There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth on both the conservative side and the liberal side recently about whether we should just avert our eyes from the revolting spectacle of the Bush years and move on. Peggy Noonan suggests as much, and conservatives are trying hard to pretend nothing went wrong and there's nothing to see here, folks. But Frank Rich has it right when he says we just can't. We really are not going to be able to do it. The last time we buried a piece of history, it was called the Vietnam War, and as a result of trying to forget it ever happened, we're still fighting it in this country. It's the seed of the rabid hatred and distrust that are flowering in the extravagant diatribes of Rush Limbaugh and his clones.
I don't know how many people on this site have teenage kids, but in my daughter's middle-school history book, they almost entirely skipped the Vietnam War. That whole era is now nearly 40 years behind us and we can't figure it out enough to be able to put it in a history book. We still can't address the grievous divisions that split our country wide open and continue to fester today. I can see why history book writers can't do it. If they write sympathetically about the war protest movement, whole squadrons of right-wingers will move in like predator drones and ruin their business. But frankly, the protest movement was the essential spirit of the times for the young people then. Why can we not say so? Why can we not talk about how a whole generation grew up mistrusting authority? We might be able to give a name to the self-centered greed of the Wall Street tycoons who thought so little of their communities if we could tie it to the experience of the alienated 60s and 70s.
Will we do the same thing with the Bush years? Will we try to paper it over and pretend it didn't happen? Or will we have to get in each others' faces and shout it out? How can we heal this terrible time in our own spirits?
I think we probably do need truth commissions, and we probably need to sit down as a country and review our founding documents, because very clearly, a lot of people don't understand the nature of our constitution or of democracy itself. A lot of people think no government is the answer, or they think a totalitarian theocracy is the answer. We need to arrive at some consensus of what our country is supposed to be and to stand for, or we will never succeed in putting the Bush years into a perspective we can live with.
Here's to a nationwide Constitutional Study Session. All Americans welcome. Let's figure out who we are, for once, and then let's get back to being whatever that is.