According to most historians, the 20th century began in earnest with the commencements of WWI, when Europe’s monarchical balance-of-power system in place since the Congress of Vienna collapsed upon itself, and ended in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Cold War. Similarly, a history professor at Penn, Dr. Thomas Sugrue, opined in a class I took that the 60’s really began in 1954, with the fall of Dien Bien Phu [the real beginning of the Vietnam War], and ended in 1974, with Watergate and the Nixon resignation.
A similar discussion could be discerned in some ostensibly less “discerning” publications [see the end-of year issues of Rolling Stone and New York] regarding what to call the “00’s”; “the aughts” seemed to be the general consensus. In that spirit, I’ve decided that the most appropriate term for this new decade—at least right now—would be the tweens. My rationale, aside from the aforementioned examples of history not being limited to actual chronology, is that the century seems to be in that period where it hasn’t even begun its adolescence yet, even if one might think that circumstances should have forced us to “grow up” faster.
As if that weren’t enough, conventional wisdom holds that adolescence is usually prolonged during recessions, as more people go to--and stay in—school [as I am, currently, on my second masters and third career change]. This, in addition to what another Penn history professor, Michael Zuckerman, referred to loosely as a general cultural zeitgeist of an across the board adolescence [in case you haven’t figured it out, I was a history major at Penn]. In the middle of the previous decade, Time magazine referred to these hybrids as “Twixters” or “kidults”, New York magazine as “grups”. “Tweens” describes the new decade perfectly.
In keeping with the spirit of a general refusal to grow up, I have discovered that some of the most salient observations one can make in a socio-political or cultural sense are, counterintuitively, the most obvious ones. Addditionally, it is sometimes the most obvious points that need to be reiterated, especially in a cultural setting where the general population needs to have everything explained, diagrammed, powerpointed, mapped out and illustrated with cartoons.
Obvious point number one:
Big Government is not going anywhere. Whether of a conservative bent—one requiring a strong defense and military-intelligence apparatus; or of a more liberal bent—requiring funding of all various elements of a “welfare state”—all government, especially the Federal branches, will never get to the point where one can “drown it in the bathtub”, as Grover Norquist would have it.
Obvious point number two:
By extension, the welfare state isn’t going anywhere either. One can debate whether governmental welfare goes to the “undeserving poor” or “’rapacious corporation”—but the fact of the matter is, the government will always be doling out funds to somebody. Just realize that the arguably most liberal administration in American history began its tenure by bailing out the banking and automotive industries. If that wasn’t corporate welfare, what is?
Obvious point number three:
Government and business/finance are inexorably tied, and ever have been since at least the creation of the Federal Reserve; and when government gets involved in business, there will be—and should be—regulations. Regulating business is NOT a socialist concept, no matter how much the Sarah Palin wing of the Republican party screams that it is [not to mention that Palin probably understands less finance and economics than I do.] The New Yorker’s most recent issue—which includes a treatment of the schisms becoming evident in the Chicago School of economics, heretofore ground zero of fundamentalist deregulationary free-market orthodoxy—better illustrate this point.
Obvious point number four:
Even if a stubborn unemployment rate and a questionable recession persists through the 2010 midterms and beyond, its actual impact on the political fortunes of the Obama administration will be limited—though there may be some shakeup in Congress, which is to be expected; one might call it a “correction” not all that unlike when a market “corrects” itself. It will remain a truism in the forseeable future that economic misfortunes are the fault of conservatives and Republicans.
Obvious point number five:
Similarly, the Democrats have not earned themselves any credibility vis-à-vis national security. It might be that they don’t care, that they are so bent toward another “correction”, that of America’s image in the Muslim world. However, the reaction to the underwear bomber indicates that Obama and his minions know that they can’t turn a complete blind eye to the danger without suffering political consequences. A series of further Northwest Airline flights and Fort Hoods will start to do to the Democrats what Lehman Brothers did to the McCain campaign.
Obvious point number six:
Sarah Palin is, right now, politically salient in a way that is all out of proportional to her personal talents and intelligence. That not only may not matter; it may almost help, especially with a base that has serious misgivings with anyone smarter than they are. To be fair—and I personally haven’t been, because my falling for the pre-Couric interview Palin cost me a ton of credibility—Palin is probably closer to a female Dubya than a hybrid of Dan Quayle and Jessica Simpson, as I had previously described her. There is a less-than-subtle difference.
Obvious point number seven:
Despite the series of leaked emails from East Anglia, the truism that there is a phenomenon called “global warming” and that it is caused primarily by our consumption of coal and oil will hold for some time into the future, irrespective of how the “real” science bears out. It also may be equally true that no one country is going to be willing to give up their consumption privilieges. I personally wish this aspect of the environmental movement many more Copenhagens.
Obvious point number eight:
I am biased. So is everyone else.
Happy decade.
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