07 19 05

I usually don’t read the letters page, because it’s often the worst of talk radio without the entertaining music bumper and host retorts. Half the writers have a little snarky glow: I made a clever remark. Aren’t I smarty? You get this from a Bob Lundegaard (this one, perhaps?): “It will be interesting to see how the White House functions if Karl Rove is forced to resign. My guess: probably like the Charlie McCarthy radio show the day Edgar Bergen had laryngitis.” Ha ha! Because Bush is the stupid!!11! you know. There’s dispatches from the parallel universe: “Hans Blix, Richard Clarke, John Kerry, Joseph Wilson. The list of respected figures labeled as liars by the Bush team grows and grows. Just what you’d expect from a president who can’t think of a single mistake he ever made!” That manages to be inaccurate, deluded, internally illogical and full of adolescent self-satisfaction in less than 40 words. Sweet.

This one stuck out today:

“Blaming liberal attitudes that grew out of the 60s for problems with gang violence is a sentiment that Sen. Rick Santorum would surely love.”

I think Santorum is the new Jesse Helms: the person you evoke when you want to indicate that the idea is so stupid it’s held by someone who we all agree is the epitome of ideological ugliness and wrong-headedness. It’s like starting out a letter by saying “Blaming conservative attitudes that grew out of the 80s for the problems with immigration is a sentiment that Sen. Ted Kennedy would surely love.” Oooh! Zinger! Touchdown! Nailed ‘em! That’ll leave a mark!

You know, it’s not really as effective as you might think, no matter how much the choir smiles. Anyway. “Rather than blame amorphous cultural forces that, among other things, helped end the war in Vietnam - ”

Uh, no. It helped to end American participation in that war, and thereafter followed conflict, defeat, collectivism and the imposition of a distinctly illiberal administration. On the other hand, we got some kick-ass ethnic restaurants here out of the deal.

" - and supported the civil rights movement –"

Stop. The civil rights movement had its genesis in a previous iteration of liberalism, and in ideas that were not, shall we say, confined exclusively to the Democratic Party. One suspects that the letter writer would vote for Byrd today if he lived in West Virginia, even though the ol’ Kluxer filibustered against civil rights bills. I suspect that the ideas Kersten addressed came from the sort of liberalism that swept out the old anti-communist pro-America greatest-gen types in favor of internationalist radicalism that sought to remake nearly every social, intellectual, artistic and political institution in the culture. In order to get the new utopia into place, nearly everything traditional had to be detonated. The symphonic tradition gave way to atonalism, the classical architectural vocabulary was jettisoned for acres of bleak concrete bunkers, dead white males were swept from the ciriculuum, and the family – well, it could stay, as long as it wasn’t granted any particular importance over other social models.

Yes, I’m speaking broadly. Very. If the idea that the 20th century didn’t see nearly every traditional expression of Western culture get attacked by hairy little termites, then you might think there’s a natural and direct line from Raphael to Jackson Pollack, from Brunelleschi to brutalism, from Beethoven to John Cage.

It’s interesting how both post-war strains of “progressivism” get conflated into one – as though Truman would have endorsed constructing large concrete poor-person storage boxes on the edges of cities and confining their occupancy to women who had children from various absent men. Yes, that’s the way to go! That’s what we need!

Anyway: . . . we should look at some other things that have also changed since the 60s. A college education has become so expensive and financial aid grants so small (in favor of loans) that it isn’t even a realistic option for many poor students.

So they get women pregnant, disappear, and deprive them of male role models.

More boilerplate follows: “The massive loss off manufacturing jobs to outsourcing has left a gaping hole in inner cities. Poorer students who finish high school have few options to earn a living wage. For all of us, real wages adjusted for inflation have been stagnant since the ‘70s, and the inequality between the rich and poor continues to grow. While there is no excuse for gang violence” – except for the high cost of college, outsourcing, inflation and the gap between the wage of a broker in New York City and a single mother with three kids in Kansas City, that is – “wishing for a return to the 1950s doesn’t solve the underlying economic reasons for poverty and hopelessness that are the breeding grounds for gangs.”

Well. What did the 1950s have that the 60s and subsequent decades didn’t? Massive national welfare programs. Can we thus conclude that the programs have failed, utterly, and need overhauling if not abandonment? I don’t expect the letter writer to make that point. More of the same, he might well argue. More incentives to discourage family formation. In any case, it reminds me that this idea isn’t exactly new: witness the scene in West Side Story where the Jets are making fun of all the people who want to find reasons for their thuggishness. “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived!” one shouts.

It was a joke already in 1957.