omorka | Political Crap

Note to self: never re-read 1984 (or read in full for the first time, I'm discovering - I think what I read before must have been either a series of excerpts or a bowdlerized version for young teens from a textbook company) during an election year. If I have time this weekend, I'm going to post some of the most frightening passages . . .

This is

moontyger's Link of the Day, and while it's not news, it's terrifying. On the other hand, I've been noticing for a long time that the paleoconservatives (including Buckley and Will, especially) have been having serious hissies about various aspects of the Shrub's policies, in particular the nation-building and interventionist foreign policy. The Republicans are about to find out the internal contradictions of straddling two corners . . .

It also underlines something I've been thinking for a while: this isn't just a competition between two well-born scions of the New England aristocracy (though it certainly is that), or a hardscrabble battle between two massive, bloated, corporately-encrusted political parties (although it is certainly that, too).

This is field-independence against field-dependence. This is about T against F (and perhaps, to a lesser degree, N against S). This is about Reason versus Faith. This is about Reality - with all its internal contradictions, ragged edges, inconvenient caveats, subtleties and muddiness - versus . . . not fantasy, but a TV caricature of the world, a child's idea of the way things are. This is about cynical, world-weary adulthood against an overgrown adolescent and uncomplicated idealism. If you will forgive me, it is the Silent and the 13ers against the Boomers and the two living Civic generations. (In fact, if I am recalling correctly, Kerry was born in 1943 - not part of the demographic Boom, and right on the cusp of Silent and Boom according to Strauss and Howe - while Bush is on the front edge of the Boom, in 1946.)

This is about Apollo, battered by his fall from the sky but still able to speak and sing, against a dry Dionysus, emptied of all his power and made a plaster saint in Yahveh's dull heaven.