Frank Rich: Mayberry R.I.P.

[Book O'Dead]

One of my favorite liberal journalists takes on his own set:


These declinist authors have in common a paucity of plausible or practical solutions to address the laundry lists of imperatives that America must deal with urgently if it is to save itself from perdition or extinction. But their most revealing shared trait, whatever their individual politics or panaceas, is an authorial demographic—they are all white men of a certain age. It’s not happenstance that the Indian-born Fareed Zakaria, who shares some of the declinists’ complaints, conspicuously stands apart from them by defining his subject, in The Post-American World (http://www.amazon.com/The-Post-American-World-Release-2-0/dp/039308180X), as not “the decline of America” but “the rise of everyone else.
”http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/declining-america-2012-7/index1.html

The Correct link for the article is this:

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/declining-america-2012-7/

[Rocky Rococo]

Rich is apparently blissfully unaware of what's happened to the American working class over the past 40 years. At least he makes no mention of it in the entire five-page article.

[Book O'Dead]

Rich is apparently blissfully unaware of what's happened to the American working class over the past 40 years. At least he makes no mention of it in the entire five-page article.

Frank Rich alludes to efforts by sectors of the ruling class to mitigate the class struggle or, at best, to gloss over it:


The mission was to demonstrate to one and all that America “was unified, consensual and inclusive”—or, in other words, a nation adhering to “the vital center,” a term that would be coined by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1949. The launch was celebrated in Philadelphia to capitalize on the 160th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention, with an Independence Hall jamboree of patriotic songs and speeches broadcast on NBC. But though the train would chug on for sixteen months, it was nearly thrown off-track by one dispute after another. Some of the exhibition documents—including copies of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator—were dumped. The Gettysburg Address survived the cut, but by being paired with an 1865 address by Robert E. Lee. Attempts to permit white and black viewers in the South to mix freely were met with resistance, with the consequence that at a few stops, the Emancipation Proclamation was exhibited to segregated audiences. Even the choice of “freedom” as a rubric was a carefully considered avoidance of the more contentious “democracy.”