Uncle Tupelo, "Outdone" (Track of the Week)

I've been thinking a lot about my rural Nebraska hometown recently. Partly this was out of hearing that a bunch of businesses that were important to me there are closing, and partly this was due to finding out two priests I worked with as an altar boy were listed by the diocese as having committed sexual abuse. One of them was excommunicated 25 years ago, but this was all hushed up because I never heard about it and am finding it impossible to find information out about it.

I'll probably write more about that soon, but today I've been retreating into the music of the band that best gets at my ambivalent feelings for my homeland: Uncle Tupelo.

I first discovered them in the spring of 1994, right as I was leaving my hometown behind. Their music blew me away, a combination of punk and country roots suffused with a critical political stance and poetic words about small town Midwestern life. I felt such a kinship with Uncle Tupelo, since they seemed to be so much like me and nothing else in the pop culture universe at the time really was.

Listening to the band's compilation on Spotify while I rode the commuter train to Manhattan I was struck by "Outdone," a song that had never been a favorite before. The chorus really hit me "Now there's too many people trying to hard/ Not to be outdone/ They follow close being their proud smoking gun." Amid the thrash of the twangy punk I hear a disdain for the daily rat race, an emotion that gives my Gen X soul all the feels.

I guess the song struck me because as much as I like living in the New York City area, some parts of it will never be comfortable for me. People here are much, much more status-oriented and hierarchical than back home in the Midwest. The local bourgeoisie here just constantly walks around high on their own bullshit. When I meet someone of that class background I've learned to not trust them until they reveal to me that they're not one of these striving yuppie bores. These are the kind of people in their status obsession who are so afraid of being outdone.

I don't miss the smalltown bigoted squareheads who bitch about Muslims and immigrants and think mayo is a spice. However, I do miss the small town sages who embraced the slower pace of life but look around them with a jaundiced eye. Sadly they've been written out of the "red state" narrative.

Slacking As Refusal? (A Gen Xer Reflects)

In my head this is still current and nothing you say will convince me otherwise

Generational analysis has become a popular pastime among the chattering and twittering classes. This has brought the sad conjunction of the words "aging" and "Gen X." While I have been fine dealing with my own aging, it's been tough realizing that my generation's cultural touchstones and values are being met with derision by those younger than me. For example, I recently heard something criticized as being made for "Gen X ironists" and that smarted a little. I was reared by the culture of the nineties to deride selling out and think most pop music was shit, but now people younger than me think that's politically regressive or something because the masses are always right, even when they like mass produced shit. 

But hey, that's just part of getting old and I should learn to deal with it. I do not want to be like the boomers who act as if the sixties were the paragon of human experience and will tell you about it at every single opportunity. If I am honest with myself I know how angry and irritated I got at my own generation when it was in its youth. At my college there was pretty much zero political activity. My third year I started a club with some of my friends to push for progressive causes on campus. We weren't very big.

My friends and I were complete exceptions to the rule of apathy that reigned among white middle class young people like ourselves. (When doing any generational analysis these kinds of qualifiers are absolutely necessary.) Reagan was elected when we were in preschool, and by the time we had graduated from high school the neoliberal onslaught was pretty much complete. When I was in college a Democrat was president who exulted that the "era of big government is over" while he went after welfare recipients with the same gusto as the Gipper. There was, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, No Alternative. 

For people from my background, there were basically two alternatives. Alternative number one was to embrace the new order and take it to the hilt. When I see people like Paul Ryan and Scott Walker my skin crawls because I knew a lot of guys of their exact type in college. They had absolute faith that their position in society was all due to their hard work, and were completely uninterested in expressing any kind of empathy for those who had it worse than them. These were the people who aspired to live in the McMansions sprouting in 1990s suburbia like mushrooms. I met these guys again a couple of years ago when I was at a birthday party for one of my daughter's friends in a much more suburban town than the one I live in. A couple of the dads at this event were practically spitting with anger about Colin Kaepernick. 

