The crumbling of our country, pt. 1

In which a Gen-Xer looks at his nation, bereft and aghast, trying to put words together.

We're well past "Do you ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up?". Let's not even talk about "When I think of the road we're traveling on, I wonder what's gone wrong." I'm not sure of a lyric that can encapsulate the level of dysfunction and destruction of the American ideal I grew up with. I'm sure there's something out there, though.

In the days of Paul Simon's "American Tune," there was plenty of dysfunction. The jolts of the summer of 1968 had hit our country. Vietnam was in full swing, with boys by the thousands practically graduating high school only to be shipped off across the ocean, many to their deaths, and many more to a life punctuated by injuries both physical and psychological. The violence of the Democratic National Convention revealed a fraught political situation we hadn't ever felt so deeply as a country. Both Kennedy brothers—major symbols of American idealism up to that point—had been assassinated. Racial tensions were running high as everyone from white supremacists and segregationists to handwringing liberals resisted civil rights progress and riots and further assassinations took leaders down. And the album There Goes Rhymin' Simon itself was released at the height of the Watergate scandal; the silent majority who had put such faith in Richard Nixon to steer our country away from all these issues watched in horror as their president was caught not just spying on the Democrats, but repeatedly lying about it and denying any involvement until the evidence was...well, undeniable anymore. Then resigning. The thing about this, though, was that the public had enough of a conscience at the time that people began withdrawing their Nixonian support in disgust that a president could be so underhanded.

By the time of Pump Up the Volume, on the surface, things seemed to have smoothed out. After a rickety remainder of the Me Decade, our Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, stepped into the role of President in January of 1981, symbolically beginning the 1980s. And his avuncular style was as welcome and smooth as Dwight Eisenhower's was during the 1950s after the tumult of World War II. We all want someone to believe in and to look up to, and Reagan was as iconic an American presence as Uncle Sam, George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln. (His time as an actor certainly didn't hurt, either.)

But things only seemed to have smoothed out. In reality, Reagan did some dastardly things. The arrival of HIV and AIDS dominated the 1980s public health conversation, but while thousands of people died needlessly from a disease that neutralized the body's immune defenses, Reagan and his cronies ignored the issue; when they did discuss it, it was as a joke to be laughed about, then shooed under the carpet. Reaganomics fucked with the stalwart backbone of our country—the prospering middle class—by cutting tax rates for the rich with shocking effrontery and putting the onus on the middle class. Future economic Republican presidents would take this policy and run with it, continuing to gut the middle class.

Meanwhile, kids of my generation saw the idealism and happiness of the Boomers harden, congeal, and begin to rot as their true selfish motives came out. I know what Nirvana's "Territorial Pissings" is about, or at least inspired by—the mistreatment of Native Americans and women—but Krist's sardonic singing of "C'mon, people now/Smile on your brother/Everybody get together/Try to love one another right now" nails Boomer hypocrisy by its balls to the wall. I like to consider Kurt's chorus "Gotta find a way, a better way" both a renunciation of this stance and a flailing call to arms before the next line—"I'd better wait"—perfectly emasculates that call to arms because...well, look what happened before us, and we really don't want to make that same mistake twice.

I look now at Nikita Khrushchev's attributed quote with resignation: "We do not have to invade the United States; we will destroy you from within." I mean, the US is pretty damned impregnable. Huge oceans on either side of us, and (up until last year), two stalwart allies to our north and south. Anyone of consequence who would want to attack us would have to fly or sail pretty damned far to attack us. (Witness Pearl Harbor and ask Japan how well that went for them.) So anyone who would want to destroy the United States would have to at least consider that second option Khrushchev supposedly entertained.

More later.