Death fears of the Boomer Left

American Thinker ^ | September 21, 2007 | James Lewis

[neverdem]

"Back in the Sixties," sighs an ex-hippie lady I know, "everybody was happy. Really. Everybody."  

Gosh, that wasn't what other people remember. Most teenagers go through a lot of ups and downs, and in the Sixties the Baby Boomers were rollercoastering through their own adolescence. (Some still are.)

But as the Boomer Left thinks back to those glory years, they sound like the poet Wordsworth rhapsodizing about the early French Revolution -- before the heads started to roll from Dr. Guillotin's clever new contraption:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

Well, bless their romantic little hearts. The Sixties! Woodstock! The Summer of Love!

Yet today Lennon is dead and Yoko is a little old lady; Jack Kennedy is long gone, brother Bobby and Dr. King are glorified Martyrs of the Left  -- which is odd, given that Bobby sent the FBI after Dr. King. Even elegant Jackie O has passed away. The Rolling Stones are gathering moss, and The Grateful Dead are looking a lot less grateful than they used to. But the enemies of the Boomer Left are still alive:  Richard M. Nixon is now reborn in George W. Bush as the Left's favorite hate object.

It wasn't supposed to be that way.

A lot of the loss of political sanity we see today reflects the death fears of the Boomer Left. The Baby Left was only a small  percentage of the Boomer generation. But starting in the Sixties, they managed to place their indelible stamp on the media, and haven't let up since.

"The Sixties" was itself a PR fantasy, whooped up by our objective media to flatter their younger audience, and to make converts for the Left. For Boomers themselves, swinging Left was a good career move: It got them noticed in the media, in colleges, in advertising, in the arts, in politics, and in the sexual meat market.

Europe had a slightly different version in the rebellious year of '68. It was all triggered by the biological clock of the post-war Baby Boom, of course, but the Left quickly took control of the generational narrative. A tiny minority of Boomers grabbed political and media power, and have exercised it with a vengeance, literally, over half a century.  Today they are having majot anger control problems, precisely because their media monopoly is being threatened. The traditional American narrative is not yet stamped into extinction.      

The rising Boomer Left openly conspired to conduct a "Long March through the institutions" -- to infiltrate and seize control over the  American media, universities, and bureaucracies. Those institutions are stacked today with aging Lefties, enforcing Political Correctness in all its maddest manifestations. Black faces dominate Madison Avenue ads, as do white women and teenagers, while middle-aged white males are demonized and ridiculed on billboards and TV. This has a devastating effect on boys looking to their Dads to be role models, only to see Dad put down mercilessly in all the pop media. Kids are very confused as a result. But Politically Correct agit-prop  satisfies the Boomer Left's need for psychic vengeance. PC is now the dominant style of our age. 

When people confront their own mortality, their finiteness, they tend to project their personal fears onto the world. So we have Global Warming panic, Flesh-Eating Germs panic, Nuclear Power panic and scores of other imaginary fears. For anxious people the world is full of scary things, all because of their need to escape the prospect of personal end. The PC world is as full of superstitious phobias as the Mayan world of a thousand years ago; the Mayans controlled their fears by sacrificing children to ensure the sun would rise the next morning. We sacrifice conservatives: Newt Gingrich, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, two Attorneys General in a row.

Oddly enough, this omni-panic goes along with omni-denial, as liberal Boomers turn a blind eye to real dangers, like the looming nuclear proliferation threat coming from Ahmadi-Nejad, the Syrians and the NoKos. On any given day the Washington Post and the New York Times will fire yet another denial out to a skeptical world. What nuclear proliferation? Bush lied! Today, the French Foreign Minister is more serious about Iranian nukes than the leading Democrats running for president of the United States. 

But it's not just nuclear proliferation. On the Gay Left there is denial of such immediate dangers as HIV transmission, with some men having "bug chasing" sex parties with infected carriers. Europe continues to import millions of militant Islamists into its multicultural fantasy land, and now faces demographic extinction; but the Euromedia still live in blissful ignorance. Major Euromedia like the BBC, the Guardian and Der Spiegel  blame America and Israel for their own suicidal multicultural blunders; those scapegoats are making the peace-loving Muslims mad, you see. Such misdirected fears go hand-in-hand with misdirected denial and rage.

Just recently we saw yet another shameful display at the US Senate Armed Services Committee, as the Left united in publicly slandering a four-star General, a man who has seen combat on behalf of the United States, who has served us all his adult life, who literally wrote the manual on counter-insurgency, and who came back to report steady improvement in Iraq. General Petraeus drives the Left barking mad, in good part because he is so un-PC: Another middle aged white guy, super-competent, intelligent, honest, brave and modest, in uniform, telling us what we don't want to hear. Damn! 

