FROM THE ARCHIVES
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battle lines
[Frederica Mathewes-Green 03/30 01:39 PM]I had to get into something controversial that’s difficult to talk about and which … well, I didn’t hold back, I told all. You admitted that your nickname is "Poochy"? Man, this is going to be bad.
One of my favorite older movies is Robert Altman's 1976 Nashville. (I read the "making of" book, and was surprised to learn that the intentions of the film were a lot stupider than the final product.) Anyway, this complex film gives a good glimpse of how much more polarized battle lines were 30 years ago. Back then, you could tell a person's political opinions simply by the way they dressed. And it was largely a generation gap, something we don't have today (probably because now all ages partake of a common entertainment culture; we didn't then). At the time of the Bicentennial, it really did seem like the country could fly to pieces. Rioting on college campuses, "Four dead in Ohio," all of that.
The last thing we Boomers ever expected was that all this entrenched hostility would just sort of drift away. The current climate is, in comparison, pretty mild. Boundaries keep shifting, as with "Crunchy Cons" and "Lifey Liberals," more so as folks get younger: In my limited observation, the rising generation is more opposed to abortion than the Boomers, but that doesn't mean uniformly conservative (eg, laissez-faire about gay marriage).
The main thing that puts me off party politics, though, is a sense of thoroughgoing phoniness. Everything is rigged, anxious, artificial, prechewed. In Nashville, a kook candidate rolls around town all day in a van with speakers on top, blasting out his cranky ideas. I kinda miss those days; I miss that kind of authentic, if nutty, encounter with real people and real ideas.
Here in Maryland, the state legislature just passed a law to fund embryonic stem cell research. The newspapers reported that some surgery was required on the bill's name: supporters eliminated the adjective "embryonic." The bill still would *fund* embryonic research, but it was necessary to mute the point, to enable Roman Catholic legislators to vote for it without fear of reprisals. That's what I mean. Bring back the kook in the truck.
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