Posted on by Helen Boyd

Sullivan Said

I just came back from an impressive lecture by Andrew Sullivan about the current election. When it was planned, they didn’t realize he’d be speaking on Super Tuesday, but it’s good that he did.

It was a pretty stunning analysis of the way the Boomer generation’s politics have divided the country and our politics for too long, and pointed up the ways that the (predicted) winning candidates, McCain and Obama, transcended some of those divisions, divisions left over from the 60s: the blue/red, left/right, hippie/straight divide.

His articulation of the way Hillary Clinton is the last current hope of any Republican party unification was not just funny but on the mark. She pisses off Republicans in a way no one else can, and as Sullivan put it, “It may not be her fault – but it is a fact.” & I agree. I’ve been frustrated by the Democratic Party’s backing of her for a very long time – not because I dislike her, but because she symbolizes – fairly or unfairly – the kinds of ideas that divide the country. (Even if, as Sullivan pointed out, both she & her husband are moderates.)

What he had to say about McCain was equally interesting: that because he was in, and suffered during, the Viet Nam War, he would never go after the likes of Kerry in the ways his Republican party cohorts did. And that what may have gotten him through his own torture was the thought that the country he was fighting for would never do such things. But we have. And so, Sullivan pointed out – and as he said, “maybe naively” – McCain feels the dishonor Dubya and his cohorts have brought to America in a way that most Americans feel it, as well.

The image of Mitt Romney as Glenn Close in the bathtub scene in Fatal Attraction will forever stick in my memory as well.

But of course Sullivan is well-known by now to be an Obama supporter. As he pointed out, Obama is not a Boomer. Thankfully. And like most people under 40 in the US, Obama knows that it isn’t a choice to be pro-gay or pro-family, that the idea of women being equal isn’t radical or terrifying, and that there isn’t necessarily a divide between letting a government help people it can help while letting the rest thrive with relative freedom from government. Conservative after conservative Sullivan interviewed (for his Atlantic Monthly article on Obama) said they like him, because even when Obama disagreed with them, he listened to them with respect.

It strikes me now – a half hour after Sullivan finished speaking – that what both candidates stand for, more than anything, is not being their own Party’s favorite son (or daughter), and simultaneously being capable of bringing some dignity back to politics in the US.

I hope he’s right.

Now go out & vote.

18 Replies to “Sullivan Said”

  1. Barack Obama is a Boomer. He was born in 1961. And he’s not under 40. So much for slandering my generation!

  4. yes, Obama’s more “generation jones” or a shadow boomer, imho. you have to be born in the 50s to be a boomer proper.

    but Sullivan said he’s technically a boomer, too, & the whole issue is getting boomers to put down the divides caused by the 60s. that is, he wasn’t slandering anyone – just saying that everyone of age to be involved in politics in the past 40 years has had to deal with these divides, & we can’t, as a nation, afford this “which side are you on?” thinking anymore.

  5. Technically I’m boomer too by some accounts (squeaking in at the last year — 1964). But I think it’s more a question of temperament and attitudes — “boomer” examples on both have never resonated with me (in fact I’ve usually found them down right annoying), whereas “Generation Jones” did.

    For those of us on the cusp years, I think birth order may be a factor. I was the oldest child, whereas a friend of mine who’s the same age is much more of a stereotypical boomer — but she was also the youngest of several children and consequently her childhood was much more influenced by the attitudes/events of earlier years.

  6. I also happen to think he isn’t slandering the boomers. I think he pretty well nailed them on the political situation we’ve endured–something that surprised me going into the talk and the Q&A afterward.

  7. She also pisses off a lot of us Democrats. I can’t speak for all of GenX, but Obama seems to be the one for many of my friends and those family members who are Dems.

  8. And McCain SHOULD feel that dishonor. Those Republican bastards have done untold damage. I still hold the hope that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld all get hauled off to The Hague to face charges of war crimes.

  9. When I see how the US I believed in has been squandered by the powers-that-be (Bush et al) I could cry. What makes me optimistic is that people seem to be tiring of this polarization in US politics and trying to make a change happen at the ballot box. Ultimately, that’s one of the biggest reasons I went for Obama over Clinton. But it was a close choice for me.

