Skip to comments.
The End of Boomer Weirdness?
American Thinker ^
| September 06, 2008
| James Lewis
Posted on 09/05/2008 11:19:50 PM PDT by neverdem
At Wichita State recently, a college debate coach dropped his trousers after a foul-mouthed argument with the opposing coach in a debating tournament. YouTube shows it for the world to see.
""Obviously it got out of control, but to be honest I thought I was in a safe house," Shanahan said. "I thought I was part of a community that handled its problems internally and that recognized the dangers of exposing ourselves -- no pun intended -- to the rest of the country."
Suppose these fine teachers were working for Governor Sarah Palin. How long would they stay in their jobs?
Right.
Believe it or not, this used to be a normal country. Maybe John McCain and Sarah Palin are a sign of a return to normal -- assuming the voters elect them instead of the comedy team on the other side.
"Boomer Weirdness" is the great eruption of irrationality that seized the West three decades ago, when the
Boomer Left rose to positions of power. I don't think the Boom Generation as a whole is any madder than other generations; but the Boomer Left --- ah, now we're talkin' several curlicues short of a plumbline.
But it wasn't just the US. Today the old, high-brow
Times of London reads like a tabloid, with
girlie pics and all. Britain is now a shadow of its former self; nobody knows if it will ever
recover. Europe has become a defense parasite on the United States, and we
tolerate it. The Western world went from rational thinking to the Planet of the Weird. It's been slip-slidin' away ever since. Normal people watch it happening everywhere, and they feel utterly helpless to stem this epidemic weirdness, often rising to the level of criminality.
Our Leftist politicians are all kind of weird. From Howard Dean's Scream to Obama's uncontrollable
God Complex, from Hillary Who Must be Queen to Bill's sly seductions, all the way to John Kerry's delusions of Swiftboat heroics, and Algore's weird idea that NASA should launch a hundred-million dollar satellite specifically to beam TV pictures of a rotating Planet Earth back to all of us -- these people are not planted on terra firma. They have little planetoids going around their heads.
Nancy Pelosi's bubblehead response to questions about oil drilling is "
I'm trying to Save the Planet." Don't tell me that's normal. It's not even normal in the hare-brained precincts of San Francisco. This is the woman who took it upon herself to negotiate with Bashir Assad as soon as she was elected Speaker, while her sidekick Steney Hoyer
went to the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, to the distress of the Egyptian government. Barack Obama even sent Zbig Brzezinski over to Damascus -- to do what? Negotiate with Bashir Assad? Tell him that help was on the way?
This is madness. But running a separate foreign policy has been a Democrat routine ever since Ted Kennedy tried to undermine Reagan and House Democrats tried to aid the burgeoning Communist Sandinistas. But Cold War liberals like Jack and Bobby Kennedy would have called it treason.
The Boomer Left even gave its weirdness a pretentious name:
Post-Modernism. Old-fashioned Modernism, according to this tale, is the height of rationality. The ideal of Modernism is good sense, objectivity, reason, logic, and tolerance for competing ideas. Its symbol is the Empire State Building, square, tall, and built to minimize real estate costs on Manhattan.
The US Constitution was built as a bulwark against untrammeled lust for power. The Founders didn't know Nancy and Harry in person, but they were pretty sure that power-mad demagogues would show up some time. They had studied history and understood human nature. As we can plainly see, they were right.
Post-Modernism leaves all that
rational thinking far behind, like Alice tumbling through the looking-glass. The weirdness of the Left is not an accident; our hebephrenic media folk were taught flashy Po-Mo nonsense in their Ivy League classrooms, and they were dumb enough to
fall for it. That is why they deliberately
abandoned all those old-fashioned newspaper ideals of truth, objectivity and fairness. (And that's why the Old Media are finally going bankrupt today. Hooray!)
