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If any of you guys out there have a copy or a scan of this, I’d love to do a review.
Ladies and gentlemen, Heart!
Capturing the Gravity of the Cold War with Unicorns
I have been, for about two years now, toying around with an idea for a book. Of course, I’m always toying around with an idea for a book, but only this summer have I really started to pull my act together and get back into prose fiction. I finished one short story called “The Ways of Things” and am working on another tentatively called “Bolingbroke,” and hopefully, once this workshopping group I’m in gets off the ground, I’ll be writing fiction with some regularity.
Thanks be to God for all that, and for this blog, which gives me the pressure to write every day. I don’t always succumb to that pressure, or sometimes I’ll pull something old of mine off the shelf and just post that, but it has me looking for the sacred in all sorts of pop-culture scenes and putting myself to work in this long, summer exile of mine.
Anyway. So I’ve been toying around with this idea for a book, and I’d love to hear if the learned elders of St. Blog’s think it’s worth a damn.
I was born in 1984, which puts me in a cadre stretching roughly to the early 1990’s, called variously Generation Y (a term I hate for merely placing us after Generation X), the Net Generation, the Thirteenth Generation, and the Millenials, which is my preferred term. We are a particular group of people. We grew up after the age when animation was dedicated solely to selling toys, in what is sometimes called the “Golden Age” of children’s entertainment. We had everything from Animaniacs and Tiny Toons to Batman: The Animated Series. Our television shows had high production values, and didn’t always feel the need to justify themselves with tacked-on moral lessons at the end like those of our immediate generational predecessors. You know what I’m talking about. Every episode of G.I. Joe ended every episode with “Now we know! And knowing is half the battle!” Safety tips to justify twenty-two minutes of violence.
We also grew up in the Digital Age. I never didn’t know how to use a computer, and in elementary school, the kids were often the troubleshooters in the computer labs, because our teachers barely understood the nearly decade-old machines we were using. We spent our lives using them from the beginning; one of my earliest memories is using the computer at the day-care center where my mom worked when I was three. I think I was playing some Mario knockoff.
What I think is most significant, though, is that we are the first generation to grow up mostly if not entirely after the Cold War, the last generation to have any memory of the Soviet Union (so much that some of my friends, in 1995, hadn’t realized it had broken up), and the last generation for whom the Second World War will remain in living memory, the last generation to largely have grandparents who fought in it, the last generation who could have met Holocaust survivors or have them as grandparents, and as a result, the last generation who will have any contact with firsthand knowledge of that period.
It may seem strange for me to think that that peculiar configuration is the most important aspect of my generation, but consider the impact of the Second World War and the Cold War on the world’s collective psyche. The twentieth century was the century that went insane all at once, the century that saw the most powerful militaries and economies in the world mobilize for essentially eighty years of war. Our parents 
grew up under the constant weight of potential nuclear annihilation, and our grandparents went to war to stop an insane super villain bent on global domination who murdered ten-million people, and in doing so allied with another madman who murdered twenty-million of his own people.
Things went pretty badly for a long time.
The past hundred years were full of murder and destruction on a scale the world had never seen, and the cumulative effect of that, first felt in the aftermath of the First World War in the dada movement’s studied and deliberate insanity, was the rejection of any objective authority and meaning in the world, the cold clinging to material gain under the nuclear veil, and the rejection of the value of the human person. This last one was the central tenet of both the Nazi and Soviet systems, but inevitably, in the militarized society of the postwar United States, it’s clear we embraced a similar ethic. Capitalism, the unrestrained market, the government, patriotism, and democracy were themselves now raised as ideals of themselves. in contrast with communism, the state, and patriotism in the USSR. We knew who our enemy was, and we weren’t afraid to build thousands of nuclear missiles just in case.
Basically, the twentieth century was a moral catastrophe, a slaughterhouse fueled by lies and money. And my generation, those of us in our early twenties, roughly, were born there. We’re of a peculiar birth, born and reared in one century and coming to maturity in the next. And for those of us who are Catholic, that means that roughly our entire lives were spent under the pontificate of John Paul II. It’s why I call us “Generation JPII.” John Paul himself lived in Nazi and Communist Poland, and dedicated himself to countering the lies that governed both of those states, both that the state is the natural expression of a people and a culture, and that a human is only as important as his use by the same.
Now, as a result of this confluence — the time of our birth and the ministry of John Paul II with his particular experience of the driving force of the century — I believe my gen
eration, Generation JPII, is well-suited to examine the history of the century with fresh eyes and well-formed hearts, apart from the fear and callousness the period fostered but with direct experience and access to direct experience of the catastrophe. Above that, the twentieth is our century. We’re its last sons and daughters, its last Catholics. The question is: what do we do about it?
Where does it leave us? If we have a particular responsibility to the world in understanding and interpreting the century of our birth, what is that responsibility? It is to put to paid those lies, turn away from statist nonsense, and embrace the conversion of the Spirit in Christ, which is the only force capable of changing the world. Not militaries. Not democracy. Not market economics. Only Christ, the son of the Living God working through the Church has the moral strength and holy charism needed, because the world can’t be changed by systems. It can only be changed by personal conversion, one at a time.
That’s the only way out of the mess.
I don’t know exactly what the situation is in Spain. What I can say is that Polish society is pro-life. We have reached this objective thanks to decades of prayer and works of apostolate, also carried out during Communist domination. Within the structures of the Catholic Church, we have engaged in intense activity in defense of the life of the unborn.
Like I’ve said. You don’t end abortion through legislation. You end abortion through conversion. Through prayer.
I’ve written before about how, even though I’m not a particularly political person, I love politics, the feints and dives of the game. I’m not invested in any of the candidates, I don’t place my hopes and dreams in them, and I don’t even really think they can do all that much to begin with. I’m an antigovernment communitarian, which basically means I think that problems are generally best dealt with from the bottom up, based on the needs of local communities, parishes, yada yada.
That said, I am absolutely addicted the Veepstakes speculation. For those of you uninitiated in Ridiculous Political Jargon, the Veepstakes, a portmanteau of veep and sweepstakes, is the quadrennial guessing game of presidential running mates. Normally, it’s not a big deal. The vice-president doesn’t technically have a whole lot of power, and almost never delivers a critical state, absent Lyndon Johnson in 1960. But the vice-president has emerged in recent decades as a powerful position of itself, starting with Mondale in 1976, when Carter took him in as a valued and trusted sort of super-cabinet member.
The VP has also become the president’s natural successor, and this is itself an aberration. The normal path to a run at presidency is either as a state governor or Secretary of State. Secretaries of State that have become president include Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren and James Buchanan. Secretaries who unsuccessfully ran for President number Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, William H. Seward, James G. Blaine, Walter Q. Gresham, John Sherman, Elihu Root, William Jennings Bryan, Charles Evans Hughes and Edmund Muskie.
But vice-president as heir is really a fairly recent development. Five of the last presidential elections since 1960 have featured sitting or immediately-previously sitting vice presidents, and of those that haven’t, three ( going back to 1948 ) included vice-presidents who succeeded to the presidency. Cheney is the aberration in choosing not to run; every two-term vice-president since Nixon has.
It goes further. I hate to be the guy to say it, but I think there’s a good chance neither Obama nor McCain will make through their first term. As much as everyone’s tossing around the Kennedy angle on Obama, I’m a little surprised that the whole, um, assassination issue hasn’t been discussed. I’ve read a few articles about it, but I guess it’s too grim to really consider. But I can see it happening all too well; all it takes is one nutcase who will not see America under a black president. God help Obama.
McCain’s age and his cancer raise the deathwatch over him.
So. There are two candidates, both of whom are going to pick someone a heartbeat away from the office in a very critical time.
Kaine
Finally, this year, the Democratic speculation has been filled with Virginians. Tim Kaine, Jim Webb, and Mark Warner, the latter two have recently dropped out, Webb to focus on his Senate career and Warner his Senate campaign which he is sure to win (he was a brilliant governor). Tim Kaine is the center of most of Obama’s veep buzz lately, which has me excited, because I’ve generally supported him. He’s a Catholic, at least nominally pro-life (which means he’s as pro-life as every Republican out there…), and anti-death penalty (even though he hasn’t stopped very many here in VA…).
Palin
Meanwhile, some speculation is swirling around Alaska governor Sarah Palin for McCain. I mean, come on! She was Miss Alaska 1984, a strident reformer, and brings this whole Laura Roslin feel the office.
Who I vote for will depend heavily on their VP.
Heh. I put Kaine on the left and Palin on the right.
