The story of man is: sin - punishment - repentance. Rinse and repeat. Both on a micro and macro level. So it makes our current situation explicable. Every generation, after all, must start from scratch...we're back in the sin phase. America will be punished and then, ideally, repent. So hopefully I can tamp down my shock a bit.
The word of the day is: earnestness. God probably calls us to this more than I realize. This quality, according to John Podhoretz, was one of the things that made the late P.J. O’Rourke a mensch. O’Rourke never quite fit in, being an Ohioan amid a host of east coast Harvardians. Somehow O’Rourke managed to be earnest and yet funny.
Earnestness is decidedly not a Gen X vibe. A couple days after hearing Podhoretz I read Matt Taibbi on this, flipping it around a bit:
I grew up in the Cold War, one of those Gen-exers raised on Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five and Dr. Strangelove to believe our hawks and their hawks were equally crazy. My generation’s orientation was ironic. We struggled with earnestness because we were there during the ten seconds it took for the Boomers who preceded us to go from being Marxist revolutionaries to Apple executives. The late seventies and eighties were a strange period in American history (a lucky one, I realize in hindsight, as I think about the world my kids are facing) when war was so distant that the fact that not enough people took it seriously as a policy option was a regular complaint of Washington experts.
My generation, which smoked a lot of weed and listened to a lot of standup, mostly didn’t buy it. Being told since birth about the thousands of civilization-destroying missiles aimed at you by lunatics on both sides of the planet tends to decrease your patience for armchair-General Buck Turgidson types who argue that with a few engineering tweaks here and there, war can be a good idea again.
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