trigger finger and speaking a few words of common sense.

It wasn't you baby boomers that brought down this house of cards, but someone much younger, with guts, fire in her belly and some common sense.

So expel me if you want. I am sick to death of your kind of whining gut-shot caterwauling. I will happily join her generation. While I may be a bit old for moose hunting, a generation of fattened squealing over-pampered pigs should be an easy target and require minimal hunting skill.

Whenever I have conversations with my son about this stuff - and believe me, his generation knows what we have done to them - all I can do is try to explain where it went wrong, apologize, pass on some lessons about what it is going to take to undo the mess, and ask him not to order up euthanasia - or worse - against his own parents. Oh, by the way - while our generation was draft-dodging, his generation is over in Iraq bearing arms honorably, except that when a 19 year old comes back, having killed some terrorists, he has to face charges preferred by - guess who - more screwed up Boomers, overseen by senior officials and a President who are also baby boomers.

Yes, we boomers are just Great.