Taking Off-the-Record Comments Onto the Record

Ward and I were having an off-the-record e-mail discussion today, and decided it was interesting enough to post. I had e-mailed Ward regarding the Patti Reagan piece he posted below, and said among other things:

Hey, I just read the Patti Reagan piece you linked to from Mod-BLog and that has to be the sorriest excuse for a piece of serious reflection that I have *EVER* read. It is the kind of thing that I think would have been failed out of even the "Personal Writing" course at [college]...She trusts Russert because of his "eyes"?! Doesn't she know that most tyrants came to power because of trustworthy facial features and/or mannerisms? And that includes Sadaam Hussein! Grrrr... Facts [are] optional, once you are sure how you feel about something... Sigh. Can the end of the days when the Vietnam/60s generation are in power come to an end too soon?

Ward then responded:

...I really feel like 2004 is turning out to be a bad year for our country. I'm not talking about end of the world type stuff, of course. But it just seems that everything this year is twisted and bitter. Hardly anyone seems to be thinking at all. I guess it's the election but it's too bad...

And I then responded:

Well, the "lack of thought" thing is really still the shadow of 9/11 falling over us.



Those on the left were shocked by the fall of the towers, and hate the feelings of fear they get. So they figure if they just roll back the world to the way it was before 9/11, everything will be great. It is the first stage of grief - denial - and it seems like John Kerry is gambling that this stage will last through the election. Add that to the Iraq War. It is the kind of war that the Vietnam Generation is "comfortable" with - it is far away, against a vastly overpowered people, by the U.S., for reasons which are somewhat hard to understand. In other words, to their minds it is Vietnam all over again. So the left can hate the war and hate everyone associated with the war, because really they are just borrowing emotions and philosophies from the Vietnam Era, when most of them were in college, busy getting stoned or... well.. enjoying the coed dorms. That is why Howard Dean was so powerful, until he freaked out the base with his primal scream. He was purely anti-war, and purely a throwback to Vietnam.



For those on the right, this is a very familiar feeling as well. But instead of harkening back to Vietnam, they look back to the 80s and the Cold War that we all faced. They remember that Reagan stepped in and took all kinds of steps that seemed murky at the time but which in the end brought down the U.S.S.R. They remember the fear, and the joy that came with overcoming the fear and ending the threat for all time. Thus, they see the Iraq War as Gulf War II, or Cold War II, and feel that we simply can not back down under any circumstances. And this is why the right hates Michael Moore and Howard Dean so much - they are clearly the Benedict Arnolds of this war. Like the Rosenbergs who gave away nuclear secrets to the Soviets, these folks are opposing a clearly just war and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.



So the problem as I see it is that both extremes have decided, instead of fighting the current War on Terror, to fight older wars that they know well. The left has Vietnam, the right has the Cold War. And we are already seeing that both paradigms fail to capture the reality of the present war. Course, being slightly to the right, I would still suggest that the Cold War is the better example to follow. At least we won that one!

What do our faithful (or unfaithful, whatever) Mod-BLog readers think?