Andrew Schmookler: What do you make of this phenomenon?
R Well, the young people are fascinated with
post-apocalyptic times. There is hardly anybody
left, and it takes people back to the time when there were not millions of
people on the planet, there are thousands of people on the planet, and there is
none of this hierarchy anymore; it's gone.
There are skeletons of cities, and millions of empty, dead cars. That's this fiction that young Adults are
just eating up like candy.
Andrew Schmookler: My interpretation of that is this: Whether they say see what I'm pointing to or
not, they sense that a destructive power is operating in their society, that
their world is evolving in a way which is ruled by the forces of destruction
more than construction, and they are not optimistic. Like. I grew up in the 50s , I was born in in
'46 and grew up in the 50s, when we thought that the world was being remade and
making huge progress toward being the place it's supposed to be.
And
the Vietnam War was (more than anything else, I think) the wake up call to the
Baby Boomer Generation of which I was a part, that the positive turn things had
taken in the world, and in some important ways, too, in the presidencies of
Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower (all rated in the top
quarter of American Presidents, I might add), that the way things were going
better because of their leadership and of people like George Marshall, that did
not lay aside the capacity of the country to fall into the wrong hands and to
degenerate. And that's what's
happened. You ask why? I do have a theory about that, and it's got
to do with our affluence, and our culture's not having caught up to the
unprecedented situation that affluence put us into.
Rob Kall: Well,
we've got to wrap up. I hope
you'll be writing abut that. I bet you
will.
Andrew Schmookler: I already have some, I will some more. You said we weren't satisfied with where we
got to. I -
Rob Kall: That's OK.
Andrew Schmookler: I came to think that this didn't add up to
something that are you are pleased that we've created.
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