David Solway:
You need to get a grip.
Your delving into the depths of the American psyche and your lamenting over “the death of the individual” reminds me very much of President Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech in 1979: There’s something deeply wrong with the American people, he thought. And so do you, evidently–even if you would disagree with him as to what that is. And you’re just as off-base today as Carter was in 1979.
We start to see this kind of stuff every time the U.S. gets itself into some real economic hot water. Spengler’s “Decline of the West” became real popular during the Great Depression too. And that stuff vanishes after the U.S. works its way out of its economic difficulties once more.
But let’s not interchange cause and effect.
Those OWS protesters are popular among our youth for two reasons: These young people can’t find jobs (unemployment rate for the Class of 2011: 11.2%). And due to that, they want to protest someone *other than* Obama, since they are still emotionally invested in Obama. OWS, by focusing on Wall Street, gives them a fresh emotional target to yell and chant about.
But if the youth unemployment rate were much lower, there would be no OWS. It’s a reaction to bad economic times, that’s all.
Individualism is alive and well. You have only to look at YouTube to see all the amateur videos on numerous subjects–nature, comedy, politics, etc.–that individuals have taken the effort to put there as self-expression. Many are better than the stuff you find on prime-time TV these days, all the more so because they’re produced on shoestring budgets.
What this country needs is not psychoanalyzing the American people or American society but a better program to restore the American economy. Just like what it needed in 1933 and 1981.
