The Laws of our Fathers

PART TWO

PEOPLE MY AGE ARE HUNG UP ON THE SIXTIES. EVERYBODY knows that and regards it as sort of a problem with us: the generation who won't throw out their bell-bottoms. Whenever something by the Beatles comes on the car radio, my son begins to moan for fear I'm going to sing along. 'But look,' I sometimes want to say, 'all these people said they were going to change things, and things changed: The war. The cruel formalities that disadvantaged minorities or women. People stopped behaving like they'd all been knocked out of the same stamping plant.' These days I say I'm going to stop dropping my underwear on the bathroom floor, and I can't even change that. So naturally I think something special happened in the sixties. Didn't it? Or was it just because I was at that age, between things, when everything was still possible, that time, which in retrospect, doesn't seem to last long?

– MICHAEL FRAIN 'The Survivor's Guide,' September 4, 1992

MANY YEARS AGO, I LIVED WITH A WOMAN WHO LEFT graduate school in Philosophy right after she read a remark of Nietzsche's. He'd said: 'Every great philosophy [is] the personal confession of its originator, a type of involuntary and unaware memoirs.' In light of that observation, I guess my friend decided she was, literally, in the wrong department. Nietzsche – and, as ever, the woman – were brought to mind recently when I went to a gathering in Washington in which some of the DC smarty-pants types, the pundits and pols, were analyzing the primaries and repeating as gospel, the adage Tip O 'Neill used to like to repeat, 'All politics are local.' But to me that saying has always seemed to be off by an order of magnitude. It's Nietzsche who was on the button. I suspect he'd say, 'All politics are personal.' – "The Survivor's Guide, March 20, 1992