The other option was to refuse to take part in the new culture of greed and consumerism. When reading my Twitter buddy Jon Malesic's piece "Millennials Don't Have A Monopoly On Burnout" I suddenly realized that the "slacking" that a lot of folks were doing back in the 90s wasn't laziness, it was refusal. Modern American capitalism is built to suck its workers dry, chew them up, and spit them out. It's perfectly sensible to sit that shit out. Of course, that kind of thinking doesn't lead to much social change, and it may even be self-defeating.

At the same time, I have to remind myself to take pride in having opted in my twenties not to join the Paul Ryans of the world. I (stupidly?) decided to go to grad school and pursue the life of the mind. Little did I know that the neoliberal tide would soon submerge higher education, too. But you know what? I was broke in my 20s, but I had a blast. I worked like a madman in grad school, but it was work that MEANT SOMETHING to me. When I left academia I became a teacher, a job that is hard but fills me with joy on a regular basis. To get that job I had to quit being a professor, the much higher status job. I'd been lucky enough to learn that refusal can be liberating.

Whenever I think about how much less money I have because of these life decisions and get a little sad about it, I remind myself that I've spent my adult life doing work meant to do something positive in this awful, broken, capitalist hellscape. I am glad I came of age at a time when I got the validation to take that path. My generation maybe isn't much to write home about, but maybe we can pass along the wisdom that opting out of our contemporary world of "personal branding" and endless self-promotion isn't such a terrible idea.

Trumpism Is White Baby Boomer Generational Warfare

For pretty much all of my adult life I have seen generational warfare afoot in this country, but never on the level of Trumpism. Trumpism is white baby boomer generational warfare at its most acute, as Trump's recent budget proposal proves.

This budget would add tens of billions of dollars to the defense budget, a military buildup likely to lead to a war (they always do) where the youth of America will be sacrificed. At the same time, social and environmental spending will be slashed, while Social Security and Medicare will remain untouched. The elderly white middle class will thus retain their entitlements and be protected unto their deaths, which will likely happen before the effects of mass pollution take hold for everybody else.

The aging white population came out for Trump in a big way. They are basically fine with making everyone else suffer as long as they are protected. Back in the 1980s, Reagan had also figured this out. He too sheltered Medicare and Social Security while slashing away the parts of the safety net that helped the young and poor. Reagan was a shrewd enough politician to know that his free market hocus pocus didn't wash with the great masses. He also knew that middle class white people would support him if they knew that other people were getting nailed harder than they were. It's a tale as old as time in this country, my friends.

Those of us below a certain age will likely find out that the tiller is empty when we come to collect our retirement. In the meanwhile we'll be breathing polluted air and watching the thermometers rise. That's been par for the course for the older generation, of course. They grew up with a robustly supported education system that made it cheap to attend public universities. At the same time, they could get good jobs still without higher education. Then, once they reached adulthood, they decided they'd rather not pay the taxes their parents did, and made public universities insanely expensive right as they became more essential for entry into the middle class. They were the first generation and in fact the only generation to benefit from the post-New Deal state from the cradle to the grave.

The generational war is over now, and those of us not fortunate enough to be on the winning side are going to have to face a bitter defeat who consequences still can't be foreseen.

The Strange Absence Of "Generation X" From The Political Discourse

We are hearing a lot of generational analysis when it comes to the election, especially in regards to Millennials. This fits with broader cultural discourses that are sometimes comically maladroit in determining what Millennials are all about. We can all certainly acknowledge that generational thinking is problematic because talking about people across race, class, gender, regional, and sexual lines as if they share the same mentality because they were born around the same time is rather specious. Articles about “the millennials” are thus preferred by hack journalists who need to get something in before deadline.

At the same time, generational thinking can help explain some things, because those born around the same time grow up consuming the same popular culture, living under the same government policies, etc. I recently finally read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and although we grew up in radically different places, we are about the same age, and I noticed a definite Generation X feeling to his insights that really spoke to me. (The growth of politically conscious hip-hop and interest in Malcolm X had managed to reach me out on the Nebraska plains.)

