This from Chris Lydon today. Reposting it here. These are conversations that shed light, serious inquiries into what has befallen us and speculations about how we might survive with our humanity intact.
Dearest
Ones:
The
ghost of Tony Judt, historian and prophet, hovers over
the best conversations we've recorded this spring -- for all the reasons that Ill Fares the
Land, Judt's parting sermon, hovers over the 2012 campaign and
American life this Fourth of July.
The
connecting thread that Tony Judt spun brilliantly is the common dread
underlying both the Occupy movement and the Tea Party. It's an unfamiliar,
almost unnameable anxiety -- that we don't recognize our country any more; that
our imperial illusions are crashing and we're the last to get the joke; that
the rough-and-tumble egalitarian premises we grew up with are being mocked by
legislated inequality that must get worse; that the public conversation has
died, and that all the semi-private buzzing on the Web doesn't make up.
"We
cannot go on living like this," Judt wrote, and worse: "We simply do
not know how to talk about these things any more."
Three
main points stick out of the Judt diagnosis: (1) the enfeeblement of
"social democracy" in the American Dream -- the slashing of taxes
that enabled a distributed prosperity; (2) the old cult and social disease of
private wealth which has infected the culture and the curriculum of the rising
generation; and (3) the collapse of a reasonably inclusive and "ethically
informed public conversation." Most people, he wrote "don't feel as
though they are part of any conversation of significance."
Judt's
prescriptions were all over the place. He said we must "theorize our
better instincts," but also: "we need to act upon our intuitions of
impending catastrophe." We need to recast our public conversation around
measures of human well-being, and we need a new crop of defiantly self-reliant
dissenters to keep it honest.
Ill
Fares the Land -- from Oliver Goldsmith's couplet:
"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey / Where wealth accumulates,
and men decay" -- reads to me like the missing manual of the malaise in
the land, a perfect outline for the Obama-Romney debates. On the chance that we
won't hear these angles on the stump, we're taking Tony Judt's themes as a
framework for conversations about the American condition in 2012 --
Happy
Fourth!
Yours
ever and ever,
Chris Lydon
