Damn it. He is straying into politics again.

Joshua Tree National Park - 2009

I've been reading the news, blogs of friends, observing life and am getting a bit depressed by the culture wars, government intrusions, war, greed, environmental destruction, and other issue.  It feels like we are headed to a boiling point.

I've tried to keep politics out of this blog since I reinvented it unless the issues related to art and photography.  Today I make an exception... or not.  All this world drama will affect every aspect of life, including art.  I wonder where it is all leading to.

The fundamentalist Christians may think we are heading into the end times.  The liberals are worried that the Tea Party will set back the social institutions to an equivalent of Afghanistan under the Taliban, but with a corporate Christian domination.  The libertarians are up in arms about airport scans.  The  moderates are feeling left behind by all sides.

Last night I was talking about the last Star Trek movie with a friend and mentioned a few things about how San Francisco changes between now and the 23rd century.  My friend asked, "Will they be watching Star Trek at that time?"  My answer was, yes, but it will be called the news.  The earth in Star Trek is a pretty great place when Romulans or Klingons aren't causing problems.  All of the world is a happy globe.

I then thought about history.  I bet there is no time in history when drama was not happening and will probably be the same in the 23rd century as well.   It just feels more intense right now.

I also looked back at the history from 1930-1990.  I came to an interesting conclusion.  All of the stuff happening in the 1950s and early 1960s lead to the tumultuous late 1960s and through the era of malaise in the end of the 1970s.  The country had the New Deal Democrats in the 1930s and 1940s. We then had the McCarthy/Eisenhower era of the 1950s that lead to the Goldwater conservatives of the early 1960s.  We then had Camelot cut short and went to the moon and Vietnam.  The country went up in smoke as the baby boomers boomed.  They changed our world for better and for worse (more for the better, but not all was good).  The dark events of the McCarthy era, the Vietnam War, civil rights, gender equity, and many other issues were building to boiling points and that generation acted out.   The country needed a catalyst to get to that time where cultural rebellion sprung up from all areas.

I think we are in that time again, but it is going to be harder than the 1970s.  The traditional American culture was not ready for the youth rebellion during those years.  They were not able to defend the status quo and so the impact of those movements still live today.  The problem we face now is that the opposition learns from prior failures and evolves (or intelligently designs) into a different entity. 

Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Paul Rand, and many younger conservatives are succeeding at whipping up a fury of energy for their cause that the 1960s and 1970s status quo couldn't.  I think they are ahead of the progressives at this moment in creating a movement.  The conservatives are brilliant at building up their empire while the progressives are complacent.  Reagan and the GOP were brilliant at this and after coming into power in 1980, they were able to sweep aside so much of the liberal agenda.  Clinton tried to make a few changes, but the strong GOP made him a moderate president overall.  Bush 2 was headed toward a similar fate.  He was a mentally week president that could not muster up support for the GOP agenda... until September 11th.  On that date, the GOP gained enough political clout to ram their agenda though again.  They didn't use protests.  They used corporate power backed by government to do their bidding. 

Once President Obama* came into office, the GOP saw they needed to squelch the new "progressives".  The "progressives" that brought Obama into the Oval Office were only concerned with electing him, and not what he or the true progressives wanted to achieve**.  Once he got there, his star faded and celebrity washed away.  The "progressives" that elected him were content in getting him there and grew complacent and the Tea Party came into being.  They stirred up the fear and hate base with the simple message of "No Obama".  They have nothing on their agenda except that, but that is enough to keep their base fired up and to put Palin in contention for 2012.  They have all age groups and are slowly growing their ethnic bases.  I believe we may be seeing their equivalent of the liberal uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s.

I also believe the progressives are much better at stirring this type of energy faster and broader than the conservatives.   The next two to four years will be the tipping point for whether we will be free or corporate Christian America will be reigning over us.

We are building up for another culture war in our country.  It is going to be harder, dirtier, and worse than the 1930s, 1960s-1970s, and Reagans 1980s.  Both sides are media savvy, smart, idyllic, and unwilling to compromise.   We might think we are on the correct side of the war, but they think they are too. 

*I voted for Clinton in the 2008 primaries and I voted for Obama in the general election.  He is a brilliant man, cares for our country, and does not make rash decisions.  He was also hesitant to make the hard decisions and follow through on tough issues while he had control of the two houses and the White House, like Bush did.  I know the Tea Party would have risen up against Clinton if she had won, but I think she would be better at fighting back.  We need a smart, scrappy President, not a contemplative, thoughtful one.  That is a sad statement, but a true one in my opinion.

** It is obvious that many of Obama's supporters wanted him in office, but were not true progressives, at least in California.  How could we elect him and still pass Prop 8, banning gay marriage?  Many Americans supporting Obama didn't care about what he and the party wanted to accomplish.  The "supporters" wanted a handsome celebrity minority president and to finally pat itself on the back for being post-racial.  Sadly, this became evident in these midterm elections when his broad 2008 base ignored him by not voting and didn't support the important changes he, and the Democrats needed to make.  They may have doomed him to being a one term president by focusing on him rather than what he believes in and could do with true support.