Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Do We Boomers Owe Sarah Jeong an Apology?
I am not angry or offended by the anti-white people nonsense spewed by new NYT editorial staff member Sarah Jeong. It must be unpleasant to see the world through such a narrow, ugly prism and it is clearly hard to discover, appreciate or generate new perspectives from within such a rigid ideological bubble. As a Baby Boomer, I feel partially responsible for what must have been her stultifying educational formation.
I will explain.
We Boomers thought we had invented narcissism. Truth be told, there was nothing we came up with that had not already done in the Roaring ’20s or Weimar decadence but it certainly felt new. We rejected the notion that history, culture, tradition, country, and religion (i.e., our parents) had any standing to impose moral obligations on us. Patriotism was just a sneaky way of making us go to Vietnam, religious morality just meant that we weren’t supposed to get laid in an era of expanded sexual opportunity. We sought freedom from such moral constraints. We embarked on a path to the Nirvana of Narcissism.
We rejected historical icons and reverence for American values. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were just slaveholders. Columbus raped a continent and the entire nation was an immoral enterprise based on genocide and slavery. These kinds of statements were exciting in much the same way a child feels empowered learning cuss words but their larger purpose was to crush out any standing on the part of our heritage to impose any duties on us. Nothing that tainted has any moral standing to demand loyalty or reverence. We would be the first culturally autonomous beings.
If we did adopt any religious beliefs, it was only as a satisfying adjunct to a lifestyle, not an adherence driven by obligations to truths greater than ourselves. While we steadfastly resisted any sneaky attempt to impose traditional moral obligations on us by traditional institutions, we created new obligations to impose on others. Protection of the environment, for example, was never just another dry public policy issue but rather a set of exciting new ways to assign blame and virtue, to impose obligations on others.
From abortion to homosexual marriage to plastic straws, it is all about the heirs of the Nirvana of Narcissism imposing their/our will on the remnants of the culture that once tried to impose its morality and legacy. Only the enlightened (i.e., deeply, bathetically narcissistic) would have standing to impose moral duties.
Some of the worst of us got tenure, naturally. Even though the legacy of Marxism in practice is hundreds of millions of corpses, unimaginable oppression, injustice and horror, Marxism, in theory, remains a preferred mode of mental masturbation for the worst of us. Global growth of middle-class lifestyles and the free market’s relentless assault on class barriers made the “workers of the world unite” shtick from the early 20th century so patently silly that the worst of us decided to apply Marx to race and sex where it is even more patently stupid, yet seemingly new and clever.
Like the dog that actually caught up to the fire engine, Boomer academics destroyed so much of the institutions they rebelled against that they have nothing left to do but devolve into caricature. If one’s whole life was about resenting parental disapproval of one’s politics and sexual mores, what does one do when they’re gone — or worse they change their minds, “grow,” and agree with you? The ever-shifting array of leftist tropes, causes du jour, and passions are all driven by the same non serviam based on the fear that some comprehensive traditional moral order will return and swallow up the illusory freedoms we narcissists carved out.
Back in the day when the face of the traditional moral order was that of the innocuous ordinary people who comprised family, friends, and neighbors, it was not really all that threatening. But when you succeed in divorcing your life from all that was once normal, when distance and ignorance create caricature in the place of everyday experience, the fear increases even as the threat from the forces of tradition recedes. Spectacularly stupid fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale is accepted as accurate metaphor, Jim Acosta’s horror at the deeply alien, non-leftist regions of America is considered sane, and Sarah Jeong’s utterly sophomoric tweets about her weird caricatures of white people is mainstream.
When we Boomers embarked on the solipsistic, selfish, arrogant stylings that characterized our youth, we did lasting damage to nurturing institutions and to the following generations who needed and deserved the values, wisdom, and experience we squandered. Sorry, Sarah, we owe you an apology but you may not have been educated well enough to know why and that’s our fault as well.
Published in General
You are on to something Old Bathos. There is something stinking in the culture. To be fair, it started back with the Da-Da movement in France and the Roussean rejection of human nature.
She learned to be ungrateful to America and she learned that insulting whites in clearly racist terms was OK. What’s weird is she probably learned it from white people. Whoever taught her this rubbish is partly responsible for such vulgarity.
There’s nobody who hates white people as much as white people do.
Who you callin’ *people*, Henry and Drew? I relish my person-ality… :-)
What you mean “we”, Kemosabe?
Boomber shmoomer. I say this is white guilt, and I’m having nothing to do with it.
Ouch. That’ll leave a mark.
This is revelatory.
Side bar: Did the shows’ writers slip in a little Spanish lingo here for fun?
Tonto: Fool.
Kemosabe: He who doesn’t know.
There is some truth in what you say. But I don’t think most Boomers actually resemble your portrait of us (although I fear many in academia do). This young woman has been expensively miseducated, but she sought that herself. She could have avoided the Ivy League altogether, or simply avoided the grievance studies wherever she chose to go.
I read that she comes from an evangelical Christian family. (They must be so proud.) She sounds like she’s still stuck in the adolescent, I’ll-show-them, rebellious phase of finding herself.
Shortly after Do the Right Thing was released, I read an interview with Spike Lee where he said that although anyone can be a bigot, only white people can be racist because only they had the power to be racist. Reading on and picking my way through the arid and rock-strewn mess of his thoughts, it seemed that he wanted to redefine “racism” as the ability to oppress people. Since in his view black people don’t have that ability, they can’t be racist.
If you can’t win an argument, or even make a coherent argument, redefine the terms.
Could this be a joke? It’s hard to believe the NY Times would be so blatantly insensitive.
On the bright side, the bigots are getting cuter.
Evening Old Bathos,
I am 70, and early boomer. The part that is what I am most curious about, is the transition between generations. My parents were part the generation were over achievers, beating their parents expectations, we/I, their children did not follow their model, we under-achieved, and we rejected them, and used a power to strip them of moral standing. Why did our parents generation work to surpass their parents hopes, and we tossed that successful model away as if it were foul. We had models of responsibility both personally and in public arena, and we ran away from responsibility to anyone else, why did this happen?
Exactly. The fact that some members of my generation are…..nether apertures! doesn’t really reflect on me, or the other right-minded among us, does it?
To paraphrase Jeong: I open my mouth to apologize to her, and nothing but a stream of vomit issues from my face.
Not just that, but the Congresscritters we’ve elected, the national debt, the regulatory state (and its comorbidity, the unfunded public pension liability catastrophe,) and the shakiness of Social Security, leaving her generation to pay for us on top of having to fund their own retirement.
The indoctrination has been successful enough that Leftists tend to love Big Brother to the point where the ruined education system and the regulatory state are seen as features, not bugs.
There’s nothing wrong with her that six years and five months more of Donald Trump can’t fix.
Yuh.. I abhor racial epithets–except in self-defense. Then I say: you throw spitballs? Prepare to be spat upon.
Here we go with that “we” again.
No idea. I sometimes feel as if I went overseas to “protect and defend” then came home a short ~25 years later to a country that I can no longer recognize. Plenty of blame to go all around I suppose.
Let’s see. What else has changed? Final answer for $1,000: What is the internet?
Didn’t they basically write this back in the 1930s?????
It’s ironic she has it in for “old white men”, since those words now describe a large part of whoever is left of people who fought to keep the North of Korea from taking over the South.
Jonah Goldberg dealt with this in yesterday’s G-file.
This^^. The GG Did the depression and the WWII thing and too often said, “My kid isn’t going to have to do that.” They were too often the ones who should have been the adults but rolled over for the children thus spoiled. You can look it up…
Bathos, from a historical prospective the damage to our society began long before the Boomers came along. The Progressive movement along with the slightly younger Frankfurt School and other leftwing movements began severely disrupting American values over a hundred years ago.
Even most of the leading American revolutionaries of the ’60’s were born before the boomers. No, this indoctrination and destruction has been going on a long time, and it is not right to blame it on just one generation. The Boomers were just the first generation where a great many were effectively indoctrinated and it has gone all downhill from there.
You know what frosts me? Her good life in South Korea was made possible by the sacrifice and bravery of many many white men. How do you become anti-man and anti-white with this as your starting point?
Used to be just wonderful at holidays to hear the Korean War vs. the Vietnam War vets in my clan debate who got screwed the worst.
*apologize for spelling and such…
FWIW: I think it is probably too close to call but my guess is that our Korean War vets got the Bigger Shaft so to speak.
That was not my experience but it does sound nice.
That seems a bit harsh. My parents came through a lot of bad stuff—real deprivation in the Depression (my mother had to give up dreams of college, my father worked to build a levee with the WPA), a world war and all the destruction and disruption that came with it. When, in the 1950s, they achieved stability and a modest, lower middle class lifestyle, it was natural for them to want, and be able to deliver, a much easier, softer life to my sister and me. Who would do otherwise?
The fact that it’s harsh doesn’t make it untrue.
The domestic, home-grown self-loathing apparatus. In her case, UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School.