I take it a little personally when I read "eight dark years of George W. Bush"* and like lines, from some Democrats in this country and more than a few foreigners -- the sort of people who fantasize that earth-shaking and history-shaping judgments of national defense and foreign policy could possibly be explained by the prospect of a few new oil contracts for old friends, or that a nation with 11 million illegal aliens could possibly be a "police state". (No self-respecting actual police state would abide even a few hundred illegals, surely.) I feel about the "eight dark years" business much the same as I feel about the annual denunciations of Christmas displays and music in stores: I actually get a kick out of animated plush snowmen singing Christmas carols in the Wal-Mart seasonal section, even in October.
It's been my privilege to live in "Bush's America" for about six of Bush's eight years, in a state which voted to re-elect President Bush in 77 of its 77 counties, and it's been the happiest time of my life yet. I hope to be here for many administrations to come, and whatever my disagreements with those administrations, I like to think I'll never take them out on this country or be so carried away by them as to damn their place in time.
It's long ago and far away, since the Panic of '08, but over all the crisis and chaos since the bursting of the tech bubble and later the 9/11 attacks which yanked us from our holiday from history, it was only last year that the Dow Jones was setting records at over 14,000 points, the U.S. jobs market was setting records for longest unbroken gains at 52 months, and the average unemployment rate under Bush was better than the holiday-from-history Clinton average of 5.2 percent. Numbers out of the World Bank even now show President Bush leaves America's economy larger than he found it, by 19 percent.
The whole of the 1970s by any measure was a much more miserable time than we've seen since: Vietnam draft and defeat, Watergate melodrama and the only presidential resignation in the history of the republic, runaway inflation plus slow growth or "stagflation", Soviet ascendancy, the first energy crisis, gas lines and the first defeat of the American car by Japanese imports, inner city lawlessness, counter-cultural chaos, etc. And yet since sometime in the early '90s, the '70s has been the fixation of much of the nostalgia in American popular culture. When bellbottoms reappeared in the early-to-middle-'90s, it was my hope that the fad would be blessedly fleeting; the retro bellbottoms were not fleeting or blessed. Then with the coming of Austin Powers and Boogie Nights, it was my hope that the '70s nostalgia would be succeeded soon enough by '80s nostalgia in film; I'm waiting still for my retro-'80s movies. That '70s Show was followed by a companion sitcom called That '80s Show; the '70s show became an institution and the '80s show was promptly put to pasture. And has not VH1 given the world two 10-hour series reliving the '70s? Nostalgia for the 1970s by now has outlasted the 1970s.
So plainly the papers and textbooks are missing something, when they're not wrong altogether. And if you're one of those people who imagines everything's just awful and has been since sometime in January of 2001, see if you feel quite the same in 20 years' time, if not a lot sooner. An '04 Hummer in 2024 will look like a '56 Chevy in 1976. The War in the Desert from '03 to '07 will look in 2027 like the final few years of the Cold War look to us today. Or take The Sopranos, or Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, or 300 or The Dark Knight, or even Borat; there'll be "2000s nostalgia" before the decade is very long past, and the old refrains of "eight dark years" will be exposed for the partisan hysteria they only ever were.
* - Those being the words of a Canadian news director
It's been my privilege to live in "Bush's America" for about six of Bush's eight years, in a state which voted to re-elect President Bush in 77 of its 77 counties, and it's been the happiest time of my life yet. I hope to be here for many administrations to come, and whatever my disagreements with those administrations, I like to think I'll never take them out on this country or be so carried away by them as to damn their place in time.
It's long ago and far away, since the Panic of '08, but over all the crisis and chaos since the bursting of the tech bubble and later the 9/11 attacks which yanked us from our holiday from history, it was only last year that the Dow Jones was setting records at over 14,000 points, the U.S. jobs market was setting records for longest unbroken gains at 52 months, and the average unemployment rate under Bush was better than the holiday-from-history Clinton average of 5.2 percent. Numbers out of the World Bank even now show President Bush leaves America's economy larger than he found it, by 19 percent.
The whole of the 1970s by any measure was a much more miserable time than we've seen since: Vietnam draft and defeat, Watergate melodrama and the only presidential resignation in the history of the republic, runaway inflation plus slow growth or "stagflation", Soviet ascendancy, the first energy crisis, gas lines and the first defeat of the American car by Japanese imports, inner city lawlessness, counter-cultural chaos, etc. And yet since sometime in the early '90s, the '70s has been the fixation of much of the nostalgia in American popular culture. When bellbottoms reappeared in the early-to-middle-'90s, it was my hope that the fad would be blessedly fleeting; the retro bellbottoms were not fleeting or blessed. Then with the coming of Austin Powers and Boogie Nights, it was my hope that the '70s nostalgia would be succeeded soon enough by '80s nostalgia in film; I'm waiting still for my retro-'80s movies. That '70s Show was followed by a companion sitcom called That '80s Show; the '70s show became an institution and the '80s show was promptly put to pasture. And has not VH1 given the world two 10-hour series reliving the '70s? Nostalgia for the 1970s by now has outlasted the 1970s.
So plainly the papers and textbooks are missing something, when they're not wrong altogether. And if you're one of those people who imagines everything's just awful and has been since sometime in January of 2001, see if you feel quite the same in 20 years' time, if not a lot sooner. An '04 Hummer in 2024 will look like a '56 Chevy in 1976. The War in the Desert from '03 to '07 will look in 2027 like the final few years of the Cold War look to us today. Or take The Sopranos, or Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, or 300 or The Dark Knight, or even Borat; there'll be "2000s nostalgia" before the decade is very long past, and the old refrains of "eight dark years" will be exposed for the partisan hysteria they only ever were.
* - Those being the words of a Canadian news director
1 comment:
well bush is a complete nut
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