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Dec 21, 2004 The Raging OughtsQuestion: When does a massive terror attack on a country fail to ignite a new social mood of perceived vulnerability and urgent need for action? Answer: When the generations in that society aren’t yet ready to cross into a new era.It is just amazing to me, after all this country has been through in the past three years, that the electoral map from the 2004 presidential election looks just like the map from the 2000 election. For all that has changed in this country – new skylines, new wars, new laws, new agencies – we just haven’t become a nation united with a common goal, in a profoundly tranformative new age. Instead, we’ve become a polarized society of angry patriots and resentful intellectuals – of conservative Christians battling against a morals revolution, and despairing progressives aghast at the idiocy of middle America. We’ve been through this before – in the 1920s – and I believe that the 2000s will be a repeat of that thrilling decade, but perhaps a bit uglier because of the pall cast by the War on Terror. Like the 2000s, the 1920s was an era of Republican ascendancy, conservative politics, and shrill moralism. It was a time of technological and economic progress – but also upheaval – and a time of demographic transformation – but also nativist backlash. Career took precedence over social justice, and celebrities and trashy culture held the public’s attention. Sound familiar? The denizens of the values camps of our Culture Wars have fallen neatly into the roles performed by their 1920s counterparts. Yesterday’s Klan-joining Evangelicals, railing against the corrupting influence of jazz and liquor, are today’s red zoners, whose Internet op-eds criticize Hollywood culture and warn against the dangers of gay marriage. Yesterday’s tired radicals are today’s blue zoners, wondering now, as then, what could possibly be the matter with Kansas. So 9/11 wasn’t our Pearl Harbor after all; it was more like our Lusitania. What we have recently experienced is a resurgence of nationalist and patriotic sentiment akin to that which arose in the World War I era – with attendant distrust of foreigners and pacifists. We even have a “Terror Scare” to match the “Red Scare,” complete with victims of midnight raids by law enforcement. We just have Muslims to fear now instead of Bolsheviks. But didn’t we actually enter a new era after the 9/11 attacks? The President said as much during the national security debates; the American people apparently agreed and handed him an election victory. Well, we saw the same thing following the Wilson intervention in the European war. There was an unmistakable feeling of a new postwar reality; this was especially true for the Lost generation, which felt the impact of the war more than any other generation. World War I was a strategic watershed for this nation, marking a point at which, finally, after resisting forever, we got involved in Europe’s awful internecine wars. But following the armistice came a strong isolationist sentiment in America, which delayed our entry into the next big one over there. When we did undertake our great crusade, it was to ultimately transform the continent and end its wars for good (except in the Balkans, of course.) So in 1917 we crossed a strategic threshold without putting our hearts fully into the matter. That seems to be what we did again in 2003. The invasion of Iraq was also a strategic watershed: we “unilaterally preempted in defiance of the U.N.” But we don't have our hearts set on the task of occupying the nation or its remnants, we are “good at waging war but bad at waging peace.” Just as the First World War was a rehearsal for the Second, our experience in Iraq presages a future we can only vaguely foresee, but one which involves a role in global security as a better peace wager with a better relationship with a better organization of nations. But that era obviously comes later. A history of the 2000s begins with the hysteria surrounding the world’s computer systems and the rollover to the new date at the end of 1999; it continues with the paranoia following the 2001 election of George Bush by the electoral college without a popular majority. These two events earned acronymic appellations – Y2K and E2K, respectively – and were followed by a third much more shocking one: 9/11. This trio set the tone for the recent elections and for this whole debacle of a decade: fear and hysteria, anger and hatred, paranoia and doomsaying. How do you survive the Raging Oughts, or Raging 2000s, as I think these years should be known? For starters, stay away from those asinine Internet discussion forums where the hardcore zoners of either color hang out. You don’t want to turn particularly red or blue in your outlook. We actually have time for reasoning things out before it all comes to a head, so expand your knowledge with some good books and use your common sense. Build your social network and your trust in people – love your neighbor, for heaven’s sake. Whether uptight Mormons, redneck Marines, raghead Muslims, or wetback Mexicans, we’re all ‘Murricans, dagnabit!
© Steve Barrera and Generation Watch 2004-2007. All rights reserved.
Also by Steve Barrera |
| Lost | 103+ |
| G.I. | 79-103 |
| Silent | 61-79 |
| Boomer | 43-61 |
| Gen-X | 22-43 |
| Millennial | ?-22 |
| Homeland | ? |
| High | 1946-1964 |
| Awakening | 1964-1984 |
| Unraveling | 1984-? |
| Crisis | ?- |
