Move On

Dave Barry:

Call me a dreamer, but I’m hoping that at some point before we go to the polls, we can get this campaign past the Vietnam era to at least, say, the late ’70s.

It would be cool if we could argue about the late 70s. I was nine years old then. I actually remember the late 70s. Vaguely. I saw The Who’s Tommy. Didn’t understand it at all. Scared the heck out of me, actually. But I do sorta remember some of the craziness. It was a weird time to be a child, believe me.
I know it’s hard for some people to understand, but I really don’t care about Vietnam or the 60s. Sorry. I wasn’t even born yet in the 60s and the Vietnam War ended before I began kindergarten.
Anyone who is stuck in the 1960s today is exactly as out of date as were those conservatives in the middle of the last decade when Bob Dole prattled on about going back to the 50s.
Lefty Boomers seriously need to stop and ask themselves if they want to be today’s Bob Dole. Roger L. Simon told me on the phone today that when he left the Republican National Convention (where he blogged it live) he saw gray-haired protesters in the streets screaming exactly the same slogans he yelled more than 30 years ago when the world was a different place. People get reactionary as they get older. I guess it’s just part of the process. But it can be resisted with effort.
We are never going back to either the 50s or the 60s. You know it, too, so please move on and get over it.
Yesterday I wrote this in my comments box:

History swung on its hinges in 1968. And it happened again in 2001. The scream you hear from certain quarters (but not all) of the left comes from the knowledge that 1968 has been topped.

When Roger writes about the new reactionaries this is basically what he’s talking about, the difference being that he actually lived through the era in question.