Health Care Woodstock

Forty years ago, Baby Boomers were out rocking and rolling in the mud to, as one put it, "terrify our parents in a deeply satisfying way." Now, facing Medicare, they are acting out in public again, this time over death panels that might finally put those aged begetters out of their misery.

"It’s a vivid reminder," Frank Rich observes, "that what most endures from America, 1969, is not the peace-and-love flower-power bacchanal of Woodstock legend but a certain style of political rage. The angry white folk shouting down their congressmen might be--literally in some cases--those angry white students whose protests disrupted campuses before and after the Woodstock interlude of summer vacation ’69."

Politically the Baby Boomers never did get it right. For all their idealism about race, sex, gender, war and politics, they produced only two presidents, Clinton and W, both of whom managed to dodge serving in Vietnam and went on to exemplify selfishness that marred their tenures and helped wreck the economy.

Now the first president after them is struggling to overcome, in his words, "the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation--a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.”

But the Boomers have migrated from campuses to town halls, turning health care reform from an issue that deserves serious, rational debate into another me-first sandbox squabble, with a little help from Obama's post-Boomer polar opposite, Sarah Palin, with what Maureen Dowd calls "her visceral talent for aerial-shooting her favorite human prey: cerebral Ivy League Democrats."

At least back in Woodstock there was music to compensate for all the madness.

Depoliticizing Prayer

After eight years of White House showboating on National Prayer Day, Barack Obama celebrated the event yesterday with a proclamation that emphasized the private nature of religious observance.

In his proclamation, the President noted that on "this day of unity and prayer," we "live in a nation where people of all faiths can worship or not worship according to the dictates of their conscience."

The Religious Right was not pleased, The marketing and media manager of the National Day of Prayer Task Force harrumphed: "The White House is a small part of what the national day of prayer is all about. Tomorrow there will be dozens of events held in our nation's capitol and governors from all 50 states have already issued proclamations...It would be belittling to those millions of people to reduce this day to merely one event not being held at the White House."

The irony in all this is that Obama, from all evidence, is more genuinely religious than Bush, who found his faith only when he was forced to give up booze in midlife.

Shortly before taking office, the President-in-waiting disclosed that he had been getting spiritual support every morning from "a prayer circle" of pastors from all faiths and denominations, some of whom "get on the phone and pray for me."

With the way the economy is going, even the most devout non-believer must be hoping that they are continuing their devotions.