So it is with a little trepidation that I am embarking on a little discussion on an analysis of Generation X in the current political landscape. There’s a lot of talk about how Millennials are more likely to vote third party in this election, as well as the longings by white Boomers for a past that never existed. What about my generation, stuck in the middle, the product of a historically steep drop in the birth rate?

The first thing to note is that it now looks likely that much like the Silent Generation, there will never be a Gen X president. While Barack Obama has a certain Xer quality about him, he is still a Late Boomer. (They came of age after the 60s but before the Reagan era had completely settled in.) All four candidates for president are Boomers, and there does not seem to be a Gen Xer out there able to rise to the top anytime soon. This is especially the case on the Democratic side, where the failure to win local elections means that they are not developing the next generation of politicians. On the Republican side there are many Xers, but they are the simpering contrarian Young Republican types that I encountered in college in the 90s, like Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, and Ted Cruz. Coming up at the height of Ayn Rand’s influence, they are too trollish to make it on the presidential stage, even if they’ve had some political success. They are the product of the supercharged post-Reagan conservative movement, and have succeeded within the party for that reason, but with the rise of Trumpism the days of their power might be few.

So what about the voters? Part of the problem is that pollsters don’t really use Generation X as a category, because when they organize the data they may talk about voters under thirty or voters aged 30-55, but not the parameters of Gen X (which I would define as those between roughly 35 and 50 years of age.) This is part of the larger trend of pretending that my generation doesn’t really exist as a distinct entity. I think some of this is rooted in the reality that the mentality of my generation is even more disunited than that of others, especially the generation after mine. The War on Drugs and mass incarceration raged during my coming of age, and the increase in de facto segregation means that the experiences of white and black Gen Xers are often completely foreign to each other, perhaps even more so than for other generations.

Another difference has to do with religion. My generation is less churched than our elders, but more churched than the Millennials.  Lots of people my age rejected organized religion, but we were also the guinea pigs for the revival of the Religious Right, and many folks my age were subjected to extreme indoctrination. Many rejected it, but a large number also embraced it. Gen Xers seem to be more broad minded when it comes to gay marriage and transgender rights, but not as much as the younger generation.

Generation X is, in many respects, a transitional generation. The Boomers were established before the late 20^th century neoliberal onslaught; that’s the world we came of age in. The middle class members of my generation were the ones to finally be able to buy their first homes at inflated prices in the bubble, and then were thrust underwater by the financial crisis. Contrast this with the Millennials, who have had our economic difficulties growing up in a time of expensive college loans and casualized labor, but even worse. They just aren't buying homes, period. We were the canaries in the coal mine, but when we were transitioning into this new economy, there weren’t any sympathetic think pieces. Things hadn’t gotten so bad that elite journalists bothered to pay attention.

Since generational thinking is so inherently troubled, I do wonder if Gen Xers aren’t part of the discourse simply because it is too difficult to cram us into an easy narrative. In my youth I remember all kinds of concern pieces about how we were a “nation at risk” in schools full of “super predators” and “slackers.” Perhaps generational political thinking then and now was just a reflection of anxieties about the younger generation, and in ten years as Millenials hit middle age they won't be invoked much anymore. Now that our youth is no longer a flashpoint of anxiety amidst moral panics (as it was in the Reagan era), “Gen X” might as well be another relic of the nineties, like grunge and MC Hammer. Perhaps journalists should drop the facile generational analysis and talk more about the broader changes -secularization, lowered economic security, etc- that are leading to the generation gap between Millennials and Boomers.

On Being A Member Of The Moral Panic Generation

Todd Rundgren's band Utopia knew that the Beatles burning of 1966 was more a sign of the early 80s than an image of the past

I was born in 1975, the year of the lowest birth rate on record in American history. That reflected both a sluggish economy as well as a shift away from the power of the traditional family in post-60s America. It also made me the perfect age to endure a whole raft of moral panics, which came fast and furious in the 1980s as a response to the very era of decadence that I and my generational cohort was born into.

