Jay Cadillac for November 11
56,587,540
of us fear
this may not
be the dawning
of the Age
of Aquarius
_______________________
The children are in charge now.
Like a "Lord of the Flies" nightmare come true, the generation that never grew up has at long last seized power. The New Leftists of the Sixties, and the broods they begat, finally did what they've long dreamed of, something they tried to do in 1972 and failed miserably. They got a president -- at least they hope -- whose values are just like theirs.
President-Elect Obama. Its very sound, I suspect, scares the hell out of 56,587,540 of us. But to 64,171,391 others it symbolizes the Age of Aquarius. Harmony and understanding. Mystic crystal revelation.
Peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.
I once walked with these idealistic flower children. I angrily marched with them, singing Give Peace a Chance. When Nixon mined Haiphong Harbor, I helped my comrades take the 28th street overpass in Boulder, later breathing in the heady fumes of tear gas when the police took it back. I placed some flowers in my hair and hitchhiked to San Francisco. I made my straight-chick girlfriend go see the movies "Easy Rider" and "Johnny Got His Gun." At Red Rocks I cheered Joan Baez along with thousands of grass-glazed concertgoers. I put a peace sign on the back window of my ancient pickup truck. And when I got drafted into Uncle Sam's Army, I told myself, I'm getting outahere fast as I can.
It's a stage I went through, just like potty training. Even Robert Frost understood that many young people go through a period when they have to prove to themselves they're idealistic, that theirs is the first generation in history to hate war and all the other evils of humanity. But he also understood these children should grow up. They should acquire experience and wisdom and slowly discard their childhood fantasies as they move into the real world where bullies lurk and warriors test.
On a high school or college campus it's OK, for awhile, to seize the dean's office or build a shanty town or shout down speakers you don't agree with or demand the expulsion of ROTC or insist on global warming courses in the curriculum or cry out "Ho, ho, ho, western civs got to go!" But in the real world not everyone is an Eloi.
The Greatest Generation, our parents and grandparents who survived Franklin Roosevelt's Great Depression and who fought and won the bloodiest world war in history, begat a generation that spit on them. Never having memories of genuine hard times or of mobilizing an entire nation to exterminate overseas fascists who sought to enslave a planet, the offspring of the men and women who literally saved civilization concluded that it is they who are the truly enlightened, it is they who are the bright and beautiful future.
Their messiah has told them that the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one," that September 11 was not an act of terrorism but an unfortunate "tragedy," that Georgia should "show restraint" when Russia invades it, that the United Nations can handle Iran if it should point a nuclear missile at Israel..
Barack Obama has faith that we are One World, that "aggressive personal diplomacy" is the best way to deal with Bad Guys. Obama's World is one filled with hope and change and, may I say, childish faith. Obama probably sincerely believes that the American president's real job is to travel to other continents and join in teary renditions of "We Are The World." It's more important, to the Aquarians, that they love us in Germany and France and Africa and Iran rather than that they respect and fear us in Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.
An earlier Aquarian, Jimmy Carter, was also a child. He was shocked, shocked when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and he famously said that he sought advice on nuclear policy from his 13-year-old daughter.
Carter by any honest measure was a pitiful failure as president, and the voters fired him in 1980. Replacing him was a cowboy who, literally, on Day One got 52 hostages back from their Iranian kidnappers and won -- not ended, but won -- the Cold War.
Will history repeat? Will 2012 see the 64,171,391 children who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 grow up? Or will it prove to be too late? Will the Morlocks have already devoured all the Eloi?
In "Lord of the Flies" a ship arrives at the shipwrecked boys' island. They rescue, if that's the right word, the children whose little universe had degenerated into anarchy and murder. The book didn't have what you would really call a happy ending -- too much evil had momentarily triumphed -- but at least the grownups took charge again.
Many of the 56,587,540 who did not vote for the candidate of Hope and Change, I suspect, will be doing a lot of hoping, and praying, the next few years as we wait and watch. Hoping that the children don't do too much damage. Hoping and praying that our beloved old republic can one more time pull through.
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The millions who voted for Change and Hope aren't all idealistic fools, aren't all children, a pre-publication critic asserts. That's true -- the swing voters, that brainless and gelatinous mass that bounces one way one year and the other way another year, decided to punish the Republicans for a terrible economy. They aren't sophisticated enough to see the Democratic footprints all over the mess. (And they have also forgotten that President Bush has kept us from a second September 11.)
But the Democratic base is unarguably dominated by children, both tantrum-tossing brats who never learned how to lose gracefully and the more dangerous kind -- the ones who promised that blood would flow in the streets if Obama lost, the ones who angrily stormed the streets in deep-blue California when it voted down legalized homosexual marriage, the Black Panther thugs who patrolled a Philadelphia polling site with nightsticks.
Remember when candidate Obama cajoled his supporters to "get in their face"? Do you think that now a President Obama is going to counsel harmony and understanding?
It's a frightening coalition, the one that demanded America elect the most left-wing member of the Senate or else. Can anyone who proudly voted for Obama reasonably argue that the thousands of celebrants in Chicago's Grant Park, if McCain had pulled out a victory, would have satisfied themselves with a few boos and hisses, as the disappointed losers in Phoenix did Tuesday night?
No, my friends, blood would have flowed.  .....COLOSSUS