Count Alfred Korzybski is not a household name, but he is relevant here. Korzybski was one of those eccentric Polish geniuses who come along every now and then. His useful contribution to this topic is one word:
Unsanity. For Korzybski a society could be unsane without being insane. He wrote about that in his book
Science and Sanity, which came out in 1933, just in time to watch the world go mad. His timing was impeccable.
We don't have to consult a psychiatrist to see that our culture today is at the very least unsane. Just one little example:
We have more college-educated adults today than ever before. But our college grads are so superstitiously afraid of the little word "nuclear" that we have surrendered part of the very oxygen of our national life -- our energy supplies -- to the likes of King Abdullah, Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez El Loco de Caracas, and Putin the Poisoner.
That is unsane.
That's only one little example. There are hundreds, constantly infecting our national discourse, to the point that we take it for granted. It's just the way it is. Our national conversation has become polluted, sabotaged by media weirdness.
This is where the McCain/Palin ticket may be of historic importance, because both the Senator and the Governor are quite sane folks. You can't survive five years in the Hanoi Hilton if you don't have a pretty firm handle on concrete reality. You don't grow up hunting moose in Alaska if you confuse polar bears with teddy bears, as our eco-freaks seem to. Alaska is the polar opposite (so to speak) of Marin County.
If McCain and Palin win this election, we may be able to push the culture back to a level of sanity we haven't seen for thirty years. Our colleges could start teaching reason and logic again. That would be wonderful.
That is not to say that John McCain doesn't have his faults; he does. We can all give a list of serious mistakes, like the campaign finance law, which has now whip-lashed McCain's own campaign. But McCain is solid on energy and national security, on the economy and taxation. He may turn out to be exceptionally good on fiscal responsibility. John McCain takes abortion seriously, unlike our Left, which has trivialized fetal extermination so completely that we aren't even allowed to talk about it any more
On the great issues of the day McCain and Palin just seem a lot more rational than the opposition. They can
think straight. After almost two years of national exposure, Barack Obama is a bigger blank slate than ever; if anything he has deliberately confused Americans even more. Nobody knows what he would do if elected, and his potential appointees are freakier than Clinton's. As for Joe Biden, over 35 years in the US Senate he solidified his rep at the biggest loose cannon on that wildly careening deck. Between Robert Byrd and Joe Biden, the Senate has become as
weird as the Oprah Show.
Our choice in the fall will come down to two pretty normal people who seem to think straight, versus two Lefty oddballs.
Weirdness has its entertainment value, of course, and public comedy may be the biggest contribution politics ever makes.
But when it comes to steering the ship of state, I'd rather go for steady character and strong values than for the wildly gyrating compass of Barack O'Biden.
They will call me weird, of course.
TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Government; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: academia; babyboomers; boomer; genx; mccain; obama; palin; theleft
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-20, 21-40, 41-60, 61-66 next last
1
posted on
09/05/2008 11:19:51 PM PDT
by
neverdem
To: neverdem
The coach obviously hasn’t a clue as to what a sign of respect is.
2
posted on
09/05/2008 11:31:45 PM PDT
by
skr
(I serve a risen Savior!)
To: neverdem
This is the Left’s idea of a good argument. I bet he thought he won after using more expletives than his opponent and then baring his ass in a coup de grâce.
3
posted on
09/05/2008 11:31:57 PM PDT
by
counterpunch
(Country First)
To: neverdem
Great article! I'm tired of the “unsanity”, too.
4
posted on
09/05/2008 11:38:33 PM PDT
by
singfreedom
(Obama's solution to the energy crisis: check the air in your tires! Why didn't we think of that?)
To: skr
“I thought I was part of a community that handled its problems internally....”
After exposing his rear-end? I think I know what “community” this is.
5
posted on
09/05/2008 11:38:47 PM PDT
by
21twelve
(Don't wish for peace. Pray for Victory.)
To: neverdem
You would think that somewhere in all those links would be one to the actual VIDEO.