During the years when I was first able to trick or treat, the rumors about poisoned candy intensified. In the early 1980s in my grade school years "stranger danger" became a constant fear. It didn't help that two boys were horribly murdered in Bellevue, Nebraska, (my home state) by a serial killer who picked them up in his car.  As I got older, sex, drugs, and rock and roll all became deadly and even devilish. By the time I was in middle school, I got heavy indoctrination in anti-drug propaganda, as was the style at the time. Tipper Gore and the PRMC were telling everyone that the music their kids liked was evil, and started slapping "explicit content" warnings all over it.  Others went further, claiming backwards messages were inserted to incite devil worship and suicide. Instead of empathy and compassion, the AIDS epidemic resulted in fear and scapegoating of gays and panic over how it spread. I was constantly on the lookout for drugs being pushed on me, and constantly told when I went to the big city (Omaha, in my case) to be on the lookout for gang members who would hide under cars and slash my ankle tendons as part of their initiation.  Hell, I couldn't even enjoy a harmless game of Dungeons & Dragons, which had been declared Satanic. At one point a family member panicked because someone had told her that Nintendo was Satanic, too. She couldn't actually remember the reason, but evidently my playing Nintendo was endangering my soul.

I've been thinking a lot about how this particular moment in American cultural history came to be. As more and more mothers worked, we were the daycare kids before becoming latchkey kids. The guilt and anxiety over this transition, combined with the rising influence of hardcore evangelicalism and Reagan-era backlash against the permissiveness of the 60s and 70s, perhaps made this all inevitable. Back in the sixties when Bible thumpers burned Beatles albums it was pretty obvious that the Fab Four were not under any serious kind of threat. All of a sudden, in the 1980s the Dobsons, Falwells, and Pat Roberstons of the world had their own media empires and powerful friends in office.  Boomers who may have strayed from the righteous path started going back to church, but it was more likely to be of the mega variety. Even for those of a more secular bent or adhering to a different religious sensibility, a reevaluation of values, as Nietzsche would put it, was in the offing.

Whatever the reasons, the sons and daughters were forced to atone for the sins of the mothers and fathers. Although members of my generation were the most likely in history to experience parental divorce, it was our generation, not our parents' generation, that bore the cultural fallout. We were an object of suspicion as much as we were of protective anxiety.  In school we were a "nation at risk" according to a famous report from 1983.  In my teen years the African American and Latino members of my cohort were labelled "superpredators." Youth were feared as products of a society gone wrong, cannon fodder in the culture wars.

But nowadays, my comrades in the moral panic generation have had the last laugh. I have a theory, borne out by data,  that the recent spike in those declaring themselves religiously unaffiliated began with my generation. Bombarded with a newly strengthened conservative Christianity powerful enough to engender court cases accusing day care centers of running Satanist death cults, many of us decided that religion just wasn't for us. We were bombarded with anti-drug education using spurious methods, but still were more likely than our parents' generation to favor legalization, which now looks like it is possible in the next ten years. With the advent of streaming on the internet, the attempt to limit music that teenagers can hear is now pretty much null and void. Hilary Clinton's "predator" comments -intended to harness the moral panic for the Democratic side- are now used AGAINST her. LARPing has become commonplace and is no longer fodder for scare-books like Mazes and Monsters.

People like to put my generation down as disaffected, but that disaffection is actually wisdom. We were fed massive tranches of steaming bullshit and fear mongering in our youth, and it's given us a healthy distaste for authority and a well-developed ear for malarkey.  (And yes, I am aware that generational thinking is notoriously subjective, but just indulge me this once.)  If that means we're not as big of "joiners" as our millennial juniors are, that's fine. We survived the wave of moral panics and defied them so that those younger than us could grow up with more possibilities for action and the necessary faith to be able to push for change. You're welcome!

