Their Last Hurrah and Hallelujah

Star Trek: The Next Generation. "Make It So"

One night last week in Nashville, while waiting in a state of punchy exhaustion for our chain restaurant suppers, my husband and I suddenly waxed profound on America's quandaries. It was one of those punchy but pithy conversations where one insight led us naturally to the next until a vision emerged that seemed new to us. Of course, if an ordinary pair of frustrated liberals can view the variables and arrive at obvious conclusions, our betters will have beaten us to it. Nevertheless, here's what we suddenly knew: This next few years--perhaps a decade, tops--is the last hurrah for conservatives. From here on out, for years to come, they do not have a shot in hell...

Because there will be no one left who remembers institutionalized segregation or Jim Crow. My Class of '66 was the last all-white graduating class in my little high school in North Carolina. We remember with wonder that such a thing was ever allowed to exist.

My Class of '70 was probably the last graduating class at my all-woman, liberal arts school to forbid slacks in class, even while training the generation that would, within mere weeks of graduation, leave its bras and panty-girdles and up-tight conventions at home in the back of the closet. All that happened so long ago that Spanx have come to seem like a modern invention. There will be no one left who remembers when a woman's college was the best bet a girl had of leading a heated discussion in a political science class. Or any science class.



There will be no children raised on Jimmy Dorsey, the lyrics of "Bali H'ai," or television re-plays of "From Here To Eternity." There will be no one left who personally recalls the chill tensions of the Cold War, the so-called logic of the Domino Theory, or the long histrionic circumlocutions that have been used for 65 years to justify America's out-sized war machine. The Bay of Pigs will be a paragraph in a history book, rather than the opening act for the national panic attack that came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam will be a nice place to visit. Iraq and Afghanistan will be the generational wars that shape an age exhausted by the human and economic profligacy of its hawkish elders. They might not remember the hanging chads or Valerie Plame, but they won't forget that we sent them back to the Middle East for duty tour after duty tour, regardless of how they and their families suffered. They'll remember that we called it "voluntary service."

There will be no one fighting to protect the rights of the richest 2% when my children's generation takes control. They won't have Trickle-Down Economics stuck in their memory banks; they will recall the trauma of losing their first jobs just as their careers were getting off the ground, of being unemployed before they ever got their resumes built. And they won't ever forget that Republicans balked and stonewalled on continuing unemployment compensation. Burdened still with student loans, they'll remember that six years of higher education didn't guarantee them squat in 2010 because Big Business and The Chamber of Commerce outsourced their futures.

They won't remember high school graduation as their door into adulthood; they'll remember moving back in with Mom and Dad at thirty and knowing that they might never be able to afford children of their own. They will remember being upside down and in hock up to their asses, or what it felt like to be foreclosed on by the same banks that handed them credit cards before they ever had their first paychecks.

I have nightmares that my keepers at the nursing home will assume that all of us were tea partiers just because we look dull-witted and ride the halls in wheelchairs. I'm going to get a bumper sticker for my Scooter Store Jazzy that reads, "I Was At The First Jon Stewart Rally." That is, if Medicare will still pay for my wheels. Otherwise, I'll have to get my motto tattooed on and I should probably hurry while there is still a semi-smooth work surface somewhere on my person.

There will be no one left in America who thinks that corporate CEO's give a shit about them as employees if only they work hard enough and demonstrate loyalty. No one left who thinks that Wall Street deserves a second glance. What they will remember is that investment meant cashing in on somebody else's medical malpractice lawsuit. In case you missed this one, here's HuffPo's take yesterday (USA Today also featured this news this week):

Large banks, hedge funds and private investors hungry for new and lucrative opportunities are bankrolling other people's lawsuits, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into medical malpractice claims, divorce battles and class actions against corporations -- all in the hope of sharing in the potential winnings.

The loans are propelling large and prominent cases. Lenders including Counsel Financial, a Buffalo company financed by Citigroup, provided $35 million for the lawsuits brought by ground zero workers that were settled tentatively in June for $712.5 million. The lenders earned about $11 million.

Most investments are in the smaller cases that fill court dockets. Ardec Funding, a New York lender backed by a hedge fund, lent $45,000 in June to a Manhattan lawyer hired by the parents of a baby brain-damaged at birth. The lawyer hired two doctors, a physical therapist and an economist to testify at a July trial. The jury awarded the baby $510,000. Ardec is collecting interest at an annual rate of 24 percent, or $900 a month, until the award is paid.

They won't buy into marriage when they still remember their parents' fiascoes, although betting on somebody else's divorce won't seem so obscene...if there was any extra to bet with, that is. In fact, having extra money to invest will be a dim memory from their grandparents' generation. They'll know that retirement was a Twentieth Century fantasy because, no sooner did they move from their Mom's home than Mom, impoverished by conservative policies, moved in with them. Life insurance will conjure Dead Peasant Insurance and not much else.

And they won't be impressed with piety, dogma, or position; they will recall the televised scandals of the big congregation Christian poseurs as a national blood sport. They knew kids who came out as homosexuals in middle school, for God's sake! If DADT had been laid at their feet as a proposed school policy, it would never have gotten past the Student Council, much less Mock Trial.

As I was waiting in Nashville to come home to my grandfather's chaise again to write this in peace and comfort, I visited my friend Karen at The Next Stage, who posted an angry, bitter, but true piece from Tim Wise on AlterNet, "The Last Gasp of Aging White Power." It gives me pause to consider plastering a few more self-protective bumper stickers on my motorized wheelchair, but I found much with which I can empathize. This segment spoke:

There won’t be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won’t be any more white folks around who actually remember them, and so therefore, we’ll be able to teach about them accurately and honestly, without hurting your precious feelings, or those of the so-called “greatest generation” — a bunch whose white members were by and large a gaggle of miscreants who helped save the world from fascism only to return home and oppose the ending of it here, by doing nothing to lift a finger on behalf of the civil rights struggle.

So to hell with you and all who revere you.

By then, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it.

Nothing, Senõr Tancredo.

Nothing, Senõra Angle, or Senõra Brewer, or Senõr Beck.

Loy tiene muy mal, hijo de Puta.

It is over, Conservatives. Better get your kicks while you can; you dig your graves as my generation's graves are dug.

It was a relief to realize this. I somehow worry less for my grandchildren now.