Heating Up

I don't want to be too depressive, because I know that turns off people. I feel I've always had an asymmetry in my relations with others: I enquire about their problems, their lives, and have listened to their gloom and doom. But it is very rare person who will hear out mine.

Nevertheless, I've had a lot of thoughts this year about the wasted ineffectiveness of my life. For example, I wrote and talked myself blue before the U.S. Conquest of Iraq. I pleaded with the ladies who are my Senators not to vote for the war. Maybe I should consider myself lucky that Sen. Boxer did not vote for it, while Dianne Feinstein did. And, maybe I was lucky that eventually Sen. Feinstein recanted her vote. Meanwhile, the Senators continue to vote for money to continue a ghastly war that has persisted more than 3 years. I was right about everything, but it gets worse and worse. So I wonder, why bother about it?

It was the same for the Vietnam war. Eventually, I was proved right in my diagnosis and prognosis, but I never got any credit for it. Instead, the half of America that approves a Bandit and his henchmen despise people like me. The other half is tired out by my endless complaints. So, very few Americans learn anything from their dreadful experiences. That's why there is an Iraq and the Middle East is blowing up.

I tried to warn Baby Boomers about where they were headed in the 1970s, when they turned into the Me Generation. I began to realize 30 years ago, that the 1960s meant different things to different generations. For the Boomers, it meant immediate gratification of every young person's wish: overthrow of parents, cheap drugs, free sex, easy living - running wild. The only complication was The Draft. When The Draft was eliminated in favor of the volunteer Army, most of the anti-war protestors went home. The politicians don't know it, but they killed a Revolution in the making when they ended The Draft and The War. When the Boomers were left free to pursue their ME GENERATION interests, they turned into good Capitalists, a chip off most old blocks. Greed is good.

Those of us who dreamed of a different society in the 1960s dreamed on for a few more years. But it became pretty clear by 1980 that it was over. Thermidor - the Hot July of the Revolutionary calendar - arrived that year, and has been with us ever since. (Another consequence of global warming?) Maybe it is fitting that the month of Julius remembers those assassinated for the good of the country, Caesar and Robespierre. It is strange that in every case of tyrannicide the eventual result was reactionary: Augustus and Napoleon for the Romans and French, Reagan and Bushes for Americans.

Most recently, I spent over 2 years writing The Graduate Student's Question, but maybe that was a waste of time as well. Thinking through the assumptions of our society is unpopular. The men who wrote the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were, for the most part, well read as befitted their upper class status. Benjamin Franklin, in particular, was the Einstein of his day. At the beginning, Americans read the Federalist Papers in order to understand and approve (or not) the government they were about to bring on themselves. Since then, people prefer to be told what to do. Just tell me what is the solution! So, some book like GSQ is hateful  because it asks too many questions; it requires too much thinking. It's just too hard.

If, however, I were to cut out the underlying reasoning for my conclusions, I would suffer the fate of Morris Berman, slashed to ribbons by NYT's Michiko Kakutani. My work would be deemed a litany of complaints, moans and groans, followed by protest slogans. Obviously, complaints without reasoning mark the author as a whiner to be ignored.

If I were to feed the reader sugar coated pabulum with a silver spoon, the result would be equally infantile. Those who live on pabulum and mashed potatoes are not equipped to dig ditches, pave highways or raise new buildings. Adult size problems require adult size people to solve them.