I'm guilty of it, indeed we're all guilty of it; by virtue of our editorializing humanity we tend to look back on a scrubbed, sterilized, nostalgic past, one whose barbs are blunted by pains never felt and whose storybook sepia warmly welcomes with arms of simplicity never experienced.
Yes, I plead guilty, as any historicizing commentator-as-defendant should. And I've no doubt that Frank Rich, upon assuming the witness chair under oath, would spill his distortionist guilt just as freely. But seat him in front of a word processor, under deadline, and his deeper internal restraints take flight. According to a rather disturbing trend of indignant generalization in Rich's Sunday columns: Then, good; Today, bad.
Grasping for poignant metaphor, this morning Mr. Rich enlightens us with cinematic tales of the ruggedly virtuous Old West versus unspeakably corrupt modernity. To wit ...
"Talk about Two Americas. Look at 'The Social Network'" -- described by Rich as an immorality tale of "the ability of the powerful and privileged to manipulate the system [and] the collapse of loyalty as a prized American virtue" -- "after seeing 'True Grit'" -- bring in the angels, for here we're exalted by a "clear-cut sense of morality and justice, even when the justice is rough" -- "and you’ll see two different civilizations, as far removed from each other in ethos as Silicon Valley and Monument Valley....
"When Americans think of the law these days," reckons Rich, "they often think of a system that can easily be gamed by the rich and the powerful."
They do indeed, Mr. Rich. Just as "they" thought precisely that in "those days" as well, when the rich and powerful of the Railroad Trust and the Copper Trust and the Sugar Trust, ad infinitum, gamed and ruled the "system."
Which was also a time that even the incurably cynical H.L. Mencken looked back on and smiled on as something approaching a sociopolitical paradise, before came the abnormal corruption of his times.
"The legislature," wrote Mencken in the American Mercury, 1930, was once "the creature of the people." Yet, he lamented, "Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle -- a mere counter in a grotestue and knavish game."
This backward, nostalgic frogleaping in time could extend to the first instance of some 6th-century B.C. Mesopotamian farmer suspecting that his neighbor was getting that newfangled irrigation system only because the neighbor's wife was shtupping the tribal chief or the tribal chief had scored a higher kickback of grain.
Doubtless, if he had known of them, the farmer would have longed for the simpler, uncorrupted days of the Neanderthals.
Don't mistake me: I regard Frank Rich as a superb writer, of often keen insights, who invokes the abstractions of our better angels merely as an exhortative device. That kind of near-utopian voice in the public arena is needed; I've never denied that, although it happens not to be my cup of political tea.
Would that Mr. Rich, however, at least occasionally acknowledge the inescapable complications forever with us in his rather black-and-white worlds of then and now.