American victory in Iraq is a threat to the Left, which has always told us that "wars never solve anything." Google shows almost four million reptitions of that mantra.   Fighting is said to be a universal evil, running right against the rock-hard facts that tell us that civilized -- yes, civilized -- warfare abolished slavery, established peace and freedom in half the world, liberated the oppressed, spread democratic forms of government, and created the basis for world-wide prosperity today. American military strength protects us every single day of our lives.

We forget that at our peril.

No matter: The Left had to slander a victorious American commander in Iraq because he brought the unwelcome news that they were wrong --- again.  They felt betrayed, giggling wildly to the sad pun of "General Betray-Us."  But the American people did not feel betrayed. (Not by the General, anyway.)

The personal death fears of the Boomer Left are a key to contemporary politics. Death fear drives the lifelong quest for Hillary Clinton to be the First Woman President at any cost in personal destruction to her political enemies, the narcissistic need for John F. Kerry to see himself as his mythic hero JFK, and the grandiosity behind Al Gore's Global Prophecy of Doom, now playing to loud applause in Norway. (Where Al will no doubt receive the Nobel Peace Prize for peddling faux science to millions of dupes).

We can also see the Boomer Left's real fear in their constant need to shut out conservative voices, just like they shut out their parents' voices in the Sixties. Conservatives are too much in touch with reality. Conservatives are scary. The Left doesn't listen to conservatives as a matter of noble principle.

In the Sixties the Boomer Left discovered  the answer to war and human conflict, and indeed the secret of eternal life. Then reality came along with one shocking blow after another: JFK was killed, RFK was, too, Dr. King went down, and Vietnam happened. The Left twisted all those events. You will not read in their memoirs that JFK was killed by a Communist loner, that RFK was murdered by a Palestinian militant, and that our retreat from Vietnam was followed by the biggest crashing domino in the horrific history of Communism: Pol Pot's genocide of his own people in Cambodia. None of those facts exist for the Boomer Left. They never happened.

The fear of death is a basic human obsession. It may be the basic human fear. Judging from the archeological record, modern humans arose between 40 and 70 thousand years ago, when our ancestors began to decorate graves with red ochre, buried personal weapons and jewelry with the bodies of the dead, and gave them food and servant companions for the journey. Symbolic objects arose 30-70 millenia ago, and were constantly employed to ward off the fear of dying. The symbolic undoing of death is a universal marker for Homo Sapiens Sapiens today.

The Boomer Left created its own fantasy world without death. Well, they were hardly the first. The Egyptians built their pyramids and funeral mastabas, generation after generation over three thousand years, culminating in the super-sized Great Pyramid at Giza. They were all dedicated to the immortality of whichever pharaoh died and was buried there. Ancient grave mounds can be found in Scandinavia and the Americas, as a kind of proto-pyramid. By the beginnings of intensive agriculture and settled cities, six to ten millenia ago, we find humans grasping for eternity by way of great monuments in India, South-East Asia, Sumeria (Iraq) and China.

Conservatives don't have the answer to the fear of death; it's not the sort of thing you can find settled answers to. But we respect the ways in which humans have learned to cope: By religious faith -- the constructive kind, not the suicide-murdering version -- by contributing positively to the world in any number of ways, by raising children, by passing on what wisdom we have learned.  Conservatives don't believe in denial, by and large. Historically, Anglo-American conservatives have been skeptical about grandiose "solutions" to human frailties; but not closed-minded to reasoned progress. Balancing skepticism and open-mindedness is a conservative value.

The greatest flaw of the Boomer Left is to see life through plainly false ideas. Start with a false premise, and you'll end up with false conclusions. Begin with the conviction that we can turn all human conflicts into peace and love just by willing it, and you end up convinced that those who don't agree with you must be evil, or must be forced to obey. Start with the false certainty that youth is eternal, and you end up undermining responsible parenting and kids. Assume  that cultures are easy to change -- and not the treasured heritage of a hundred generations -- and you end up importing millions of dangerously indoctrinated militants into your peaceful land. Or take it on faith that brain-altering drugs are harmless, and you end up with vulnerable people hooked on smack and crack, killing each other to feed their habit. Or fall for the idea that women are better than men, and you ignite a war between the sexes, and lead children astray.

The biggest error we tend to make is to confuse the Boomer Left with the Boomer Generation as a whole. The Left has managed to peddle that illusion. As usual, liberals fool themselves into believing that they are The People; But the conservative revival in the United States shows it isn't true. It's good to keep in mind that General Petraeus is also a Boomer. 

