POLITICS AS POLITICS. Have I ever mentioned that I hate baby boomers? Sometimes I think this is irrational on my part. Then along comes Andrew Rosenthal's infuriating contribution to today's New York Times editorial page. In essence, he went to hear Crosby, Stills, and Nash play, started thinking about the old Crosby, Stills, and Nash shows he's seen, waxes nostalgic about the sixties, and demands to know why the kids these days aren't as awesome in terms of mounting an anti-war movement as the kids were back in his day.
Well, what's happened is that a broad coalition of boomers who've managed to grow up, along with the vast swathes of the American public either too old or too young to have been at Woodstock, are trying to avoid the catastrophic mistakes made by the anti-war movement in the late 1960s. Specifically, we're trying to not link the war question up with a broad countercultural movement that managed to become less popular than the war itself. Specifically, rather than engaging in a lot of self-indulgent political theater, contemporary anti-war people have managed to get the vast majority of the Democratic Party -- along with a few Republicans, like the desperate Chris Shays -- to shift toward a position favoring an end to the war in Iraq, and we're now hoping the 2006 midterm elections will put such politicians in a position where they have the power to do something about it.
There's just very little reason to think that organizing mass demonstrations or getting more people to listen to "New Kicks" or "Celebration Guns" would advance any important political goals in a useful way.
--Matthew Yglesias
