Bill Powers has a sharp column today chiding "the Baby Boomer-run media" for their '60s throwback mentality:
If the race turns out to be Obama versus McCain, the obsession will only grow. Where Obama represents the RFK/MLK side of '60s culture, McCain, the former Vietnam POW, will become the embodiment of the anti-communist, warrior strain. America's Boomercentric newsrooms will churn out endless stories about the great dichotomy that supposedly lives on today. But does it really? The present is messy and complicated, hard to make sense of. Why not Google the world of 40 years ago and say it's all a rerun?
If the news outlets of the early '60s had been this backward-looking, JFK's candidacy would have been all about the 1920s. "Gosh, doesn't that young Kennedy fellow remind you of flappers, the Lost Generation, and Warren Harding?" But then, that would have been silly.
Quite right. At the risk of upsetting any part of the pan-generational Cogitamus family and readership, can I just say that I'm extremely tired of hearing about the '60s? Yes, we need to learn from history and all that, and there are some obvious parallels, but there is a certain narcissism on display when people who grew up during that era interpret current events primarily through their generational lens. The present, as Powers says, is both messy and complicated.
