YOUTH ISN’T TRUTH

Over on Truthout it is reported that California Democrats are trying to get 16-17 year-olds some type of vote (they call it ‘preregistering’), and seek to allow 17 year-olds to vote in the primary if they will be 18 by the general election. See “California Republicans Cool to Youth-Voting Bills” (http://www.truthout.org/article/state-republicans-cool-youth-voting-bills)

As is evident from its title, the article (originally from the ‘San Francisco Chronicle’) has clearly given this thing a certain spin. Something like: stuffy old grown-ups get in way of the future and a better life for all of us kewl types.

This is a re-run of the play the Dems deployed in ’71 when they got a constitutional amendment passed to give 18 year-olds the vote. The argument then was that if they could die in Vietnam they should be able to have the vote (neatly sidestepping the huge question as to whether their brains were sufficiently neurobiologically matured such that they could exercise any vote that they might ‘have’). But the drinking age was put back up to 21 after awhile; it seemed that the kids could be trusted with military weapons that could destroy whole city-blocks but didn’t do well with beer. And as mentioned here a couple of days ago, experienced special-forces ops seem to require an older, more matured brain – with, say, 30 or so years of experience under its belt – rather than the impatient and inexperienced – perhaps not even fully formed – brain of a late teen or a twenty-something.

If this were a matter of maturely considering the situation and going with the best available evidence and thought, you would expect the Dems to figure that maybe the voting age should go back up to 21, at least. But no. This is, like it was then, hell-and-gone from ‘mature consideration of the common weal’; it has now as it did then everything to do with the Dems garnering ‘votes’.

You might think that a moment’s step-back from the current national train-wreck might lead any responsible adult to consider that decades of conducting national politics according to ‘feelings’ and the surface appearances of things, rather than a sorta grown-up coming-to-grips-with the complexities of serious matters, would lead us away from a kid-friendly emphasis on ‘coolness’ and total, instant fulfillment of whatever ‘good’ the brain has currently latched on to. A politics of feelings and appearances has utterly debauched and derailed our politics and undercut our common weal.

In support, the media report ‘feelings’ rather than issues, pols are concerned not only primarily with ‘feelings’ but even more importantly with making sure that they appear to be sensitive to feelings. Feelings unrealistic, immature, and downright dark have deformed Constitutional theory, jurispraxis, and the criminal law; soapisch and celebrity-besotted political ‘campaigns’ have led to the selection of Bush as President, and a current roster of candidates to replace him that features an aged, dubiously distinguished eccentric and a well-intentioned man with little actual experience, who himself has just recently triumphed over a woman who claimed that being the wife of a President went a long way to qualify her for the Presidency itself.

This is no way to run a Republic. And we shall not remain one very long.

‘Youth’ was one of the Identities desperately raised up by the Dems to replace the enraged Southern whites (who with their whackjob preachers achieved an Ascendancy in the past fifteen years from the consequences of which We shall never fully recover) and the soon-to-be-obsolescent blue-collar industrial males of the soon-to-be Rustbelt, whose obsolescence the Dems did much to hasten in their two-faced orgy of pandering to feminists who hated ‘men’ and corporate barons who hated giving money to workers. Mr. Obama may be very well-intentioned, but he faces a well-entrenched treachery that has had decades, on both sides of the aisle, to settle in. Mr. McCain, no doubt, will consider the present state of the affairs as The American Way, and continue – like Superman – to ‘do whatever it takes’ to preserve it.

‘Youth’ is not known for its ability to deliberate. The brain itself hasn’t fully formed, let alone the individual’s ability to effect a mastery of the integrated operating system of brain, body, emotions, character (or what is left of that concept in education) and even spirit (ditto ditto ditto). Nor is it possessed of a database of experience from which analysis can be widely and deeply made through comparison and contrast. Nor is it known for its ability to sustain a course of action once chosen. This is not a ‘failure’ in youth; it’s simply the way youth is given the factors available and unavailable to it at this phase of development.

Nor is it known for its ability to speed-bump the connections between feelings and the step-back capacity to reflect. Nor to reflect on alternatives. Or consequences.

