I've often told people that one of my state's senators, Teddy Kennedy, seems to be stuck in the past, say about 1975. He seems to still view the world as if it were that year.
The same may hold true for Obama's newly-named energy and environmental team. Those folks are similar to the ones I knew back when I was an active environmentalist. (In fact, I know Carol Browner, albeit not well, from those days.) I wonder if we're in a time warp, trying to return to those "halycon" 60s. (The continuing impact of the 60s has caused more grief and problems for American society than any other period during my lifetime.)
I hope those newly-appointed idealists have some new, and a bit more practical, ideas. But I'm not optomistic. During their announcements, there was not one mention of two things that are pretty critical to dealing with today's energy/environmental world: nuclear plants to supply electricity; and domestic drilling to supply fuel.
If we seriously want to cut hydrocarbon consumption and/or encourage domestic production and/or put Detroit into a position where they can more effectively compete with the offshore car companies, there's a step we can take that's tried and true: Drop CAFE, drop government subsidies and put a $2 per gallon tax on gasoline. But neither the democrats nor the republicans have the guts to do that.
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2 comments:
Oh great patriarch, we bow to you.
As all the rest of the blog authors were born in the 1960s, and of them only two be older than Obama by a tad, it's not clear how either the rest of us authors nor Obama and his administration can participate in evaluating the relative amount of "halcyonness" of the decade.
I the eldest don't have a clear memory of JFK, neither alive nor the funeral. Indeed, as far as inherent political memory goes, the only reasons I have any memory of before 1968 are the flashes of cognition that I get when recalling all the Goldwater trinkets that I found while cleaning out my dad's place.
So given that my earliest in-context political memory is protesters shouting "Hey, Hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?" during Huntley and Brinkley, and they're younger, just what part of the 1960s do you suppose Obama's team is thinking about?
You're right that Obama is relatively a young'un. Not true for many of his confreres, starting with his veep. Those are the ones I'm concerned about.
I was definitely there in the 60s. Young people were opposed to a far-off war in Vietnam primarily because it was a messy war (unlike our more recent fairly antiseptic ones) and YOU MIGHT GET KILLED and they just DIDN'T WANT TO GO. But many of them couldn't admit that to themselves, so they came up with idealistic and unrealistic "principled" opposition. That led them to develop an enduring distrust of government that continues to this day, even though they're now the ones in government positions. They rationalize that dilemma by somehow believing that their own views are right and the other guys' views are wrong. Keep that in mind the next time you hear one of them waxing on about the members of the other party and how dangerous they are.
More of that vitriol comes from the left than from the right because the people with the leftish bents were the ones most opposed to the Vietnam war. They just can't come to grips with their own pasts.
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