6
posted on
09/05/2008 11:39:15 PM PDT
by
PLMerite
("Unarmed, one can only flee from Evil. But Evil isn't overcome by fleeing from it." Jeff Cooper)
To: skr
The coach might want to get himself checked out. I'm serious. One of my best friend's developed Pick's disease. It a variation of Alzheimer's and usually hits younger people (40-65). Some of the symptoms/behavioral changes are rudeness or impatience leading to aggression, poor judgment, & sexual exhibitionism among others.
Then again, he could just be a real doofus.
To: neverdem
In an insane world, the sane man must appear insane. — Spock, Stardate 20345
8
posted on
09/05/2008 11:49:23 PM PDT
by
spodefly
(This is my tag line. There are many like it, but this one is mine.)
To: PLMerite
To: neverdem
The female debating coach is accusing the flasher of "racsim." Talk about unsane.
10
posted on
09/06/2008 12:00:19 AM PDT
by
FredZarguna
(If you think OP Chaos was bad, wait till the Clintons start extracting their revenge.)
To: neverdem
WSU Shockers make an appearance... I took 3 hrs (Anthropolgy) at WSU while on summer break from Texas A&M University... I’m still stumped over their baseball diamond infield of artificial turf and outfield of grass. It worked apparently ... they won a NCAA baseball championship with Eric Wedge if memory serves.
11
posted on
09/06/2008 12:01:40 AM PDT
by
Trajan88
(www.bullittclub.com)
To: qam1
12
posted on
09/06/2008 12:12:21 AM PDT
by
Alkhin
(Hope looks beyond the bounds of time...)
To: BookmanTheJanitor
I hadn’t heard of Pick’s Disease; it certainly sounds plausible and far preferable to your other alternative, Frat Boy Syndrome, aka doofusness. The “internal” comment makes me suspect the latter; he seemed to think the audience was going to keep his juvenile antics secret.
13
posted on
09/06/2008 12:24:11 AM PDT
by
skr
(I serve a risen Savior!)
To: BookmanTheJanitor
14
posted on
09/06/2008 12:53:18 AM PDT
by
PLMerite
("Unarmed, one can only flee from Evil. But Evil isn't overcome by fleeing from it." Jeff Cooper)
To: 21twelve; skr
I thought I was part of a community that handled its problems internally.... Sounds like they could use a community organizer.
15
posted on
09/06/2008 12:56:01 AM PDT
by
Joe 6-pack
(Que me amat, amet et canem meum)
To: PLMerite
To: Joe 6-pack
Sounds like they could use a community organizer.If they're able to wait a eight weeks or so, I know where they can pick one up, on the cheap...
the infowarrior
17
posted on
09/06/2008 2:31:31 AM PDT
by
infowarrior
(“Let the voters decide if Palin is laughable.”-Tublecane)
To: neverdem
Coach William Shanahan, who sports a caveman beard reaching below his belt
Say what? Most "cavemen" in movies, art and TV have little beards only a couple inches long!
I do agree about academia. The radical hippies knew that demonstrations and songs wouldnt change a thing - change had to come from within the institutions. They buckled down and studied, going on to careers in academia, journalism and politics in the Democratic Party. Too bad more didnt drop out.
18
posted on
09/06/2008 2:47:46 AM PDT
by
R. Scott
(Humanity i love you because when you're hard up you pawn your Intelligence to buy a drink)
To: neverdem
A ‘safe house’? What he really means is cradle-to-grave union protected job in academia.
19
posted on
09/06/2008 5:25:46 AM PDT
by
mabelkitty
(Why does Obama hate pregnant women so much?)
To: qam1
The Autumn of Boomer Madness!
20
posted on
09/06/2008 6:27:43 AM PDT
by
Incorrigible
(If I lead, follow me; If I pause, push me; If I retreat, kill me.)
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-20, 21-40, 41-60, 61-66 next last
Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson