I edited my high school yearbook, which gave me the opportunity to say whatever I wanted on the last page, in print, for all posterity to enjoy. I was a serious 18 year old, particularly about politics, so I never thought of doing anything but a BIG MESSAGE. I was fairly convinced that the overarching issue that would cut short our lives was the Bomb. "Yes, the bomb Dmitri," as Peter Sellars' Merkin Muffly says to his Russian counterpart over the phone in Dr. Strangelove, "the atomic bomb." So there on the final page of the 1983 Woodside Wildcats Yearbook, under a mushroom cloud cut from Time magazine are the words, "There is no such thing as winnability."Dark to be sure, but back then, if you were looking for a specter to justify your fatalism or your liberal arts degree, the USSR was your ticket. Stoked by our own politicians, we clutched to a a historical trope; we are united by what we fear. Not only did I use nuclear winter and old "duck and cover" drills to justify my conscious lack of ambition, I also used the Bomb as the underpinning of my attitudes toward sex, drugs, drinking and physical exercise.
When the Wall came down in the early nineties, my reaction was mixed. Sure, oppressed peoples were suddenly free to express themselves and purchase American products, but what was going to replace my justification for not making something of myself in a world snapped into clear-eyed optimism? China? Not likely. They were already lowering their barriers like a sorority girl on South Padre Island. AIDS? I had too much faith in the inexorable march of science. While the nineties chugged along and many of my peers made small or big fortunes just by showing up at jobs long enough to get their options vested, I started teaching English while impatiently waiting for some new cosmic shoe to drop.
And drop it did, some ten years later. And the thing is, as monolithic as the Cold War seemed to me in my teens, I don't think it holds a candle to what we have today. My newfound sense of impending doom is no longer based on what I guessed to be the mindset of a handful of septuagenarians on the Politburo - now, it's based on what everyone seems to think about just about everything. I was behind a car today that had a bumper sticker that said "Come to Christ or go to Hell" and I realized that sentiments like that are just as venal as the values of those we are supposedly at war against in foreign fields. Everyone seems so certain of their viewpoints that simple skepticism is now the enemy. I'm starting to wonder if the guy pictured above had at least one thing right - the submission to the guiding principle of faith external to human experience is the thing that will extinguish human experience.
But the other thing that happened to me in that decade is I no longer feel the need to justify much of anything to myself anymore. If most people have adopted beliefs that I think are inimical to human progress, that doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing what I think is best for me and my fellow man. Spending time fearing specters is spending time in their world, not your own. I'm starting to think there might be more than a few others who are seeing this as well - Sam Harris' The End of Faith is popular (at least in this town) and the religious right is starting to look winded after so many years of vigorous hypocrisy.
The stereotype of the liberal male, the effete, ectomorphic, pot-smoking Vegan, is something I'm looking to update. How about the no bullshit, ass-kicking liberal who occasionally stoops to the tactics of the other side when the volume gets turn up too far? The models are out there, particularly if you ignore the last 30 years of popular and political history. If there were an Abraham Lincoln Brigade still in existence, I'd be game for a tour of duty - for first action, I suggest Washington D.C.
You may be on the ash-heap of history Vladimir, but I've still got a few things to learn from you.
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