| | This is, in many ways, a continuation of my previous post. I'm afraid it's a common malady for historians to search the contemporary landscape for parallels to their areas of interest and/or expertise, but in the case of my thesis review and recent events I feel obligated to ponder a few similarities. The overall main point of my thesis (my thesis thesis, if you will) was that the Civil Defense programs initiated by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations reflected the ideologies of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. That's not as soft a thesis as it might (admittedly) appear on first glance. Rather, I lined up what I believed, and still do, to be convincing examples of the individualism of the Eisenhower programs contrasted against the more paternal nature of the Kennedy approach. A key background element for the Eisenhower years was a pervasive fear -- of attack, of internal revolution led by the Communists who were hiding under every bed, of the unknown in general -- that provided ample opportunity for the government to peddle its agenda to the public.  A popular nostalgia has grown up around the fifties in America, not particularly related to the facts of the time. While the enduring images are of Lassie and Leave It To Beaver-esque visions of suburbia, people often forget that the decade also saw civil liberties fall increasingly to the wayside during anti-Communist crusades, the gathering desegregation storm, and the rising prominence of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.
It is tempting, of course, to point to what would seem to be incontrovertible evidence of history repeating itself -- anti-terrorist crusades (c.f. my previous post), government-sanctioned discrimination against minority groups (illegal immigrants, homosexuals), NSA wiretapping sans due process, etc., but in many ways that doesn't present enough of a challenge to even warrant attention. However, I do find myself intrigued by what happens if we take this hypothesis and expand it somewhat. After all, the fifties led (in an astounding instance of mathematical purity) to the sixties. Does that mean that we may emerge from the current eight-year Republican epoch into a drug-fueled, protesting-in-the-streets counterculture, one perhaps even characterized by a return to quality popular music? Will we see an actual, honest-to-goodness literary scene? Riots on college campuses? Free love? Rather than Homeland Security telling us that we need plastic sheeting and duct tape in our cabinets, will government surveyors fan out across the country to find and mark appropriate community shelters against the hazards of radioactive dirty bombs? As much fun as it would be to see pretty much all of these things, it is, alas, unlikely. The decade of the sixties, as historians have shown time and again, was the product of a very unique set of circumstances all coming to simultaneous fruition. We don't have a baby boom giving us an unprecedented number of socially idealistic young people. We don't have a draft, so no matter how long the current war continues there's no danger (at least for the time being) of forced servitude such as that which drove the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era. With no anti-war movement, we'll likely not see the protests, the college uprisings, the incredibly fertile independent music scene that gave recognition to talented artists and led to Woodstock. We're probably facing at least another ten to twenty years of computer-rendered anodyne pop (CRAP) -- I really wish I could take credit for that, but sadly I heard it in "We Will Rock You," the Queen musical in London. Most college students can't write a coherent paragraph, so an explosion of underground poetry or experimental essay structures is probably still very distant on the horizon. So what of civil defense? That is harder to predict. The Department of Homeland Security, like the Office of Civil Defense, was hastily assembled out of necessity to mobilize against an inherently spectral threat. CD administrators faced a dilemma -- do you lull people into a (false) sense of security to avoid irrational behavior, or do you keep everyone on an unsustainable high alert? I would suspect DHS will eventually have to face this question as well. How they address it will make great fodder for history theses by as yet unborn historians. Everything old will be new again. |
