The center is not holding

I've been reading -- in super slow-motion, a few subway stops every night -- Rick Perlstein's long and majestic The Invisible Bridge, explaining how we went so quickly from the fall of Nixon to the rise of Reagan in the mid-1970s. Perlstein  is a master at showing how seemingly isolated events reveal a broader social consciousness -- for example, how the unrelenting double-whammy of Vietnam and Watergate caused Americans to turn to nostalgia (American Graffiti, "Grease," even the ragtime-y Shakey's Pizza) and the supernatural (Uri Geller, UFO fascination) to find any kind of liberation from the fierce awfulness of then.

Forty years later, and where are we? Right back where we started from. The center is not holding. Again.

In the year 2054 ("if man is still alive..."), the Rick-Perlstein-of-the-future will no doubt find the timing of this episode to be no accident:

Viewers of CBS affiliate KTVA-TV in Anchorage, Alaska were jolted Sunday evening during the station's newscast as reporter Charlo Greene dropped an F-bomb, disclosed that she was the owner of a cannabis club in the city and informed the audience she was quitting her TV job.

"F--k it, I quit," Greene said with a shrug at the close of a report about efforts to decriminalize marijuana in the state, which will vote on the issue in November.

That's sure to be remembered a few months from now as the quote of the year. But it's also one more sign that for too many people, the old conventional ways are not working. America -- the world, perhaps, but America to be sure -- has an economy that's stopped doing much of anything for the vast majority of folks, and an entrenched power structure that has people looking for any means possible to get around it...or maybe light up and drop out of it.

A lot of people are saying "(Bleep) it"..But not everybody is saying "I quit," and for that we can be thankful. Yesterday, amid a blue-gray September sky and the last waves of summer's furnace, a staggering number of people -- between 300,000 and 400,000, according to reasonable estimates (which equals about 17 million in the Sean Hannity-Glenn Beck-Tea Party crowd-counting method) -- took to the streets of Manhattan to urge action on climate change.

That's a remarkable story -- not only was it the largest rally ever against global warming, but it was one of the two or three biggest protests of any kind in America's long and rich history of patriotic, Constitution-protected dissent. Yet you would not have gotten the import of the moment from watching the American mainstream media. CBS News -- the network that once gave the world Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, a long, long, long time ago -- didn't cover the People's Climate March at all, not one word. Ditto from the major Sunday talk shows, except on ABC "This Week" where the token liberal panelist sneaked in a mention. This is shameful.

Shameful yet not surprising. Let's be honest here -- the elites are nervous about covering events like the People's Climate March because such happenings are making them extremely uncomfortable. It's outside their oh-so-familiar bubble of talking heads funded by the military-industrial-complex or the American Petroleum Institute or whatever. They can't control it, and they want it to go away.

Today, about 2,000 people took part in a more confrontational sit-down protest called Flood Wall Street, aimed at the investment houses that fund fossil fuels, and by any standard it was massively successful, bringing Lower Manhattan to a halt for much the day. To finally bring the situation under control, the cops even arrested a polar bear, for crying out loud. Needless to say, the nervous Nellies in the media were too busy wetting their pants about ISIS to even pay any attention.

I'm surprised the polar bear didn't say, "(Bleep) it, I quit."