In my lifetime, the most startling instance of this watery dialectic occurred around the year 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. The election of the hyperconservative Reagan came on the heels of a fifteen to twenty years of surging in the opposite direction. Civil Rights, Vietnam, LSD, feminism and youth culture were some of the banners of that transformative reawakening of the American spirit. Had they asked any of us if an elderly, anti-civil rights, pro-dictator, chauvinist, anti-intellectual, uneducated, C.E.O.'s erotic dream come true, worst enemy of the common worker was electable in 1980, we would have laughed in your face. Our mistake was believing that a wave has only its visible force.
Monday, July 12, 2010
New Wave
Societal change rolls like ocean waves. Or something like that. There is a visible component, its surface, surging toward the shore, but underneath churns the outward-surging drag, and this second, nearly invisible force works to reverse the flow. In some cases, as any child who's stood hypnotized on the beach will tell you, the invisible backward pull overwhelms the visible surging, taking the whole of the wave under and out to the depths where its elements can be remixed and brought forth to roll again.
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I think the wave metaphor is a nice take on the endless political and ideological tug of war within our country. At the end of the piece I wanted to know the following: What was the undertow to Reagan's eight-year surge and how would you fit the tide into this metaphor, in general? I think it’s a decent enough metaphor to carry a much longer piece and begs it, especially in revealing how this metaphor is so appropriate to the topic – our country is linked to the ocean in many ways, from La Amistad to the Beach Boys, even as it spreads from “sea to shining sea.”
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