Look Back in Anxiety

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"

The anger of the postwar generation has given way to angst--and arthritis--as they get old and pass on. So many are gone already, but their indignation amounted to nothing. Oh, it had a lot of entertainment value, but the puritanical impulse ruined it as it ruins everything because it doesn't mean anything to be angry, but it means something to be angry about something. 

The reaction against the blind acceptance of values, the best spin on the fifties and sixties, degenerated quickly into the blind rejection of values, which is vandalism and meaninglessness, the characteristic work of unevolved adolescent boys, blowing things up only to view the result. Then they realize--you hope--that they can't still have the thing they just exploded.

And that the blowing up of things will eventually make the freedom to blow things up impossible. In the best case the awareness sticks and they grow up. Those who don't should be kept out of positions of power or they will wreck everything, so you wonder what percentage of world leaders live there, in the land of destruction and arbitrary power, the land of the man--DeLay.

Maybe the vandalism is meaningful in a larger context, as it must be to be comprehensible, but the people who were against any kind of authority won out in the sixties. It means something to be against arbitrary authority but not against all authority. Without it there is no peace. Peace is the result of some kind of order and I think the authority should be impersonal and adaptive. 

Not associated with some sect or nation or religion or person. Children should understand that parents are not the authority, for example: that parents themselves submit to an authority deemed good by them and by consensus and expect the kids to submit to some extent as well. If the kids can come up with something better, well, swell, we'll adopt it, subject to approval.

But there are people who are instinctively against authority forever and those who love it whether it's any good or not, the puritanical extremes, where there's no dialectic or interpolation and opportunity for progress and improvement. There are those conservatives who were too frightened by the sixties and retreated into certainty and absolutism, attacking an exotic liberal bogeyman.

We're a progressive country, a tradition worth being conservative about. England had this problem and messed it up, the reality of the British Empire diverging from their ideals and their self-image and resulting in the romanticizing of incredible stupidity. Gandhi saw this and threw it in their faces. We could have used a Ghandi and instead we got Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff.

Who showed an amazing disregard for decency in relation to Native Americans. Now the next generation of nutballs is romanticizing our stupidity. Someone from one of our vassal states needs to wake us up--another Gandhi, perhaps--a brown person from somewhere to call us on our crap and force us into a reckoning with the reality of our exploitation of the world's resources. 

To say nothing of our ambition for world domination. Is it impossible for us to see how our aptly-named predator drones and their use must look to the rest of the world? Even our friends will want to have defenses against us. Otherwise we might incinerate some suspect on their turf because we think it necessary. Our presumption is incredible. We're so like the English.

If you haven't you should see MY BOY JACK and how Rudyard Kipling naively got his son killed in WWI. It's sad as hell. If I could stand it I would bring up the Bush family and make comparisons. In a better world the ghost of Molly Ivins would haunt them all into mental health facilities or at least give them incurable rashes.