We can see how a too-youthy politics is hardly a wise path for a Republic, or any government. Yes, the youthfulness of the National Socialists is an awefull if little-considered truth; but even Hitler saw that once he had achieved power he had to have maturity and competence to achieve his visions (in the end, it was his own profound unripeness, not that of his people, that did him in); he decapitated the youthful SA with its impatient, erratic, brutal idealism, and quietly engorged the professional military, while raising up the vampiric SS and Gestapo to keep the citizenry in line.

You might think that at such a critical juncture in the national history as 1968, the Dems might have thought things out more carefully: it was clear that the era of incredible advantages accruing to the U.S. by its being the only undamaged great nation to emerge from WW2 was coming to an end; Seymour Melman had already begun warning that the American reliance on a Permanent War Economy was robbing the nation’s industrial base of capital to modernize, as the Pentagon’s budget grew and grew. The basis of our economic strength was eroding just when the magical era of our almost total industrial advantage was passing away; the economy would become harder pressed to provide jobs for ‘the working man’; an over-reliance on military spending could lead to overseas military adventures – and even in 1968 it was becoming clear that not only was that happening, but that it wasn’t working out very well either. It was time for some serious grown-up thinking.

But no. The Dems were thinking short-term; in terms of survival. Their own. Did society need to become less ‘male’ to satisfy the feminists? Call it a liberation and give them whatever they demanded. Did ‘grown-ups’ turn off the kids and frustrate their dreams? Let everybody get in touch with their Inner Kid (JFK had already played this card in ’60 to cancel out the age and experience of the Republicans) and let’s stop hemming and hawing and being stodgy and start being ‘hip’ and ‘sensitive’ and whatever.

And here We are. Forty years later. Our politics are a laughing-stock around the world (though the national media sensitively and shrewdly shield Us from the snickering); Our economy is based on a Rube-Goldberg set of illusory, immaterial barterings that have only served to enrich the mega-rich; the working folks and now the middle class, their faith in the Dems as the party of FDR and his promises betrayed, are hard-pressed just to make ends meets, while bombarded with Bubbles backed by pious government assurances and made-for-TV ‘outrages’ blared regularly and nonstop on TV and cable ‘news’.

The national ability to process information has been hugely changed. And degraded. We as a society process information now as emotion-addled kids, having regressed from adulthood and adult-brain processing capabilities in an orgy of scornful tossing-away; alas, the baby of maturity (sorry) went out with the bathwater of formal dress and manners.

This has served well those elements that need Us only for Our labor and – once every few years – Our votes. And after 40 years, that includes both the Democrat Party and Republican Party, no longer usefully described as Liberals and Conservatives, but merely as anti-democratic Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum. We bid fair to morph into a Cromwellian – though ‘sensitive’ – police state at home and an imperial policing state abroad. But we'll be doing it 'for the children' and 'to spread democracy'.

If the economy doesn’t lose minimum airspeed first. Or the rest of the world decides it will carry on its affairs in some currency other than dollars.

Then the infantilized citizenry will collapse into high-stericks, and for once will justify the increase of government control of their lives; Americans will return to the womb of tyrannical government as today’s failed and unripe twenty-somethings (canaries in the mine?) are returning home to live with their parents – simultaneously grateful and sullen, their development as adults derailed, their capacity to participate in a mature society stunned into impotence.

Well, that last part is what I’m afraid may happen.

But there is still time. Or maybe there isn’t. But even if there isn’t (and I’m not saying that) We are Americans, and the heritage entrusted to Us is to pool our maturities and come together as The People, to raise up a decent government faithful to the Founding and obedient to Us. If We lose that type of government, then We have lost America and We have lost Ourselves. It’s kind of a ‘1776’ moment. Do We still have the chops to pledge Our lives, Our fortunes, and Our sacred honor?

This is no job for kids. They need to learn, but for that to happen, they need to be taught. By example.

JUDGMENT BY NUREMBERG

It occurs to me that one way We can get beyond the miasm of quotidian ‘reality’ and see what has actually happened in the country is to go back to the film “Judgment at Nuremberg”. I had seen it on PBS recently (for the umpteenth time in my life) and I’ve been trying to come to grips with “what it is” about the film that tugs insistently.

Yes, the phenomenon of Fascism offers much food for thought – and not simply (any longer) as an historical exercise. Yes, the psychology of crowds and mobs and ‘masses’ offers much food for thought – and not simply (any longer) as an historical exercise. Yes, the awefullness that humans are capable of inflicting upon each other offers much food for thought – and not simply (any longer) as an historical exercise. Back then in 1961 it seemed as if the world, and most surely this country, had emerged from the blood-dark tunnel of such primitivism, and that – Soviet rocketry notwithstanding – the world and We had entered some palpable sunlit upland of species-maturity.

But what is most painful today, watching that film, is to realize that the America and the Americans portrayed in it no longer exist. It’s not only that - as they say in LaLaLand – you can’t make a movie like that anymore. It’s that We haven’t got a country like that anymore, and We may not even be able to en-office the types of public adults portrayed by Tracy and Widmark … and what does that say about Us?

It’s the seriousness with which they execute their duties, and – consequently – with which they conduct their lives and the seriousness which seems a constituent part of their very selves. That seriousness is gone now, certainly in public life but increasingly – I think – among the citizenry itself. That ‘gravitas’ I’d like to say, except that I’m afraid it would be too easily co-opted by somebody who’s figured out – with the help of PR consultants – how to ‘do’ gravitas for the cameras and the sound-bites.

Does it take a World War and a Holocaust to muster that seriousness? Isn’t the daily task of conducting one’s adult life enough to muster that seriousness? Isn’t the daily task of confronting the pains and powers of this world enough to muster that seriousness?

How did We get here? How did We come to this? The Boomers have to take some of the blame: they were only youths when the film came out, and somehow its message was effectively eclipsed by the Kennedy Camelot: you could be ‘serious’ and yet ‘young’ (Kennedy’s ploy to neutralize the glaring discrepancy between his own age and inexperience compared to Nixon and the outgoing Eisenhower). To be ‘young’ – and to imagine the mid-40s as ‘young’! – enchanted, intoxicated everyone from 15 to 50. That youth is not an age renowned for its ‘seriousness’, that youth as an age might not be able to really ‘platform’ seriousness … that possibility was eclipsed in the enthusiasm. By the time it became a possibility that required consideration Political Correctness had set in and such consideration would be labeled ‘ageist’.

Within a few years after that, Kennedy’s version of ‘youth’ – which still drew heat and light from the accomplished adulthood of Eisenhower – had slipped from public consciousness. The ‘youth’ of the Summer of Love (1967) was ‘groovy’ and ‘authentic’ when not making hay in the summer grasses in a pleasant pot-induced haze. The ‘youth’ of the Spring of ’68 were rioting not only against the war but against ‘authority’ and ‘the Man’, taking over university campuses for great causes, for small causes, and finally for laughs.

‘Seriousness’ got in the way of everything. So maybe it had to be an excuse too – an excuse to ruin a good time, to obstruct a Good Cause, to get in the way of all the Fun and the Good Work. It was a bummer; it was a downer. Never trust anybody over 30 – they ‘lose it’ and start to get in the way. And then those who were dragged beyond that magic boundary of ‘30’ made every effort to neutralize any possible effects; university faculty, ministers, even (since 18 year-olds could now vote) politicians.

By the time the Revolutions of the Identities got rolling in the early ‘70s, the erosion of ‘seriousness’ as a desirable characteristic and skill among the citizenry had already been set in motion. The reactivity and passionateness of youth was far more useful to a ‘revolutionary’ agenda than any ‘seriousness’; when ‘seriousness’ was on the field inconvenient questions might be asked. The revolutions needed doers, not thinkers – and certainly did not need questioners and tire-kickers. After all, it was in the ‘old’ days – when people were ‘serious’ – that the outrages of ‘oppression’ by whites, by the ‘patriarchy’, by ‘straights’, by (fill in the blank) had been held rigidly in place. And since any Southern preacher or politician or ‘grown up’ could give you half-a-dozen ‘reasons’ why segregation was good, well then ‘reason’ had to be a bad thing, right?

