Proceed with extreme caution; no coherence for the next 50 miles

Great Daniel Henninger column in the WSJ today on the theme of societal guard rails, and how we probably don't have them anymore.

In it, he excerpts his own column from nineteen years ago on the same subject.  In that piece, he had pinpointed August 1968 as a moment when the likelihood that guard rails would disappear made a quantum increase.  He was, of course, referring to the yippie riots in Chicago's Grant Park, outside the Democratic National Convention.

My own frame of reference can lend a constructive perspective to the significance of that historical moment.  I was thirteen years old at the time, the son of a small-manufacturing-business entrepreneur and a homemaker.  It was a middle-class household, with lifestyle parameters ranging from the Presbyterian Church to pre-dinner martinis, to expectations of Boy Scout membership to season tickets to the touring-Broadway-show series at the Indiana University auditorium.  And in the midst of this was this highly impressionable adolescent holed up in his bedroom with the most subversive rock and roll records of the day, who was getting a taste via his peers of radical literature and exotic social theory.

We're coming up on Christmas, and it has me recalling the presents under the trees of the late 1960s and early 70s, LPs by figures whose entire orientation was, to use a 21st-century phrase, the fundamental transformation of America.  And that was the musical foundation I brought with me as I learned to play guitar,  joined musical ensembles, and got a taste of professional musical activity.

A long-playing vinyl phonograph record, for any readers who may not be old enough to be familiar with that delivery system, came shrink-wrapped, and, in the upper left-hand corner of the 12"x12" carboard cover, the logo of the corporation that had signed the artist in question to a contract and had manufactured and distributed the product in the consumer's hands.

These corporations, at this point, generally still had pre-countercultural-revolution-type American capitalists as CEOs, board members, and upper-management personnel.  Their marketing departments, though, were wising up to the shifting cultural winds and hiring hipsters to craft their appeal to the demographic that was clearly buying most of the nation's records.   The 1968 advertising slogan for the Columbia label, for instance, was "The man can't bust our music."

So there were adolescent consumers like me, as well as somewhat (but not all that much) older employees of these record companies, who could use the infrastructure of the recording industry to subvert the very culture that had spawned it.  We could do so because there was an even more solid and pervasive infrastructure behind it, namely, the whole edifice of what was at that time "normal" American life: clear gender roles, church attendance, dress codes in schools, television variety shows, acceptance of the fact that US foreign policy necessitated a projection of power, family vacations, robust civic organizations, settled neighborhoods.  That whole web of factors made for an America so great and prosperous that it could absorb the jabs of a counterculture that still depended for its viability on "establishment" institutions.

Up to a point.  As we boomers grew older ("matured," perhaps, or perhaps not) and moved into such realms as law, journalism, education, and, more to the immediate point, the recording industry and the arts and entertainment generally, we cut the bonds which had tethered all that to that "establishment" foundation.

Which gets us back to Mr. Henninger's guard rails.  I recall a point Diana West makes in her indispensible 2007 book The Death of the Grown-Up about U2 lead singer Bono accepting a Grammy at some point in the 1990s and telling the audience to "keep f---ing up the system," and how both he and his fans missed the irony that they were now the system.

There truly are no guard rails now - no behavioral guard rails that would have stigmatized a clearly troubled Connecticut boy sufficiently to prevent his playing violent video games and spewing rhetoric about being the devil on social media, and no fiscal-sense guard rails that would have the current debate  in Washington be about the actual problem facing the country instead of anything having to with increasing taxes.

You don't have to even attempt to make sense in post-America.  You can spout utter babble about your sexual identity, about personal or governmental solvency, about "inclusion" for jihadists, about windmill farms versus oil drilling, and, if you do it to a sufficiently rocking beat, you can become a celebrity, perhaps even a dictator.