If you grew up like me, which is to say under modest circumstances, then you may have tended to know things to avoid better than things to go after. Sure there was plenty room for dreaming. I wanted to be an astronaut - all boys my age did. I wanted to drive a Dodge Daytona Charger like Buddy Baker or better yet drive the Green Monster like Art Arfons. For the most part however, time as a youth was not spent thinking about how to acquire the Cadillac, but how not to crash in the Volkswagen. I was practical. It was the 'we didn't know how poor we were' kind of practicality. We guessed, we fussed, but we held our heads up and we made do, and we stayed away from temptations. Because Beverly Hills was 10 miles away, but The Jungle was 2.
It took me a long time to figure out what to do with my conservatism, my sense of moral propriety, having come of age during the 70s. I was on the cusp of so many things, too young to be a baby boomer, too old to be gen X. If the country and times were changing, it wasn't because of us. We were in the middle. Things were changing around us and it was hard to know what values were going to last. Everybody had an opinion about what was wrong with America and how they didn't recognize it any longer. I was in the seventh grade when the President had to step down, and I read in the newspaper that he cursed. A kid I knew had a four foot blacklight at the foot of his bed, and his room was covered with posters. One of them was Nixon on the toilet. Another was Mickey having sex with Minnie. Was this the future? Did we lose the war? Was America no good? I wanted good to triumph over evil. I wanted to be a good Christian - I didn't want to be an angry man. I wanted no part of fear, not to fear or to be feared. But even the Catholic Church was changing. Everything was new and funky and nothing was certain.
When I graduated from high school we had inflation. Cars cost more than ever. Houses cost more than ever. What used to be enough to buy a car was now considered a down payment or so it seemed to me. Cars didn't even go fast any longer. They changed the speed limit. They put in little engines. They made the speedometers only go to 80. There were no more astronauts and speed was the enemy. The Isley Brothers said 'there's a whole lot of bullshit going down'. They played the song on the radio with the word edited out and we learned it the wrong way with the gap in the rhythm, back when everybody couldn't afford records. There didn't seem to be great promise for the future, and by the time I was a bit older and more aware of things - the sci-fi that was Star Trek had turned dystopian. The future started to look like a feral motorcycle movie. We all shuffled our feet in the shadow of mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter and hostage crises.
I couldn't know, nobody could know what brightness the future held for those of us enamored with the computer. It was logical to me. It all made sense. I loved electronics, radios, CB, cassettes, oscilloscopes, anything you would find in a rocket ship. I read Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. There was a distant possibility of hope. It is only the absence of hope that makes Hell bearable. So I held out hope and I kept my sense of moral propriety and I made a few more dollars in the next job and the radios got smaller and the speakers got better sounding and the motorcycles got faster and the music got happier in the 80s. And people around my age were starting to get into movies and the new President said that it was morning in America, and the music of Fame gave way to the music of hiphop and it was Fresh. There was a dude named Wynton who wore the same kind of schoolboys I did and Nile Rodgers did and there was a way for me to be clean and GQ and respected and the future started to look interesting again. I read Tracy Kidder's Soul of the New Machine, and I read The Mind's I and I discovered a new future.
It took a long time for me to figure out how to wear my morality consonant with a faith in my country. Ironically, it came from a dude named Cornel West. I read his book, 'The American Evasion of Philosophy' and he introduced me to Emerson. West used a word I had never heard before or since called 'theodicy' to describe what now I generally store under the title of American Exceptionalism - which is that Emerson had faith in God and Country, tied the two together and said America should be moral. It was really the first time I really thought long and hard about it and accepted the idea that America *is* moral. That it is our hope that some action we can be a part of is part of God's will and good for the country and is part of the country by definition. It took me a long time to understand the humanities; most of my life computer nerds were thought of as glorified mechanics. We weren't supposed to be leaders of any sort. But somewhere I read, because I had to teach myself, that Voltaire said knowledge of the sciences and humanities went full circle; if you study enough on a Western path of science you will find the Eastern path of humanity. And so I made the connection finally that what I've wanted from America morally speaking, was something deeply understood- not something new.
What I found in Emerson may have been deeply understood, but it was not widely understood and probably still isn't. It's very difficult to find your way to discover what thinkers you are like in history. It's also sometimes difficult to imagine your best dreams for America have already been stated, especially if you grew up in the 70s. I'm often told conservatives want to live in a magical past. I don't want to live in the past, but I do want to know my intellectual and moral connection to it.
Today, I see attitudes of hopelessness and cynicism I haven't seen since the 70s when Irwin Allen was king of the box office. I think young people are finding the same kind of powerlessness in this economy and culture that I did back then. Of course it's not the same exact situation but working out ways and means to make hope real is the same solution. One always must find the reasons to maintain a sense of moral propriety and reconcile that with their citizenship.
Politics is, I think, 30% rhetoric, 30% wishful thinking, 30% antagonism and 10% policy making. That's part of the way so many people can care about it - it has to have all that drama to sustain the manufacture of consent. But within some of that real thinking are principled philosophies that come through the discovery of individuals. That's where I'm coming from, an evolved kind of organic way to recognize the necessity of a moral citizenship.
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