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2010’s Debates Still Trapped in the 1960s

By MATT BAI

You would not think Richard Blumenthal and Rand Paul would have anything in common, aside from the fact that they are both running for Senate.

Mr. Blumenthal, the Democratic attorney general of Connecticut, is a respected, if somewhat colorless career public servant. Mr. Paul, a Kentucky eye doctor and a Republican, is a doctrinaire libertarian like his father, Ron Paul, the onetime presidential candidate. But last week, both men found themselves unexpectedly sucked into the vortex that pulls us inexorably back to the 1960s.

This wrinkle in the political space-time continuum was supposed to have been smoothed out, of course. Barack Obama based his presidential campaign on the notion that the nation needed to step past the cultural chasm of an earlier era, and younger Americans, in particular, endorsed that vision. And yet here we are two years later, arguing over Vietnam and segregation, our politics transformed yet again into a revival of “Hair,” except perhaps that it is not entertaining and never seems to end. (Actually, it is exactly like “Hair.”)

In both cases, the trite and simplistic debate seems mismatched to the more complex conversations that most Americans are actually trying to have.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/politics/26bai.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

moral clarity

On a deeper level, though, this all probably has as much to do with our basic human tendency toward moral clarity. As much as conservatives may view the decade as the crucible of moral relativism and the beginning of a breakdown in established social order, there remains something powerfully attractive about the binary, simplistic nature of it all, the idea that one could easily distinguish whether he was for war or against, in favor of equality or opposed.

By contrast, war today seems more a question of degrees and limits, while equality seems less about the laws of the land than about disparities in economic and educational opportunities that are subtler and harder to address. The choices of our moment are not nearly so neat or so satisfying as they were a generation ago, which makes them less useful as a basis for one’s political identity, and harder to encapsulate in some 30-second spot or prime-time rant.

In a sense, the discussion of the past week underscores Mr. Obama’s continuing challenge as well. Implicit in the president’s vow to move us beyond the obsolescence of ’60s politics was the idea that he would replace it with something else, that he would reframe the debate of the 21st century in a way that would make our choices as a society seem clearer and more interconnected.

He hasn’t, or at least not to this point. And without that modern framework there is only an absence, the familiar vortex that keeps pulling us back to things we had hoped to leave behind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/politics/26bai.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Or may be Obama has, but there are still plenty of people stuck in the 1960s, including some hippies and conservationists who have warned about the dangers of "growth" without including the environment protection factor in the equation... But there are also a greater numbers of old red-necks who still decry the events of the 1960s.

Thus other ideas such as the Vietnam War and racial anti-discrimination hold a sense of defeat in the mind of some people... Meanwhile some people in the newer generations are trying hard to make a quick buck without having to work for it, while others want to perform their "duty". Some youth have no idea about the previous debates, while some understand the problems as to minimise the repeat. Nothing new, except there is more confusion about the complexity of issues in which we decide on or accept the shades of grey...

Take for example Peter Costello in the SMH today. He writes:

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More facts would help Geldof see the truth
During his recent whistle-stop tour of Australia, Sir Bob Geldof described Australia's treatment of Aborigines as ''absurd'' and ''economically stupid''. "You've removed from your society of 'having a go' 500,000 of your own." He reckons the entire Aboriginal population has been removed from society.

If Geldof had turned on a television he would have seen Aboriginal footballers having a go in our premier sporting league. Indigenous players are over-represented in the AFL, and, like all players, paid extremely well. On the flight to Australia, Geldof could have watched Bran Nue Dae and seen Jessica Mauboy and Ernie Dingo star in an entertaining film based on the stage musical of Jimmy Chi. He could have talked to respected academics such as Marcia Langton or Mick Dodson, or visited Noel Pearson's Cape York Institute to look at just how indigenous entrepreneurs are ''having a go''. Plenty of indigenous people are high achievers.

 

Hum...

Bob Geldof was actually "talking on behalf" of an organisation, GenerationOne, mostly run by Aboriginal people, to have a fair go... His words were to help create awareness that not all is rosy in the Aboriginal sector... the stats are still devastatingly ugly: 70 per cent of Aboriginal kids "are not going to school" in some areas, and in some communities unemployment is as high as 90 per cent. Thus Peter, more has to be done about this. This was Bob's message. And not all people can be footballers. And thank you Mr Andrew Forrest for supporting GenOne...

And if you want a great theatrical experience go and see the Sapphires at the Belvoir... A show about a group of Aboriginal singers entertaining the troops in the Vietnam War...