The juxtaposition of the healthcare ‘debates’ and the 40th anniversary of Woodstock brings into sharp relief the double standard of our pundit class when addressing the issue of civilized and polite discourse. Recall (if you’re my age) how the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s was constantly under attack by the self-appointed guardians of The Right Way To Do Things for shouting at politicians, throwing marshmallows at Hubert Humphrey and generally behaving rudely to the authorities. Those actions were endlessly denounced as undemocratic bullying, and Richard Nixon even turned them into a set-piece in his campaign appearances by allowing a few dozen opponents into his mass meetings and then turning the crowd against them.
Now, however, organized shout-downs and wild paranoia are merely taken as signals of ‘deep concern’ among a broad swath of the public, at which the CNN opinionmeisters stroke their collective, powdered chin and utter ‘ummms’ and ‘uh-huhs’. They annotate the decibel level as an indicator of the sincere passions in the heartland, not itself a topic for dissection.
There’s also a more contemporary comparison to be made: the media treatment of Henry Louis Gates’ arrest in Cambridge. How much of THAT commentary focused on Gates’ allegedly inappropriate comportment v/s whether or not a citizen should be frog-marched out of his own front yard in handcuffs?
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