“Time waits for no man, certainly not during a real estate downturn in Brooklyn…” (via NYT)

Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?

Life is about finding the right balance, no? Efficiency versus beauty. Freedom versus security. Vice versus virtue. Most Americans shoot straight for the middle, which aside from some boring artistic preferences and questionable policy positions, seems to work fairly well. We are a generally private people (an inheritance from the English), sometimes stupidly rational (thank our German forbearers), and forever proud and usually suspect of authority (all rise: Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sequoyah, etc.)

As of late, however, you may have noticed a few of your fellow citizens in danger of falling, nay, regressing into more reactionary, and decidedly far (…)-wing sectors of thought. Back in the nineteenth century, they used to call this phenomenon “know-nothingism,” and while it proved to be a successful political tactic, the trick was short-lived, and is today generally shorthand for being willfully ignorant—a short leap from just being a crazy old coot.

This has manifested itself most recently, and most virulently, in the town hall meetings cum shouting matches called up by your local senator (or President) explaining how a public option of health care might help you and your family receive quality medical care. Those more historically inclined might have confused the fiasco for a thirteenth-century waltz of Guelphs and Ghibellines (minus any tangential literary bequests).

Another inferno that has been a-ragin’ is that between the defenders of the agri-biz food industry and the many-monikered green/sustainable/organic/local movement (a subtlety hydra-headed group of interests, but more or less speaking to the same thing, and everyone knows who they are) that ironically finds most of its adherents in the places furthest from the farm and food chain.

More below the radar, but particularly interesting, is the small, but fervent group of parents who choose not to vaccinate their children for fear of unintended, and so far unfounded, side-effects like life-long allergies and autism. That the other side of this argument is nearly a half century of successful (some would say miracle-working) public health policy is no matter.

Is the private and old-fashioned rational mind fast becoming a thing of the past? Or has the Internet and social media allowed for like-minded individuals to cohere, trade ideas, and organize movements much more successfully than ever before? The latter more than the former, surely; but it’s the particular virulence of social media that is actually making the decline of the rational mind a certainty, rather than just upstaging it as a new value in American politics.