A.X. Perez passes on a link he got from some anonymous person. I found it quite interesting, although I can’t vouch for the numbers.
September 15, 2009
The Tea Party protests, summarized by their opponents
Matt Welch sat on a panel the other night, where he learned some interesting things. Specifically, that some of the other panelists had diagnosed (to their own satisfaction) the racist roots of the Tea Party protests:
1) The Tea Parties are experienced by many black Americans as a “racial assault.” This was posited by a white “anti-racism writer,” though the black Tea Party organizer on the panel didn’t seem to agree.
2) The “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, historically, is inseparable from white racial resentment against blacks.
3) My pointing out that the racial-motivation interpretation of the protest was not manifested in the overwhelming majority of signage I saw and conversations I had was directly analogous to white Americans believing that race relations were just fine 50 years ago.
4) Glenn Beck has described Obama’s health care plan as intentional “reparations” for slavery.
QotD: Generational obsolescence
What I find amusing is how some believe that the death of civility is a new development. It started with Joe Wilson and was compounded by Serena Williams. Civility has been chained to a rock getting its liver picked out by buzzards since the golden children of the Greatest Generation were encouraged to let their freak flag fly, to use a horrid phrase.
[. . .]
I’ve always thought it’s imperative to stay engaged with your times until your time, singular, is up. Otherwise your sense of the world calcifies, and your worst impressions become your default opinion. The glories of the imagined past become a means of self-admiration, because you were not only lucky enough to be there but smart enough to get it. Kids today, they don’t. Perhaps growing up in the 70s kept me from idealizing my own past; the culture was all gimcrack glitz and second-hand hippie shite before the jams were well and truly kicked out by the anti-sloth movements of the late seventies and early 80s. They were musical and political; the former was all over the road and the latter emotional and naive, but I think they were the first attempts to wrest control of the social narrative from the early boomers, and as such were derided with the smooth weary conceits you’d expect from the generation that remade the world and expected the rest of us to line up and lay laurel wreaths at their sandaled feet.
Then the rise of internet culture saved the late boomers and Gen Xers from cultural obsolescence, because it was no longer necessarily to participate in any of the usual events to be up to the moment. On the internet anyone can be about 26 years old.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2009-09-15
Comments Off on QotD: Generational obsolescence
