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(I don’t think the young left is unpatriotic, but occasionally their/our skepticism about the American project or even just the people who happen to be in charge of it right now can express itself in cheap ways [“George W. Bush Is a Punk-Ass Chump”]. I’m thinking in particular about hearing boos during a National Guard trailer before a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, which probably has more to do with broad, cheap cynicism and immaturity than anything terribly specific, and these expressions tend to be few and far between and are probably nothing that should keep you up at night. Occasional and largely meaningless though it may be, it still raises the hair on my neck. I’ve no beef with people who throw down about history because they’re answering to a higher power, like Jeremiah Wright, but when it comes from a smaller place, it raises my hackles a bit. Sorry; moving on.)
One of the problems of the past eight years, for people like me, is that the progressive left had to be in deeply trenched opposition against the powers that be for so long about so many things–in opposition not only to Bush/Cheney/Addington/Gonzalez et al but to the often feckless Democratic party as well, sometimes including the president-elect, cf. the telecom immunity bill–that it was read as being in opposition to something much greater than the political scene.
