Watergate: A generational divide

"Are the seventies past their expiration date yet?" Megan McArdle asks.

To journalists ten or twenty years older than me, this is the long-awaited end to a grand mystery. To people my age or younger, it just doesn't matter that much. Baby boomers, many of whom seem to have trouble accepting the fact that time has passed, often seem incredulous that the major formulating events of their lives simply aren't that interesting to everyone else. Vietnam and Watergate have become the language of public debate, even though both ended over thirty years ago.

Yesterday, I was chastised by a reader for citing Mark Steyn's article on the Deep Throat phenomenon. My point was not that Mark Felt was a hero, but that I agreed with what he and Jay Rosen had to say about the detrimental effect Watergate had on the media. Here's another piece, that argues much the same:

Whatever the motive, the project was utterly disastrous for Nixon, and nearly as disastrous for journalism. For contrary to what most members of my profession believe, we journalists are not a particularly courageous or morally gifted species and, moreover, are pathologically inclined towards group thinking. And so, inspired by the Watergate example, all over the English-speaking world, young journalists got it into their not very imaginative heads that their primary duty was to expose corruption in government.

Travel back 25 years and ask a journalist whether he would prefer a scoop either into secret killings and burials by the IRA, or into MI5 operations in Belfast; nine times out of ten he would leap at the latter. For to gain kudos within our profession, we had to be instinctively against the government and its agencies. The swiftest way of drawing a torrent of derision upon your head in the company of your fellow journalists would have been to praise the security forces. Yet we know, the most flagrantly, extravagantly, wickedly corrupt and corrupting organisation throughout the Troubles was the IRA.

I should add that technically I'm a boomer. But I've never identified with them. Partly because I came at the tail end of that generation and all their attendant generational milestones. During the Summer of Love I wasn't even ready for a training bra. And, needless to say, I wasn't at Woodstock either. Though it's probably fair to say that many who have claimed to be there weren't either.

He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

The boomer generation seems to feel that they were the first to experience war, Vietnam, and the first to conclude that war was a bad thing. They discovered corruption in high places--their innocence, their blessed shattered innocence--and sex.

Sorry guys, you weren't the first and you won't be the last.

What the sixties has left us with is the aforementioned church of journalism, with its belief that the government is always "up to no good" and its partner, the Vietnam syndrome, which translates as:

War is always bad;

The government that prosecutes a war is lying to us about said war;

Our motives about war are bad, wrong, or just plain wrong-headed;

We're in over our heads;

Innocent people die during war;

Because war is always bad.

Time for a new template, people. And time to stop living in the past.

Update: "Hard To Swallow: Deep Throat Does All the President's Men" The most disturbing political tale of our time. Via Kitty at Lifelike Pundits.