So infatuated were the adults of the day, so eager to ‘get with it’, so – how American! – ignorant of the prior experiences of other countries, that nobody considered the effect of gunning the societal engine on the hot fuels of enthusiasm, idealism, unthinking and unhesitating action, while simultaneously reducing the ‘control elements’ of reflection, critical and skeptical thought, and substantive deliberation. Racing along far too fast to penetrate deeply, the ‘youthful’ spirit was incapable of serious ‘farming’, of the arduous and methodical and slow process of plowing deep, orderly furrows and planting the seeds. That the Nazis themselves had had more youthful Party members than older, that many of the Nazi leaders – Himmler himself, for one – had come to the Party still in their 20s or hardly beyond them, were facts that in the 1970s did not find purchase in the temper of the times.

The ‘seriousness’ of the characters in “Judgment At Nuremberg” cannot be found today. Even in Our present circumstances – where We not only face formidable economic and societal and international challenges but are now saddled with a pre-emptive war that is failing to accomplish anything except bloodshed and the incitement of wide hostility against Us – even so, no comfort can be drawn from the realization that at least ‘serious’ adults are in leadership positions. That ‘gravitas’ is gone – from out schools, from our churches, from our politics, and from our government. And perhaps from our culture.

Contrary to the current thrust of American society and culture, I’d propose a variation of Mark Twain’s comments about his religious affiliations once he’d arrived in Dodge City: it was no place for a child … and I did not remain one very long.

Nor do I for a moment suggest that ‘growing up’ in my proposed scenario means coming to a Rambo-like ‘conversion’ moment of decision and go grab a mess of hi-tech weapons and ammo, find a really cool ride, and go blow the crap out of something big. Nor do I propose the appearance of seriousness such as Eastwood gave us in the character of Will Munny, as much of an improvement as that excellent characterization was. Lone gunmen and revolutionaries – dressed in the trends of this or that decade – have done enough these past fifty years, and it’s going to take Us a hell of a long time to recover. If We have that kind of time.

Our youth-obsession, given such a boost in the later 1950s and 1960s, swept away the respect for – and eventually the capacity for – the type of ‘gravitas’ that shaped all of the great civilizations and societies and cultures. And having played first as tragedy, it plays now as farce in a society where parents with more resources than medieval barons had at their disposal spend their time and treasure trying to cram Einstein into their infants, while treacherous and blood-soaked public guardians claim they must not be held accountable for their crimes because they are ‘doing it for the children’.

Can it do a child any good to have a nodding acquaintance with Einsteinian thought if there is no effective model of genuine adulthood to which s/he can aspire? Upon which s/he can trellis a Self?

Was it Bakunin who gloried in the revolutionary first phase, ‘creative destruction’? Yet that is the easiest phase, that destruction-in-hopes-of-creation. But either one assumes that by destroying what is ‘there’, then an already-existing, previously hidden, fully formed ‘creation’ is freed to come forward or else one assumes that once the work of destruction is completed then somebody is going to have to do a heck of lot of ‘creation’, and quickly. And in fact, if you haven’t already got a clear plan of ‘creation’ ready for deployment before you begin the destruction, then you’re probably not going to get a chance to put creation together in the chaos that will follow the destruction.

It would be childish to ‘destroy’ with no working and workable plan to ‘create’. We see that now in the bleeding ferocious monstrosity that Iraq has become. But what We are seeing, and what is now ‘old’ enough to turn toward us with furious rage, is itself a reflection and a product of Our own childishness, a childishness that has – ala Orwell – been taken for ‘maturity’ and for ‘seriousness’ these several decades past.

It is time to put away the things of a child. It is time to walk steadily and maturely, as in the day. And if there is any armor to be put on, let us recall that it must be the armor of Light, of a maturity formed by thought and by reason, and informed by spirit (and – what the hey? – Spirit).

Too many – and many of them stained with blood and deceit – are now saying that they never thought it would come to this. But Tracy’s final judgment rings like a church-bell: it came to ‘this’ the first time We abandoned genuine maturity. That bell now tolls for many who have died because of Our immaturity. And it tolls for Us. Hear it.

