Victor Davis Hanson: The Hysterical Style
[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.]
Politicians now predict the implosion of the U.S. auto industry. Headlines warn that the entire banking system is on the verge of utter collapse. The all-day/all-night cable news shows and op-ed columnists talk of another Dark Age on the horizon, as each day another corporation lines up for its me-too bailout.
News magazines depict President-elect Obama as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, facing a crisis akin to the Great Depression. Columnists for The New York Times even dreamed that George Bush might just resign now to allow the savior Obama a two-month head start on his presidency.
We are witnessing a new hysterical style, in which the Baby Boomer "me generation" that now runs America jettisons knowledge of the past and daily proclaims that each new development requires both a radical solution and another bogeyman to blame for being mean or unfair to them.
We haven't seen such frenzy since the Y2K sham, when we were warned to stock up on flashlights and bottled water as our nation's computers would simply shut down on Jan. 1, 2000 -- and with them the country itself.
Get a grip. Much of our current panic is psychological, and hyped by instantaneous electronic communications and second-by-second 24-hour news blasts. There has not been a nationwide plague that felled our workers. No earthquake has destroyed American infrastructure. The material United States before the September 2008 financial panic is largely the same as the one after. Once we tighten our belts and pay off the debts run up by Wall Street speculators and millions of borrowers who walked away from what they owed others -- and we can do this in a $13 trillion annual economy -- sanity will return....
George Bush is neither the source of all our ills nor the "worst" president in our history. He will leave office with about the same dismal approval rating as the once-despised Harry Truman. By 1953, the country loathed the departing Truman as much as they were ecstatic about newly elected national hero Dwight Eisenhower -- who had previously never been elected to anything.
As for Bush's legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years, the now increasingly likely victory in Iraq, AIDS relief abroad, new expansions for Medicare and federal support for schools versus the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the error-plagued 2004-7 occupation of Iraq, and out-of-control federal spending. As in the case of the once-unpopular Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman, Bush's supposedly "worst" presidency could one day not look so bad in comparison with the various administrations that followed.
But these days even that modest assessment that things aren't that bad -- or all that different from the past -- may well elicit a hysterical reaction from an increasingly hysterical generation.
Read entire article at Real Clear Politics
Politicians now predict the implosion of the U.S. auto industry. Headlines warn that the entire banking system is on the verge of utter collapse. The all-day/all-night cable news shows and op-ed columnists talk of another Dark Age on the horizon, as each day another corporation lines up for its me-too bailout.
News magazines depict President-elect Obama as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, facing a crisis akin to the Great Depression. Columnists for The New York Times even dreamed that George Bush might just resign now to allow the savior Obama a two-month head start on his presidency.
We are witnessing a new hysterical style, in which the Baby Boomer "me generation" that now runs America jettisons knowledge of the past and daily proclaims that each new development requires both a radical solution and another bogeyman to blame for being mean or unfair to them.
We haven't seen such frenzy since the Y2K sham, when we were warned to stock up on flashlights and bottled water as our nation's computers would simply shut down on Jan. 1, 2000 -- and with them the country itself.
Get a grip. Much of our current panic is psychological, and hyped by instantaneous electronic communications and second-by-second 24-hour news blasts. There has not been a nationwide plague that felled our workers. No earthquake has destroyed American infrastructure. The material United States before the September 2008 financial panic is largely the same as the one after. Once we tighten our belts and pay off the debts run up by Wall Street speculators and millions of borrowers who walked away from what they owed others -- and we can do this in a $13 trillion annual economy -- sanity will return....
George Bush is neither the source of all our ills nor the "worst" president in our history. He will leave office with about the same dismal approval rating as the once-despised Harry Truman. By 1953, the country loathed the departing Truman as much as they were ecstatic about newly elected national hero Dwight Eisenhower -- who had previously never been elected to anything.
As for Bush's legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years, the now increasingly likely victory in Iraq, AIDS relief abroad, new expansions for Medicare and federal support for schools versus the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the error-plagued 2004-7 occupation of Iraq, and out-of-control federal spending. As in the case of the once-unpopular Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman, Bush's supposedly "worst" presidency could one day not look so bad in comparison with the various administrations that followed.
But these days even that modest assessment that things aren't that bad -- or all that different from the past -- may well elicit a hysterical reaction from an increasingly hysterical generation.