Methinks Mr. Cohen should have been doing a little less defending of the administration that brought us this current disaster. In any case, he raises an intriguing, and depressing, and worrisome point:
Much has been made of the so-called culture wars here in America. The McCain-Palin ticket represents one culture and Obama-Biden another. But this clash is not about culture per se -- otherwise, how could the mother of an unwed pregnant teenager be the conservative while her opponents, as conventional as Saturday night at the VFW, are the liberals? No, it's really about outlook. Barack Obama's people feel they have control over their lives. Sarah Palin's people do not have a similar confidence.
This is why the Republican National Convention made war on the media. This is why Palin frequently has referred to "the pollsters and the pundits." These were the hidden manipulators of the culture and the economy, part of the often-invisible elitists who made it so bad for everyone else. They controlled the culture, the smut that came into one's home on the TV set and what was playing at the multiplex. They owned the banks and the newspapers and the TV networks -- and it didn't matter that their name could be Rupert Murdoch and they could be deeply conservative. As Don Quixote knew, "facts are the enemy of truth." Hard times are hard on truth.
The Great Depression was not just a period of wholesale unemployment and incredible poverty -- of bread lines and apple-peddlers and women selling brief intimacy for 10 cents a dance. It was also the period of Hitler and Mussolini and, in this country, of Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin, and the belief among otherwise sane people that communism was the remedy for what ailed us. An economic crisis is like war. It's impossible to contain. It affects everything it touches.