Gen X Reflections on the Culture Wars

Ah, the early 90s, when the Vice President would give a speech attacking a fictional TV character

Last week, on the recommendation of a friend, I read Andrew Hartman's A War For The Soul Of America, a history of the culture wars of the 1960s-1990s, with most of the focus on the 1980s forward.  It's a good book, and one that got me thinking a lot about the political culture when I came of age.  It's hard to put a finger on how and when and why I managed to slough off the conservatism and Republican identity I was raised with, but it just might well have been as a reaction to the wave of censorship that hit in my teen years.  In 1989 I didn't care for 2 Live Crew's music (I loved rap, wasn't so big on misogyny), but thought it was absolutely ridiculous that they would actually be banned in Florida.  By 1992 I had come to realize that big money ran the system, but it was when I saw Pat Buchanan's infamous "culture war" speech at the Republican convention (where the title of Hartman's book comes from) that I truly realized that I had no identity with the Republican party anymore whatsoever.  In that vein, Hartman's biggest contribution is to show that the so-called "culture wars" were not a sideshow or a distraction, but one of the (if not singular) central fronts of American politics.

At the end of the book Hartman claims that the culture wars are over, but it is not a triumphant statement.  Instead of arguing over school prayer, conservatives are just slashing money from schools and effectively privatizing them.  Instead of pushing for canonical texts in the universities, the very existence of the humanities is being questioned.  His conclusion was one of the most depressing things I've read recently.  Despite gains by progressives in many areas of cultural life, the neoliberal economic model has emerged victorious in ways people in the 1960s could never have imagined.  That, of course, is a different discussion for a different time.

In terms of the culture wars, as I read the book I began to think of their impact in generational terms.  I think my cohort, which could best be described as "late Generation X" were the first to feel these conflicts as children in our daily lives, because our school years coincided with the high point of the power of Christian conservatives.  (I'm thinking here of people born about 1973-1979.)  I have friends who were part of the wave of children sent to evangelical Christian day schools, indoctrinated to be foot soldiers in the Army of God.  I have cousins who were home-schooled in the 10th grade so that they would not learn about evolution in school.  Had they been born ten years earlier, their lives would have been very different.

We were also a generation to be scared of, the one described in, A Nation At Risk, the infamous 1983 report on education as part of a "rising tide of mediocrity."  My generation was viewed with suspicion, as a problem.  (This is why those columns praising millenials -inevitably written by boomer parents of millennials- make me insane with rage.)  We were the ones to pay penance for what our elders had wrought in the 60s.  We were the guinea pigs for the failed policy of "abstinence-only education," which coincided with the height of the AIDS crisis.  Because the generation before us had been toking weed, we were inundated with DARE in schools and my generational peers of color faced draconian policing in their neighborhoods and harsh new sentencing policies.  The popular culture we liked ended up being branded as evil and threatening.  Role playing games were purportedly Satanist, all the rap albums I wanted had "explicit content" stickers to bar me from buying them, and heavy metal supposedly had the potential to induce suicide.  When politicians fretted about the future and the loss of traditional values, we were usually the ones in their sights. African American youth of my generation had it far worse from me, from aforementioned drug enforcement policies to racist balderdash like Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve.  Black youth were constantly portrayed in the media as a threat to the rest of society or a burden upon it, with talk of teenage "predators" who needed to be put behind bars in new superprisons.

It's often been said that my generation (speaking here of late Gen X) that we are cynical and not politically motivated.  I think the political world of our youth, at the height of the culture wars, has a lot to do with it (however true the stereotype is.)  Politicians used us as a symbol of decline or an object in need of discipline.  The Democrats finally took the White House with Bill Clinton, who promptly sold out his base.  The Republicans put forward the likes of George HW Bush, a patrician lacking any charisma.  It was effectively a choice between "read my lips, no new taxes" and "I did not have sexual relations with that woman!" No wonder we are less trusting than others.  (This article has statistics showing Gen Xers are far less trusting of institutions than either boomers or millennials, so it's not just a stereotype.)