PROTEST YOUTH

Tom Engelhardt reports on his experience at the recent anti-war march (“Demobilizing America: Outsourcing Action in an Imperial World”, (www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032607H.shtml.) and on his site TomDispatch.com.

He mentions the curious fact that of all the blabbering pundits still around who a couple-three years ago told us that war in ze East would be a righteous slam-dunk, almost all of them are still around demanding to be taken seriously, still outshouting the couple of commenters who turned out to have been right then and (presumably) now (he mentions Jonathan Schell and James Carroll).

It is odd. It reminds me: guess who constituted one of the earliest and most vehemently barred groups of Americans who tried to volunteer for service with the military at the outset of Da Good War?

No, not them. Nope, not them either. It was “anti-fascists”. Yes, you read right. If you had gone to Spain a few years before and fought Hitler and Mussolini there then – sorry, pal – the Army didn’t want you in 1940 or 1941. G’wan home, the whole a’yez!

And why? The official reason was – wait for it – “premature antifascism”. And – No, that’s not a sexual or psychosexual disorder. If you had seen that Hitler was a lethal whackjob too early, and had the get-up-and-go to go do something about it, then you weren’t what the US military was looking for.

In other words, if you were independently-minded enough to see a vicious whackjob for what he really was while Henry Ford and a number of Congressmen and senior officers were still impressed with his production figures and his vote-getting and his uniforms, and if you then also had the independence of will to actually change your life by crossing the sea to fight on foreign soil against him and his flunkies … waaaaal, then you probably weren’t soldier-material.

And ya know – I think the Army was maybe mostly right. Too much independence is not what they want at ze front.

Youth … now that’s one of those curious phenomena: seems independent, but really it’s not. Independence isn’t something that comes with youth; being truly ‘free’ and being able to appreciate ‘liberty’ is not something that is very easy for the young to do. It’s not their fault – it’s just that it takes a long time to mature the soul, the spirit, the psyche, the self to the point where ‘otium’ can become ‘schole’, where time-to-burn becomes constructive ‘leisure’. So they don’t call it the ‘infanterie’ for nothing: you want young soldiers because they really haven’t got a handle on how to embody or to live-out their ‘freedom’. Or you want ‘older’ soldiers who never really grew up or who had their hopes dashed out of them and are equally open to becoming pieces of military sculpture.

And yes – you can ‘fight for’ freedom without knowing what it really is or without being able – as they say in the military – to ‘platform’ it. And that’s even before the stress and the awfulness degrades whatever platforming-capacity you brought with you in the first place. You may come back having ‘earned’ your place in society without actually being able to sustain a societal life.

We have evolved or devolved into a curiously skewed society that is simultaneously too old and too young. It doesn't value the gifts of maturity - those same gifts upon which solid democratic praxis is built and by which it is sustained; consequently far too many adults see themselves only as ex-children, and miss it. As if we were nothing but a nation of ex-child stars. We are youth-defined and youth-obsessed (sorta a lot like what is found to be so repulsive in the sex-offenders).

Meanwhile, we are also sorta crazed in the intensity of our seeking to provide them (as if we were the gods) with 'perfect' and 'total' security and perfect childhoods. Perhaps this is an attempt to compensate for the actual God (or gods) recently deconstructed in the service of the assorted revolutions. Perhaps this is a symptom of the Flatness of the modern American 'world', where nothing lasts and nothing exists beyond surfaces and appearances, and so Meaning-hungry folks try to cram that Flat monodimension with as much 'stuff' and 'activity' as they can.

And all the while long lines of the children 'raised' in this foggy, foreshortened, Flattened, gadget-stuffed 'world' are heading off into the brutal clarity of the classroom presided over by Ares Ferox et Atrox.

So that’s why We most certainly now have Our work cut out for us in the matter of returning vets: they’ve seen way too much, done way too much, in this monstrous cauldron of 4th Generation Warfare and a long, losing campaign. They’re coming back much the worse for the wear and it’s on Us because it was Our word – spoken through the reptile lips of the Unitarium – that sent them over into that lethal mess.

Of all the debts We have incurred in the past few years – and their name is Legion – the debt We owe to Our returnees is one of the most significant. Did we think credit cards and mortgages were the only form of debt? Not hardly.