Many of you know that I believe this presidential election was fated long ago to be the last, decisive battle in the epochal counter-culture wars that, in truth, gripped America from the days of the beat poets, hula-hoops, Ike's farewell address and Goldwater's mushroom-cloud TV commercial, to the days of Watergate, Nixon's resignation, the fall of Saigon and Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review. In other words, not the 60's, but roughly a two-decade span from the mid-1950's to 1975. A span of time that saw more real sociological, intellectual and political change in America than all but perhaps only one other such era, 1850 to 1875.
Virtually everything we thought, said, listened to, watched on television, saw at the movies, heard in our churches, synagogues, schools and halls of congress, what we wore, laughed at, got indignant over, said and did with our dates and friends, how and with whom we played our sports, changed exponentially over those twenty-something years.
Many, many people believe that America went to hell in a speeding, flower-power festooned handbasket during those years. They believe that we descended into a morass of sloth, gluttony, depravity of every kind imaginable. Many, many other people believe we entered a second "age of enlightenment"; social justice and personal freedoms were in the ascendancy, everything was open to question. The New York Times even posed the question was God dead and the world did not come to an end and many people thought that was good. Many other people thought that was worse than bad.
There was much argument and division in America: people were killed for what they believed, and many cities burned for days because blacks were mad as hell. But the single largest issue that divided us, that gave shape and substance and unity for every side in this great cultural divide, was a war in a small Asian country that almost all Americans could not have found on a globe when John F. Kennedy was sworn in on a cold day in the first month of a new decade, a country that also was divided, North and South Vietnam. And through it all, for a decade, that war, the longest in American history, raged on.
In every important way that war never really ended; its wounds never truly healed; the great chasm between protestors of conscience and patriots of cause never meaningfully narrowed. Now, we must try to do it with an election; and we must do it even as we try to explain why it is so necessary to two generations that came after us and do not know why John F. Kerry and George W. Bush would not have stomached one another in 1969 any more than they can in 2004.
But do exactly that we must; this battle will be won or lost on how well the two sides from those two decades long past explain themselves and their values to the voters from age 18 to 40.
Why am I writing this now, here, at this moment? I want you to read a column written by a man with whom I seldom agree, but a man with integrity who writes exceedingly well, one of the better champions on the establishment side of this long, long march to finally, hopefully reuniting the "U.S. into us"--to paraphrase the words of the great Civil War Historian, and fellow Mississippian, Shelby Foote.
Please read David Brooks' column in The New York Times, I will only reproduce his evocative lead, knowing that you cannot be but moved to click:
Between 1940 and 1968, the American people trusted the Democratic Party in times of war. But Vietnam shattered that trust. So if we're going to talk about Vietnam during this campaign, as I guess we are, let's not talk about how many days George Bush served in the National Guard, or how many rows John Kerry sat from Jane Fonda at a protest rally. Let's talk about the meaning of the Vietnam War, and what lessons each party has drawn from that disaster.
