When I entered college in the early '70s, much campus discussion was so dogmatically correct (like today), and centered around collectivism and macrobiotic recipes (in which I had microscopic interest), I began to brush up on the history of near-misses and might-have-beens - just to alleviate the dreary proposition that the relentlessly presented, but stagnant, counterculture had found The Answer.
There is something about our society that mysteriously instills a need - even addiction - for scapegoats.
We seem, collectively and individually, to require emotional punching bags - persons, groups or institutions, even things, on which to exact, metaphorically or physicially, our violent frustrations, angers and fears so whetted by contradictory elements we've built into modern American life.
An encouraging sign in the past few weeks, second only to Obama's resilience against the Israeli Lobby in choosing operatives like George Mitchell and Chas Freeman to carry our new-fangled realist flag in the Mideast, was the seeming diminution of Dennis Ross in his declared State Department role.
Forget it: Looks like the old hag is back, and along with it our clumsy, Israeli-centric policies in the region.
But if we thought it would be business as usual, we'd better have a Plan B: Russia whupped a big, jolting bitchslap on our entreaties for help isolating Iran.
In the aftermath of "wartime president" George Bush's inglorious regime, and as we're gob-smacked with the realization our forces will remain in Iraq longer than Obama's promised end dates, it's useful to ruminate on just how much butter our guns are costing us.
Why, for instance, in this economically haggard nation, is it easier to talk about cutting "entitlements" like Social Security and Medicare than to mention reducing our far-flung, hysterically expensive military empire?
Oh... excuse me. Not "cutting" these benefits. Reforming. A term suitable in the same way "subdued" adequately describes the K-T asteroid hit.
It's astounding how our current conventional wisdom is not only unquestioned - it's even unquestionable.
At the Oscars last week, presenter Daniel Craig prefaced one of the deep-background awards like set decoration or costuming with the notation that nominee "Revolutionary Road" captures the quiet desperation that so marks the "prison of suburbia". It came prattling out smoothly, without hesitation, not that such would be expected. There was, of course, no reaction adverse or supportive from the crowd; no huffy murmurs, no enthused claps of assent. Craig was simply repeating one of our great elemental Modern Truths: American suburbia = prison.
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