I am a child of the 70s. Not old enough to have been on the first line of bra-burners, civil rights activists, or protesters of the Vietnam War, but old enough to have taken up the causes and run with them. I am old enough to have been an intern on Capitol Hill during Watergate and to have been disillusioned with the hypocrisy of our society and government and to have wished Richard Nixon ill for his subterfuge and lies. I am old enough to have believed in the American dream, despite my drenching baptism in cynicism, and to have believed myself to be one of a million Dorothys skipping down a yellow brick road that was paved by our social, sexual, cultural, and civil rights revolutions. I thought I was home free to do whatever I wanted in life without limitation, though I turned out to be mistaken -- but that's a different column.
These were American revolutions that my generation lived through and most of us participated in to some degree. We did change the world even though some of us grew up and edited our values or sold them out in the end, becoming revised editions of the people we once railed against -- or zealous consumers who yipped our material yuppiedom by the light of our silvery BMWs.
That's not to say we didn't intellectually support the right causes and even sometimes go overboard in becoming too politically correct, but what we taught our children was how to buy trendy goods or objects, and what we didn't teach them was how to stand up and fight for what really counted. Where did our ideas of these three I's -- integrity, independence, and responsible individualism -- go awry?
Been to San Francisco lately? The gentle people who might have been wearing flowers in their hair in the summer of 1967 are now sipping frappuccinos at Starbucks, telling the rest of us what we should eat and drink and smoke, while looking out at their blue state and their blue city from their million dollar flats. They're wearing Gucci kid gloves and running down the heartland, with which they have totally lost touch. Their dogs have walkers and therapists. Keep it real, homies. And that's just one city on one coast.
This kind of patronizing and polarizing superior attitude is not going to win the Democrats the next election. Our politicians are going to have to get down in the dirt and roll around with the common man, and it wouldn't hurt the rest of us to join them, at least those of us who don't think of ourselves as common. Anyone want to raise your hand? I love Bill Maher and usually agree with him, but in a recent column he was making a good point about our founding fathers and wrote "...rednecks who think they're the real America..." Well, rednecks are our heaving masses now, and we ought to be communing with them. Where do you think George Bush got his votes?
Yesterday, I finally saw the movie Half Nelson in which the talented actor Ryan Gosling is an inner-city junior high school teacher called Dan, who is teaching his students "how change works -- on both a historical and personal scale -- and how to think for themselves," according to the movie's website. (I know I'm behind on this, but I live abroad.) Day after day, Dan energetically inspires his young teenagers to examine life and historical events in creative ways, while he is slowly dying from his own disappointments and disillusionment, and so he anesthetizes himself with a serious drug habit. When one of his troubled but smart students catches him getting high after school, they develop a friendship that becomes crucial to each of them. "Depending on which way they turn -- and which choices they make -- their lives will change." Their personal history will unfold.
Is this a national us? Have we become Half America?
The last half-decade of headlines announcing our descent into another round, yet worse than Vietnam, of presidential unscrupulousness and dishonesty have been amplified by our president's elected and appointed cronies whose hearts and actions are malicious -- not just toward the rest of the world but also to their fellow citizens. They have basically spit in our face, and, once inconceivable, we have seen our very Constitution subverted by our own president and vice president. To top it off, weren't things supposed to be different when our generation was in power?
What have we, the people, done? What are we going to do?
Every time I read the latest public atrocity that George W. Bush or his crew commits -- whether spying on their own citizens, Guantanamo, the treachery of giving up Valerie Plame and then pardoning Scooter Libby, (the list is endless) -- it would seem I'm reading a novel of big-brother absurdity by Kurt Vonnegut or John Irving, and I ask one of my friends in Paris, "Why aren't Americans marching in the streets?"
Now I ask you: Does our generation remember how to effect revolutionary change, or have we become so individually and collectively splintered that there is no collective to act? Do we no longer see or feel ourselves in the trenches of hypocrisy that will kill our souls, or maybe we're too old and simply don't have the energy to shout as long or loud. Surely, we care, but do we care enough? Have we lost our ideals, or is it our courage, or both? Do we still possess any outrage? Or has G.W.'s fear and the fear his party has instilled in us shut us up?
The generations after us never had anything to fight for or against like we did. They never learned how to defend themselves, their friends, their soldiers -- their beloved countrymen -- with the force of their own single voices that swelled into a chorus of contempt. We didn't teach our children to embrace their raucous revolutionary spirits that naturally bubbled up in us as we watched our country fall apart from the lying about Vietnam and Richard Nixon's politics. It was for love of our country that we woke up, and this was an inheritance from our founding fathers. The spirit of America is nothing if not this.
Looking at the video of college Republicans by gifted Max Blumenthal, I see a legion of young Stepford adults who haven't learned to think for themselves, but who are ready, willing, and able to send others to war without risking themselves. They have perfectly mimicked their role models, G.W. and Tricky Dick Cheney. We've caught a glimpse of the lack of responsibility, ethics, international stature, or growth they have in mind. We've seen the future void of their personal histories.
Here's a real American hero they ought to acquire some knowledge of and want to emulate: Benjamin Franklin read voraciously and educated himself, then figured out how to create a new republic. He learned to think, solve problems on a grassroots level, and then to extrapolate his ideas on such an imaginative scale that he basically figured out how to make our country work. At the same time, he developed humanity's knowledge of other important natural mysteries. Franklin applied civic duty and rejected corruption, and he was highly regarded throughout the world. He was a sound leader and revolutionary who signed our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Those Republican boys can't stand tall enough to look over his shoe -- and don't want to for that matter -- just like G.W. and Tricky Dick, who are the antithesis of clever Ben.
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" was a motto on the title page of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania that Benjamin Franklin published and may well have written, although there is some question about that. Either way, it is still food for thought today.
But now back to me: A few weeks ago the sales had started in Paris, and yes, I was shopping. I walked into the Marc Jacobs store at the sublime Palais Royal. I love Jacobs' designs, and his staff is friendly, which isn't always the case at this level of retail when you're not there to drop a few thou (or even a few hundred), and it's written all over you. Best of all, Jacobs produces a line of cool special items that people like me can afford. I'm compelled to check out his political and cultural message T-shirts, which I find often convey exactly what I think.
But on that day a few weeks ago, I found the absolute topper in that category, a shirt that says what I've been saying, one way or another, to friends for the last several years. With big black letters on a soft gray stretch, the words blare, "Where's the Outrage?"
Does it ring your liberty bell? Now, say it with me and say it loud: Where's The Outrage?
Say it louder now: WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE?