BOOMER WARS:

HARSHNESS AND VITRIOL (Michael Barone, 11/17/03, US News)

Why this increased harshness? My explanation: It is a baby boom thing. What we are seeing is a civil war between the two halves of the baby boom, the liberal half that basked in national publicity in the late 1960s and the conservative half that smoldered in resentment for many years until its more recent rise to prominence. [...]

Bill Clinton in 1992 and George W. Bush in 2000 both conducted consensus-minded campaigns, but both soon came to be hated by large numbers of voters. Character played a part. Both men have personal traits that the other half of the baby boom generation loathes: Clinton's smooth articulateness and ethical slipperiness, Bush's mangled syntax and moral certainty. The hatred was ratcheted up in the 2000 Florida controversy, in which both sides for tactical reasons made arguments congruent with their own half of the baby boom's deeply held moral attitudes. The Gore campaign argued, The rules are unfair; change the rules. The Bush campaign argued, It's unfair to change the rules in the middle of the game; enforce the rules. It was inevitable that whichever side lost would deeply resent the result--and hate the winner.

Boomer liberals are liberation-minded on cultural issues and conciliation-minded on foreign policy. Just as they favored propitiating campus rioters by granting many of their demands in the 1960s, so they favor mollifying terrorists by conceding some of theirs, as Bill Clinton tried to do in Northern Ireland and Israel. Boomer conservatives are tradition-minded on cultural issues and confrontation-minded on foreign policy. They smoldered when campus rioters extracted demands from college presidents, and today they favor confronting terrorists militarily, asserting the fight is
between good and evil.

Where's Mayor Daley when we need him...?

MORE:
Don't Quit as We Did in Vietnam (David Gelernter, November 9, 2003, LA Times)

We are haunted by the image of Vietnamese who trusted and supported us trying frantically to grab a place on the last outbound helicopter; by Vietnamese putting to sea in rowboats rather than enjoy Uncle Ho's "Workers' and Peasants' Paradise" one more day. We are haunted by the consequences of allowing South Vietnam to collapse. Tens of thousands of executions (maybe 60,000), re-education camps where hundreds of thousands died, a million boat people.

We put them in those rowboats — we antiwar demonstrators, we sophisticated, smart guys. The war was nearly over when I graduated from high school. But high school students were old enough to demonstrate. They were old enough to feel superior to the fools who were running the government. And they were old enough to have known better. They were old enough to have understood what communist regimes had cost the world in suffering, from the prisons of Havana to the death camps of Siberia.

Today we are haunted, in thinking about Iraq, by the fact that a noisy, self-important, narcissistic minority talked the United States into betraying its allies. (Loyalty didn't mean a lot to antiwar demonstrators; honor didn't mean a lot.) We betrayed our allies and hurried home, to introspect.

They stayed on, to suffer. We were eager to make love, not war, but the South Vietnamese weren't offered that option. Their alternatives were to knuckle under or die.

It was my fault, mine personally; I was part of the antiwar crowd and I'm sorry. But my apology is too late for the South Vietnamese dead. All I can do is join the chorus in shouting, "No more Vietnams!" No more shrugging off tyranny; no more deserting our friends; no more going back on our duties as the strongest nation on Earth.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 9, 2003 12:33 PM