Again With The Age of Decline

Deploring and Ignoring a Natural Resource--Comment

Comments after reading Ross Douthat’s “Field Of Nightmares”

Ross has again artfully perpetuated unfairly indoctrinated stigma and brandished his ageist badge.

How many mentions of "decline"?

What isn't, but should be, reiterated is our intransigent refusal to learn from our over-reliance (because they're so utterly convenient) on polling. We've every reason to cease propping them up as panic fuelers and status staters yet, here we go again.

As for "decline": salient evidence of it is viewable on a regular basis standing statically behind the GOP Senate Leader's microphones. It's also been borne out, spiritually and morally, in the Right's public policies, and lack of them.

The less than wondrous baseball allusion, albeit seasonally tart, is a reach. If a mystically supernatural aspect was the intent, Douthat might have looked past Bill Buckner and W.P. Kinsella (original author of the "Field Of Dreams" story "Shoeless Joe") and on toward Bernard Malumud's "The Natural" which was masterfully and magically adapted to the screen by Barry Levinson.

In that story, ill-fates and depraved circumstance wrestle a promising career from a young phenomenal talent, only to see him return years later, a seasoned and wiser human with a more evolved moral framework to house his still formidable gifts. All of these attributes combine to present an invaluable "natural" resource. Like so many others of those, we risk forsaking another again with a vapid pigeon-holing of "shelf-life" mentality. It’s tragic, especially when that hard-earned resource is contrasted with persistently abject cruelty, criminality and evil.

One of the two will inhabit the White House in Jan 2025.