[Mb-hair] Not Feeling Groovy By MAUREEN DOWD - NYTimes

[Michael Butler]

July 4, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST 

Not Feeling Groovy
By MAUREEN DOWD
 

ASHINGTON ‹ I didn't appreciate the 60's in high school.

I spurned the unisex style of dirty jeans. I was more under the influence of
nuns than bongs. And I was frightened of the cost of free love.

 But as other decades passed ‹ the bland, polyester 70's; the greedy,
padded-shoulder 80's; the materialistic, designer 90's; the bullying, Botox
00's ‹ I've become nostalgic for the idealistic passion of the 60's.

It's amazing, given how far we've come from the spirit of the 60's ‹ with
Bob Dylan hawking Victoria's Secret and Hillary Clinton a hawk ‹ how
obsessed conservatives still are with pulverizing that decade.

Their disgust with the 60's spurs oxymoronic ‹ and moronic ‹ behavior, as
anti-big-government types conjure up audacious social engineering schemes to
turn back the clock.

The day after his re-election to the House in 1994, the future speaker, Newt
Gingrich, jubilantly told me he intended to bury any remnants of the "Great
Society, counterculture, McGovernik" legacy represented by the morally lax
Clintons and return America to a more black-and-white view of right and
wrong.

He said America had slid into "a situation-ethics morality, in which your
immediate concern about your personal needs outweighs any obligation to
others."

A decade later, after it came out that Mr. Gingrich had his own affair with
a young Washington political aide, and he divorced and embarked on his third
marriage, he would be a top adviser to Donald Rumsfeld when Rummy and Dick
Cheney decided they wanted to bring back a black-and-white view of right and
wrong. The old cold warriors thought they could improve the national
character by invading Iraq ‹ in that way banishing post-Vietnam ambivalence
about using force and toughening up what they saw as the Clintonesque 60's
mentality ‹ a weak, pinprick-bombing, if-it-feels-good-do-it attitude. Their
new motto was: If it makes someone else feel bad, do it.

W., who had tuned out during the 60's, preferring frat parties to war
moratoriums and civil rights marches, and George Jones to "psychedelic"
Beatles albums, was on board with his regents' retro concerns, like Star
Wars and Saddam, and outdated cold-war assumptions, like the idea that
terrorists could thrive only if sponsored by a state.

In his book tour, Bill Clinton has been defending the 60's, noting that the
polarization of American politics began with the civil rights, women's
rights, gay rights and abortion rights struggles of the 60's and the
assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. "If you look back
on the 60's and on balance, you think there was more good than harm, then
you're probably a Democrat," he told a Chicago audience. "If you think there
was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

Mr. Clinton told another audience that Republicans had had success
portraying Democrats as "weak elitists who couldn't be trusted to defend
their country, couldn't be trusted with tax money, didn't believe in work,
wanted to give all the money to poor people and people of color."

He said the "antigovernment, values crowd" wanted to make sure "the right
people were in power."

Once they returned to power, the Bush II team, dripping with contempt for
Bill Clinton and oozing with "we know best" cockiness, thought they could
use the sacking of Saddam to change the way Americans saw themselves and the
way America was seen in the world.

Their swaggering determination to expunge the ghosts of Vietnam and embark
on a post-cold-war triumphalism has backfired, leaving the military depleted
and drawn into a de facto draft, and once more leaving America bogged down
halfway around the world in a hostile nation.

The Bushes and Republicans recoiled at Mr. Clinton's moral relativism about
Monica, but this administration indulged in a far more dangerous relativism
when it misled the American public about Iraq's W.M.D., and links between
Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Instead of Americans' changing their view of themselves, many have changed
their view of Mr. Bush ‹ fearing, with the sanctioning of pre-emptive
invasions, torture and restricting civil liberties, he has gone too far in
distorting the principles the country was founded on.

The president did end up changing America's image in the world. Just not for
the better.   

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