When?
A Washington Post reporter is questioned by the police for being inquisitive while black . Canadian band Godspeed You Black Emperor were reportedly surrounded by cops and FBI agents with guns drawn in Oklahoma because the attendant thought nine white guys in two vans and a white panel truck were suspicious.
The “Don’t suspect a friend — report him!” poster from Brazil comes to mind. We’re living in a time when the most tenuous of excuses, an anonymous tip from Mrs. Grundy reporting “suspicous behavior,” can bring the authorities down on someone, when failing to conform to others’ expectations is growing dangerous. Yes, the individuals in these stories were unharmed, perhaps frightened in the latter case, but not tremendously inconvenienced otherwise. Yet still, I sympathize with Gregory Dicum, who wonders how do you know when it’s time to flee an encroaching police state?
It’s something I’ve been wondering myself.
Yes, we're approaching an era when cooperation and conformity are being valued more than free expression and individualism. It's not the first time in America's history that this has happened. And like the other times, it's likely to be followed by a pendulum swing in the other direction.
The last time this country swung from individualism to collectivism was during the Great Depression of the 1930's. The economic boom and social excitement of the Jazz Age went out of fashion. Prohibition was repealed, and with alcohol being legal again, the crime rate went down. (Proponents of the War on Drugs should take note of this.) The country began to pull together under a strong leader, first to build its way out of the depression, and then to defeat the enemies of freedom. Many people at the time considered FDR to be too powerful, and a threat to freedom himself, but the majority kept re-electing him.
Maybe George W. Bush isn't this era's Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Personally, I sure hope not.) But I can see a lot of similarities in what's happening today.
So what is the next chapter? The Gen-Y kids who are fighting in Kuwait, those who were born after 1980, are part of a new generation that grew up cherished, cared for, and taught to cooperate and be nice to your neighbors. Then they saw the World Trade Center destroyed by people who clearly weren't very nice at all. Their natural instinct is going to be to work together to set things right. These are the soldiers and workers of the New American Empire, like it or not. And they think -- in fact, they know -- that they are the Good Guys. This is the dawn of the next "Greatest Generation".
After the crisis is wrapped up (sometime in the 2020's, if Strauss and Howe's cyclical theory holds true), we won't be going back to individualism for a while yet. The maturing Gen-Y will see that conformity gets the job done, and raise their kids accordingly. The kids, of course, will rebel against their parents, and grow up hating the idea of fitting into the system. The next era like the 60's won't start until approximately the 2040's.
But hey, our grandchildren are going to be cool.
Posted by Jimcat on March 26 2003 06:08
That we got better after McCarthyism has been a great consolation to me. But that oppression can be overcome eventually doesn't do the oppressed much good in the moment. Germany's a nice enough place today; the people who were fleeing it (and the places it occupied) 60-70 years ago still had a very good idea.
Obviously, the U.S. isn't Nazi Germany. But there's some damn scary stuff coming to pass. I just don't know how bad it could get. So I think "how do we know when it's time to flee?" remains a very apt question.
(I haven't read Strauss and Howe's books, and don't have a strong opinion of their 20-year cycle theory.)
Posted by Zed on March 26 2003 08:12
Strauss and Howe's thesis is a four-generational cycle. The "twenty-year pop culture recycling" is my own unrelated observation.
You can find their books in print easily enough -- the best one to start with is Generations. To sum up as briefly as possible, they characterize four different types of generations succeeding each other:
Civic (like the "Greatest Generation" of WWII),
Adaptive (the "Silent Generation", too young to fight in that war, parents during the 50's and 60's),
Spiritual (the Baby Boomers we all know and, umm... have strong feelings about), and
Alienated (GenX, that's the post-Boom kids born from about 1965 to 1980).
How the country reacts to world events is shaped by the arrangement of the generations, and this has tended to manifest itself as repetitions of spiritual awakeneings followed by material crises, with a couple of decades' breathing room between each. We're now approaching the same generational alignment that existed during the Depression/WWII crisis.
Posted by Jimcat on March 26 2003 09:08
Lately we've been thinking a lot about the "frog in boiling water" meme (an urban legend, but useful even so). We don't have a firm exit strategy yet but have been considering options. Is it warm in here or is it just me? Ribbit.
Posted by T.B. on March 26 2003 22:00