Conservatives represent what Sigmund Freud called the "Reality Principle," the principle of sane adulthood. Starting in the Sixties, the Left began to deny the Reality Principle, leading to a kind of mass neurosis. Whole Leftist philosophies, like post-modernism, explicitly deny that reality is real. Terms like "Reality Principle" and "mass neurosis" have therefore lost popularity;  but they capture the essence of the problem.

To be sure, conservatives are vulnerable to all the usual human frailties. But to be "conservative" is a near-synonym for being grown-up. A big part of maturity is to come to terms with one's own limits -- without neurotic denial, without blaming and raging at others, and without undue fear.

General Petraeus, as a US combat leader, has come to terms with his own fear of death in a civilized and disciplined way. But last week, the Senate Armed Services Committee kept on swerving into black comedy when Democrats reminded him that people die in war. It was cringe-making, sink-through-the-floor embarassing.

As a grown-up making thoughtful decisions under the most difficult circumstances, Petraeus is clearly the moral superior of all the neurotics who slandered him last week. We survive and thrive as a civilization only because of people like him.

One of these days it would be nice for the grown-ups to take the culture back.

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com

[ansel12]

“”Maybe the BIG War was a little too hard and they felt that any generation which follows need to be cuddled and looked after by BIG Brother””

---

If you look at all of the Western Countries, Fascism and liberalism swept our part of the world in the thirties, WWII was just a backdrop to their gains, by the roaring fifties the left had control of all the institutions that they own today.

If you look at all the theoretical foundations of the left they were the formative ideas that the intellectuals of the 30s, 40s and 50s were the true warriors of. The intellectual warriors of the right did not start showing up in great numbers until the 70s and 80s.

Conservatism is at least equal to the left presently, that was not the case before the boomer’s.

[neverdem]

Romney longed to serve in Vietnam, ask me for the quote.

Re: your tagline, I'm curious. I went twice. The comment on the thread about most who served in Vietnam were volunteers is also true, IIRC.

[ansel12]

Romney: “I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.”

[VR-21]

Greetings Jackibutterfly,

I notice that someone sent you a Wikipedia description of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, so I'll only touch on them briefly. They were characters from an underground comic that was popular in the late 60's and early 70's. They were counterculture dopers and the humor in them was largely about drugs.

I posted that picture as a reply to Wolfcreeks post:

“Back in the Sixties,” sighs an ex-hippie lady I know, “everybody was happy. Really. Everybody.”

"You’d never known it from the sit-ins, riots and some of that depressing anti-war music. This lady was stoned."

It was somewhat "tounge in cheek" and meant to amuse some of the "old tigers" on the forum.

The character is Freewheelin' Frank, and the other characters were Phineas and Fat Freddy.

I was 19 and 20 at the time these underground comics were printed, and they were very much to us like South Park or Beavis & Butthead are to more contemporary youth I suppose. We were attracted to the rebelliousness in them, and of course pot and LSD and that stuff were relatively new and we (kids in my age group) were egged on by the likes of Timothy Leary, rock musicians, movie stars and that ilk.

It might interest you to know that the first Fabulous Furry Freak Bros. comic I read was while serving as a sailor on a carrier during the Viet Nam war.

I hope this explains my cartoon to your satisfaction. If you're still curious about this, or what it was like at that time, please don't hesitate to Freepmail me and I'll pursue it further with you.

Have a good weekend.

[El Gato]

But the American people did not feel betrayed. (Not by the General, anyway.)

The General is boomer himself. He was born Nov. 7, 1952. He graduated from West Point in 1974, so he graduated from high school in 1970. Definition of the baby boomer years vary, but all definitions seem to go up to birth years of at least 1955, the most common is 1945-1964. Roughly corresponding to those born to the WW-II generation, with the peak years being right about the time General Petraeus was born. Sometimes the boomers are divided into two Cohorts, basically '45-'54 and 55-64.

The general is also a Vietnam era veteran, although the US ground involvement was pretty much over by the time he was commissioned, as it was when I was commissioned a year earlier. Although I'm three years older, he high school at 17 and I took 5 years to graduate college, so I was commissioned only one year before him. Of course that makes me, and my wife, Boomers as well. Just not red diaper doper baby Boomers.

[ansel12]

“The character is Freewheelin’ Frank”

It is a cool image and captures the sixties that most images don’t.

It shows the subculture of the hippie doper crowd (of the later 60s), that the mass media has a problem understanding.

Because the media and culture mavens weren’t drop outs, they were weekender’s that were getting college degrees so that they could continue running the world.

The tiny number of actual hippies were sweet and harmless, and almost every time you hear someone, past or present, described as a hippie, it is almost never accurate.

[Califreak]

I’m not too keen on dying myself, but it’s gotta be terrifying for a person with lefty(non-existent)values!

[El Gato]

have a look here to see what John Dean is up

Who the heck cares what John Dean is up to?

[wardaddy]

You ain’t gotta be a lefty to be skeered to die.

I would hate to leave my family.....other than that I will try to cowboy up.

i’ve faced it a few times already and I’m happy as a convict on furlough in a whorehouse right now so I can’t say I’d be overjoyed to get notice anytime soon that I’m dining in Hell tonight

but I sure ain’t no lefty...

[wardaddy]

no kidding

White Boomers vote more conservative today than anyone cept older Seniors

[wardaddy]

boy...what a great post....refreshing to see someone who actually reads

[El Gato]

My list tops with Social Security and affirmative action.

Bad yes, but only a side effect of the ill advised Constitutional Amendments which made the income tax constitutional, and the one that provided for direct election of Senators, and those were much earlier, in the generation of the Grandparents of the Boomers, in fact really the generation of their great grandparents, since the grandparents were mostly too young to have had much say in the matter.

[wardaddy]

The Grateful Dead are looking a lot less grateful than they used to

Be nice Jack...there are 4 surviving original members over the years....two original members have died..Garcia and Pigpen The Great and two later added keyboard guys...Godchaux and Mydland

[wardaddy]

what sorta idiot thinks Sherman’s march or Grant’s bombing of civilians on purpose was civilized.

It may have been realthink to them but it was no more civilized than any other total war designed to break civilian will.

nor did it really work....it just helped create a resentment that even today can still be found on occasion

like at the Notre Dame/Alabama game..lol

[dragnet2]

By 1971 we were just going through the motions, I remember being picked up by some people going to Woodstock, they didn’t understand why I didn’t want to continue with them to the event, but I was tired and I knew that the sixties had already died.

So by 1971 you knew the 60s were over?

Hmmm...

[nathanbedford]

Who the heck cares what John Dean is up to?

Many of us are appalled at the pernicious effect on America wrought by The Frankfurt School through its pernicious and all too pervasive teachings. John Dean will not have the slightest direct effect on you or me because we know he is not worth caring about,but he might have a very serious indirect effect on us and certainly on our dependents. Perhaps you would like to take a look at the citation to see how John Dean has become a witting or unwitting tool Of the Frankfurt School.

[ansel12]

“So by 1971 you knew the 60s were over?

Hmmm...”

LOL, But this decade thing is harder than it looks. Depending on your age, pick decades that you know and they never fit within the numbers.

The 80s ran from about 1982 to about 1991, the 90s ran from
1992 to 2000 or 2001,

[B-Chan]

According to those I know who were alive then, the Fun Sixties only lasted until Revolver came out — say 1966 or so. It was a time when young faces and fresh ideas were everywhere, a time of hope and optimism, but a time in which people had not lost their grasp on tradition and their respect for order. Those few good things that came out of the Sixties — the end of legal segregration, pre-psychedelic pop music, space travel — came from this era.

Unfortunately, once the Counterculture came along, all that changed. The Beatles started taking drugs. Brian Wilson lost his marbles. That Girl went from cute sailor suits and a bouffant flip to being a feminist with a Joan Baez center-part. By 1967 the Fun Sixties was over, and the Age of Aquarius had begun.

America in the late 1960s was like Disney after Walt died. The magic was gone, replaced by cynicism, a smirking self-awareness, and a voracious and amoral hedonism. As a nation we gave up on our war in Adventureland, abandoned our nuclear-powered Tomorrowland, turned our backs on JFK's cosmic new Frontierland, and instead chose a chemically-fueled Fantasyland of drugs, free love, divorce, and abortion. By the time the Beatles wheezed out their last gasp, it was all over, leaving nothing but a muddy field covered in garbage and a generation of broken-hearted children who never grew up.

And as for me: I was born in 1965. My generation will have to pick up the tab for the "wonderful" 1960s.

[Bernard Marx]

I do want to point out that the "long march through the institutions" the author alludes to really started much earlier.

Absolutely. I remember the "Impeach Earl Warren" signs very well and he was by no means the first. Warren may have done more long-lasting harm to the country from his perch on the Supreme Court than any other single individual.

The march through the the institutions began in the 1930s and was in full flower by the time Whittaker Chambers began spying for the USSR. The Roosevelt administration was riddled with Communists or anti-American sympathizers in positions of power, chief among them Alger Hiss, the prime architect of the UN. The New Left of the Sixties was a second-generation phenomenon.

[Brimack34]

Kill babies-Kill the elderly-kill the infirmed but don’t let me die. The new slogan of the boomers.