Of course, generational thinking can be lazy thinking, and I don't want to indulge in it too much.  I do think, however, that my particular mini-cohort was the first to experience the culture wars in a real visceral way as children, and that experience marked the political mindset of its members in ways that it didn't for others.

The Irresponsibility of "Fiscal Responsibility"

[Editor's Note: choice words and salty language ahead.]

The Republican pre-primary is in full swing, meaning that there are a whole bunch of desperate shysters wanting to get their hands on that sweet, sweet Koch brothers cash.  The winner of the fund raising war in the GOP primary stage is usually the winner of the nomination, so this is prime time for potential also-rans like Chris Christie to make themselves relevant again with a money transfusion.

So what has the Most High New Jersey Bridge Troll done?  He’s decided to talk about “responsible” and “honest” fiscal policy.  What this means specifically is proposing raising the retirement age to 69, and then making Social Security a much reduced provision that would not even paid out to a large number of retirees.  Christie, in typically mendacious fashion, has spun all this as “telling hard truths,” assuming that his listeners believe, like he does, that the money to sustain old age benefits does not exist.

Of course, we all know that it does.  We live in the richest nation on earth, one where plutocrats are amassing ever-increasing piles of lucre.  Just this week comes the news that during a “down” year the top 25 hedge fund managers were still able to pay themselves bonuses that altogether add up to more than twice all of the money made by all the kindergarten teachers in America last year.  James Simons made $2.1 billion in 2011, about the equivalent of the yearly wages of 140,000 minimum wage workers.  Imagine that, the “bonus” to a select group of bankers eclipses the sweat and muscle expended by literally hundreds of thousands of laborers.  They also paid a lower tax rate than I did as a teacher last year.

And yet we are told that we are to sacrifice even more, that the nation simply can’t afford to give them a secure retirement before we might give out from overwork. 

When I hear the fiscal hawks talk about “hard truths” I know they are really spinning some diarrhea-soft grade A horseshit.  What they really want is a system where the wealthy can amass even bigger fortunes than before, and perhaps to shovel money out of Social Security and let their criminal friends on Wall Street play with it.  Perhaps due to the pernicious persistence of a Puritan streak in this nation’s culture, the media elite eat up this “hard truth” crap and never, ever question the motive, always taking these con artists at face value.  Because young voters are so far away from retirement, they do not take to the streets about being bamboozled.

Make no mistake, Gen Xers and Millenials, they are out to bamboozle you.  I made my first FICA payment at the tender age of 13, and have been paying into the system almost continuously from that time.  All that money has gone to pay for people already in the system, and I was glad to do it, since I knew that the next generations would do the same for me.  Now that contract will be broken, and I will spend the rest of my working life paying for the same Baby Boomers who got cheap college education and plentiful jobs to have a much cushier retirement than I will ever have.  It will be the final insult in a degrading generational war that many in the younger generations have no clue is being waged against them.

To consign future generations to the dung heap in their old age so that the plutocrats, hedge fund managers, and bankers dare not make a greater sacrifice is the height of fiscal irresponsibility.  To break apart the social contract that so many have benefited from is a horrible thing to do, not something deserving of the canting hosannas of “truth telling” so often heard in the more fatuous corners of our mediascape.  Please, for fuck’s sake, stop pretending that the attempt to end Social Security as we know it is anything more than a heinous crime of enormous proportions.

Key Moments In My Gen X Political Awakening

I know a lot of young people taking to the streets right now and getting involved in politics for the first time to protest police violence.  This has gotten me thinking about my own adolescent political awakening.  I grew up in a conservative family in a conservative town in a conservative area of one of the most conservative states (Nebraska.)  How the hell did I embrace the political Left by the age of 17?  I've come to realize over the years that the key was in my voracious appetite for current events and political magazines, which allowed certain crucial events of my youth to sink in and change my consciousness.  I am willing to bet that these same events had a big impact on other people born in the mid-1970s.  Anyway, here they are:

The Iran-Contra Scandal

Ronald Reagan's inauguration was the first major political event that I can vividly remember, along with Hinkley's assassination attempt.  During my childhood I thought of Reagan as a gentle, avuncular leader who was doing a great job.  Although the full import of it didn't become obvious to me until a couple of years later, the Iran-Contra affair started me on the road to questioning authority.  It seemed obvious that the president had circumvented the will of Congress, and that his later "I don't recall" testimony meant that he was either a liar or totally incompetent.

