leftovers, part 3

My inner sociologist (a long-dormant but noisy-when-roused beast) was startled by this unusual, original analysis of contemporary America from a commenter on Jeff Jarvis’s BuzzMachine. (Unfortunately, I forgot to note the post it referred to; apologies to Jeff, whose blog I read daily, and to the commenter.)

frontier zones have been places for successive generations of creative young people to escape the suffocating rule-making and political correctness of their elders, make a life and express values which are their own, and participate in building new institutions rather than just receiving them from their elders. These new institutions have always end up re-establishing order.

The two big frontier zones accessible to today’s generation of Americans are the web and the newer, vast (politically Republican) suburbs, where young people go to have families and escape urban political machines and urban public schools. In this sense the ‘culture wars’ we see today are directly linked to the past, all the way back to the conflicts between the first and second generations of the ‘Pilgrim fathers’.