This hit home to me....as someone who just crafted (and then deleted) a tweet about our real concern being not "marshall law," but "posse commie tat us," roving bands of communist tattoo artists holding down members of the bourgeoisie to give them hammer and sickle tats.
Don't worry, I am engaged in the appropriate amount of self-flagellation about the political sin I've just committed.
But to echo Aaron's point, it strikes me that the general attitude of ironic snark that distinguishes Gen Xers like me is partly a result of living most of our sentient life in the maw of a Reaganite consensus that was absurdly out of touch with reality, & administered by fools.
I mean hell, I was 12 when Reagan took office. The people in my county loved him. By 1984 the unemployment rate in my county was 25%. People still loved Ronnie. He won in a landslide. People listened to Springsteen's Born in the USA, and thought it was a paean to the GOP.
In 2004 my fellow Americans re-elected someone who transparently demagogued the gay marriage issue and had just lied us into a war. Voters chose him over an actual war hero who they thought wasn't really one because of Swiftboating propaganda. It was crazy-making.
The day after the 2004 election is exactly where my mind went the day after the 2016 election. Trump's absurdity is just W's absurdity turned up to 11.
The reason why a certain segment of Gen Xers still have a place in their hearts for Michael Moore is that in the 1990s his films and his TV show felt like one of the few places where someone was calling out the utter inanity of what appeared to be our national consensus.