ACT UP Protest at St. Patrick's Cathedral

Being a devout Catholic at the time, this protest freaked me out.  I couldn't believe that protestors would interrupt mass and even desecrate the host.  At the same time, I really began to question the church's anti-safe sex stance.  In the midst of a horrible epidemic it seemed insane to oppose condoms on narrow moral grounds.  The church's response to the AIDS crisis really disturbed me, as did the awful homophobia of people like Jesse Helms.  I was not yet too enlightened when it came to sexuality, but despite that fact I thought that hating people for who they were was appalling.  The fact that one political party accepted people who spewed such hate was not lost on me.

Gulf War

This event, perhaps more than any other, shifted my frame of reference.  When the war started I was very gung ho, and thought the kids at my high school who protested the war were ridiculous.  In the months that followed it, however, I really began to question things.  I saw articles about the "highway of death," and felt sorrow that so many people had to die, sacrificed to petro-politics.  When the US stood by while Saddam massacred the Shiites that the US president had encouraged to rise up, I knew that there was nothing behind that war except oil.  The insanely shrill nationalism unleashed in that war disturbed me as well, since it seemed to make people lose their senses.

Rodney King Beating and Trial

The video of the King beating landed like a bomb in my head.  Around that time I had been heavily listening to Public Enemy, which had me thinking about white supremacy in a serious way for the first time.  It was so completely obvious for anyone to see that Rodney King had been the victim of a horrific crime, and that the LAPD was full of violent racists.  The acquittal of the police officers at the hands of an all white jury probably did more to increase my distrust of the criminal justice system than anything else.  I was surprised at the decision, considering how obvious the crime seemed to be.  Ever since the King case I have been disheartened by similar miscarriages of justice, but never surprised by them.

Clarence Thomas Confirmation Hearings

Before these hearings I'd never really known anything about sexual harassment.  I was disturbed by Anita Hill's testimony, and wondered how many other men acted like that.  At the same time, I was less enlightened in these matters, and wondered why Hill hadn't come out with the allegations at an earlier time.  For that reason I was actually sympathetic with Thomas' comments about a "high tech lynching."

NAFTA

I was excited when Bill Clinton became president.  I was one of only two students in my history class to vote for him in our mock election, and proud of it.  His willingness to fight for gun control and health care made me happy, but very early on I wondered about Clinton's reliability.  The NAFTA proposal didn't seem all bad to me, except for the fact that there were few labor and environmental protections.  While I didn't care for Ross Perot, I did wonder if his prediction of job migration would be true.  In any case, the whole thing was written in a way to be beneficial to business and not for workers, but was being promoted by a man claiming to be a liberal.  It was about this time that I realized that the DLC version of liberalism was barely better than conservatism, leading me to vote for a third party candidate in 1996.  This was really the point when I lost any attachment to the Democratic Party, and started thinking of myself as Left of the party of Jackson and Jefferson.

The Contract With America

Believe it or not, I was a little happy when the Democrats got shellacked in the 1994 election.  I figured it would force them to take stronger stances and listen to their base (boy was I wrong about that.)  At the same time, the Gingrich-style conservative politics that emerged in the aftermath of that election made it obvious that as much as I disliked the Democrats, I would never, ever vote for a Republican.  This election convinced me that the two parties were not two legitimate, centrist institutions not too different from each other.  Instead one was a milquetoast arrangement of hacks with corporate ties who made promises they didn't keep to the lower and middle classes, and the other was the vehicle for an extremist Right wing political movement that would stop at nothing to force its ideology on the country.  Since that time I've wavered from calling myself a socialist to settling for social democrat, but my larger sense of the political lay of the land hasn't changed since I was 19.