  10. One of the best books about the paradigm of the boomers, not just politics is “Boomeritis” by Ken Wilbur. He postulates that the boomers are the first generation to go “backwards” in the sequence of human consciousness evolution. It is a compelling book and very well written. (Easy, enjoyable read.) Everyone, boomer and especially non boomers should read it. (Wilbur is Gen X -Y).

    Essentially, instead of caring more about humanity, they only “speak” of compassion. But, in reality, they use “compassion” and caring to further their self centered “me”. In my opinion, such distortion of the highest values of humanity is the height of sophistry.

    As a boomer, I am ashamed of my generation.

  11. > As he pointed out, Obama is not a Boomer.
    > Thankfully.

    besides being demographically incorrect, what’s implication here — that some of us should be ashamed of ourselves for being born during an arbitrarily-designated time span? my polite response to that is, excuse me, but fuck that. isn’t this website beyond putting people in little boxes and painting them with the same brush?

    as for the clintons, either or both of them, being “moderates”, well… no: the defense of marriage, ending “welfare as we know it”, don’t ask/don’t tell, etc., etc. these people are conservatives. they haven’t advocated any policies that richard nixon would have been uncomfortable with.

    oh, but if i remember nixon, then i’m a boomer, which means that i must buy into a whole set of values and political assumptions, right? let’s just slap stickers on people’s foreheads, so we don’t have to talk to them, and we don’t have to think. life is so much easier that way.

  12. “And McCain SHOULD feel that dishonor. Those Republican bastards have done untold damage. I still hold the hope that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld all get hauled off to The Hague to face charges of war crimes.”

    Yo. Calm down. No politician is worth blowing a blood vessel for. Save your passion for something important like sex, good food, or a fine Bordeaux.

    Republican bastards, Democrat bastards. All same.

  13. Even though the Democrats are inserting the word “change” into every half sentence, it’s obvious that it’s first class BS. The government is like a 30 barge train going down the Mississippi. There’s no way in heck that Obama or Clinton in a tiny dinghy is going to be able to change anything. They were both Senators for years. What impressive change did they bring about?

    Does anyone out there actually listen to the rhetoric, to make sense of any of it? I’m starting to think that the average American is a chimpanzee. As long as the politicians keep feeding them bananas, they’ll buy anything.

  15. “Yo. Calm down. No politician is worth blowing a blood vessel for. Save your passion for something important like sex, good food, or a fine Bordeaux.”

    State-approved torture in our name bloody well is important, and it is far past the time someone stop it.

    Arguments regarding the validity of your cynism about how change aside, I also think the composition of the Supreme Court is worth choosing between Democrat and Republican.

    But then I’m a chimp, I guess.

  16. “they haven’t advocated any policies that richard nixon would have been uncomfortable with.”

    Richard Nixon may have been a head case and a crook, but he wasn’t particularly conservative.

  17. My comments were intended to just suggest that another perspective, one more philosophical than political, might help untangle the problems of present day politics, maybe see it a little more whole if that is at all possible. The suggestion to read “Boomeritis” was issued in that vein. That book does not talk about Democrats or Republicans, or even left or right. It talks about perceptions that have been codified by more recent philosophers and researchers in cognitive psychology. As an example, there is a very good analysis of how the Boomers misunderstood the philosophy of the French philosopher Foucalt who wrote in the mid 1950s – 1960s.

    As to being ashamed of my generation, (born 1951), this comment is not an attack on any one person that happens to be a boomer. The Boomers individually are what they are, including me. Just being a boomer is not individually an issue. This comment was directed more at the archetypes, the boomer collective life premises, the boomer generational conventional wisdom so to speak. Its an opinion. I don’t think we have been honest to the heart and mind of humanity. We have retrograded in perception while simultaneously giving lip service to higher values that were, unfortunately for the most part, selfishly used by those who espoused them.

    Regardless of whether one is a Bush supporter or a Clinton (Bill) supporter, Presidents that are representative of Boomers, the generation has never really collectively “looked in the mirror” and admitted, “We were wrong. We made mistakes.” Other generations did that. In a lot of ways, boomers archetypally are “conscience cowards”.

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