The kids of today yesterday

Baby boomers selling you rumors of their history
Forcing youth away from the truth of what's real today
The kids of today should defend themselves against the seventies
Stadium minds with stadium lies gotta make you laugh
Garbage bandits 'gainst true defenders of the crowds

The kids of today should defend themselves against the seventies (2x)
It's not reality, just someone else's sentimentality...
Look what it did to us...

Speakin' as a child of the seventies...

The kids against the seventies
Kids against the seventies
The kids of today should defend themselves against the seventies (12x)

(Lyrics by Mike Watt)

Okay, maybe I should substitute the sixties for the seventies, but the point is the same. Baby-boomer presidential candidates are dredging up tired 60's-era stereotypes and cliches as if it's McGovern vs. Nixon all over again. Bag News Notes highlights a recent example.

I'm amused by the latest way John McCain chose to frame Hillary Clinton in relation to what he was doing during Woodstock
[...]
In terms of visual analogy, McCain prompts us to imagine that the spinning hippie girl, celebrating the "cultural and pharmaceutical event," is Hillary Clinton herself.

First of all, Hillary Clinton can't be both a ball-busting ice queen and a free-love hippie chick. Pick one stereotype and stick to it, Republicans! Second, I can't help but detect a sort of nostalgia, both among the political "left" and the political "right" for the sixties. Almost as if everything was so much simpler back then - liberals were drugged-out hippies and conservatives were steely Green Berets. I'm too young to have been there, but I bet it was more complicated than how movies, media, and political commercials produced almost forty years later present it.

Meanwhile, Chris Bowers at Open Left points out that the candidate billed as the best hope of the under-fifty set has abandoned his natural constituency. I guess we'll all have to wait patiently while the baby-boomers refight the last war. But it's not really fighting the last war. More like fighting the last war as some wish to remember it. The real war going on right now, here, in the present, will have to wait.

"Yesterday":

Today: