This Decade Is Still With Us: Look To The Future, Not The Past

The decade is still with us
Look to the future Not the past;
As 2009 bids adieu,
Our challenge Lies ahead Not behind

Forget The End Of A Decade Hype, What Should Progressives Do Now?
The Dissector's End of the Year-End Wrap Up

By Danny Schecter
Media Channel
December 29, 2009

WATCH VIDEO

RFK: On the Mindless Menace of Violence | City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio | April 5, 1968

[snip]

‘violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.’

Let’s drop all the decade hype. I know we tend to structure history in ten year swallows: The 60s, the 70s, the 80s, etc. It is all so neat and so clean but, alas, not quite true.

The decade that began with the new millennium, doesn’t really end unto the end of 2010, and that’s not this year, even though we may want it to.

History doesn’t self-package itself to fit a “Greatest Hits” song compilation. The 1950s, with its anti-communist craziness and nuclear arms race started after the war, in the 1940s and didn’t end until Eisenhower’s famous warning about the military industrial complex, which is still with us all these years later. It was Ike who legitimated tricky Dick Nixon whose ride was just beginning. Tricky was devious but also an environmentalist and smarter than we gave him credit for.

The 60s was an era of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll that didn’t get going until mid decade as the Vietnam War’s impact drove a whole generation into opposition. The 60s stayed with us, sparked by FM rock radio, until Nixon imploded and the war ended in 1975.

Soon punk and disco brought on the Me generation and led us to Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” and then to the rise of Ronny Raygun. When the left splintered, the right organized, putting in place a network of think tanks to take over. The conservatives drove the 80s until Clinton’s centrism snuffed the spirit of the sixties in the 90s, even as it appeared to be embracing it. “It’s the economy, stupid,” led to deregulation and the crisis we are now coping with.

That led us to the neo-con resistance and the stolen election of 2000, stolen by aggressive GOP tactics and Democratic inertia. With the help of various turncoats and media assets — like Fox and talk radio — they renergized their movement by adopting 60s tactics while waging a culture war against 60s values.

Al Gore, now seen as an agent of climate change, blew the election and in the process blew up the power and personage of a political chameleon/wannabe messiah named Joseph Lieberman, a civil right activists turned sleazy opportunist and health care reform killer. He’s still with us, like gum on your shoe, more obnoxious than ever, as a new year begins.

Barack Obama’s election seemed an anomaly, but clearly it was disgust with his predecessor that drove him from obscurity to the presidency. Obama’s “outside-inside” strategy inspired millions of new voters. But once in Office, the office took over, co-opting his populist inclinations and burying his grass roots movement in a miasma of paralyzing pragmatic centrism rationalized as the politics of the possible. Supporters became recipients of emails, not potential activists.

Obama realized that the Bush era had not ended in the bureaucracies or in the media and halls of Congress. To undercut its lingering impact, he embraced some of its tough-guy national security boilerplate. He got along with Pentagon power by going along. Compromise began to become his mantra. Minuscule reforms were presented as great victories. Withdrawal from Iraq was delayed as was the closing of GITMO.

Had he become a Bush 2? Many think so. Was he selling out or buying in?

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