The article is “What’s Driving the Millennial Political Takeover?” (by Kate Nocera, in a recent issue of The New York Times), an article that reviews a book with the breathtaking title of: The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America (by Charlotte Alter).

You cannot let a title like that go past without comment, though that reviewer did it. The ones we’ve been waiting for?

Are there really people who are waiting for someone to come along and fix politics, fix the conditions that it is the business of politicians to manage? I cannot free my head to think about this book having been whacked silly by its mallet-of-a-title, driving home the news that there may be such people living among us.

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How can I convey the feeling of this, of the discovery that there may be people among us who do not laugh at such a title or read it as open irony? It is like the rediscovery of a living species long thought to be extinct – though, frankly, the rediscovery of a species would probably be pleasant. I suppose, then, it is more like the discovery that a disease that you were grateful was long ago stamped-out-by-medical-science is back.

If, over the centuries, thanks to progress (a thing liberals worship), diseases like smallpox are eradicated, that is indeed progress – and in lifetimes too there is progress. A healthy society makes sure that smallpox stays dead and a healthy society would do the same with ‘pining for glowing mighty rescuers’, which is surely a disease all its own.

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Sorry, I just can’t get over it, must say more.

There was a time in my life when I suppose I might have thought (I really can’t remember) that the right people are coming – but that would have been a very long time ago. It was a thing I got over fairly soon, by … basic experience.

We would have to go all the way back to the ’70s, when I was out of high school, to find that time of life when I might have been starry-eyed in such a way, back when I was a liberal myself (to the extent that I was anything): but I am hard-pressed to offer even the faintest sketch of this saviour crowd I might have been dreaming of.

Hippies and radicals seemed hopelessly and impulsively reactive; the people in charge seemed counter-reactive in the same bad way; young people looked to be unthinking sheep (I tried to go the other way but had no idea how). Who ever could save us? Where would they come from?

Mind you, to have reached this conclusion would have been a telling admission that I had asked the question (Who could save us?), which all by itself would put me in the same bag with the rest of the lost.

I would have to suggest, then, that only a young person could take seriously this notion of The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For. It may be 2020 but there are always more of these young people on the way.

But how, in this year or any year, does such a title get past the editor, or not get lampooned by reviewers at The New York Times? How can you not know that the idea is laughable to ‘old people’, that to elevate this idea into the very title of your book gives your book a breathtakingly cringe-making aura to people with … everyday experience?

An answer does come to me. It must be that media (books and newspapers) now treat masses of people as invisible.

The public a publisher serves is not the public in the way I have always imagined it (anyone willing to tune in);

it is a person with the same experiential resonance as the author, a person tuned to the same pitch.

Whatever happened to John Q. Public? It is not the audience in the theatre you are addressing, the bodies out there in the seats; it is ‘the audience of the book or article’. The reviewer used to be a stand-in for the old ‘member of the public’; now the reviewer is a publicist trying to find another buyer like himself.

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And then the puzzle about this idea is all made clear:

“The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For” takes its name from a speech by Barack Obama during his 2008, millennial-galvanizing campaign, and it’s apt; it took us a little while to realize that boomers were not going to save the world and that any significant change would be up to us.

Ah, the Postmodernist president. But let’s set Obama aside: one thing at a time.

In the words just quoted we can see, beautifully laid bare by this reviewer, the manic energy that drives the cycle of this world’s nonsense, around and around.

The Young Protagonist lands on stage and registers – lo! – the Imperfection of Things,

and notices the stripe and category of those in charge: every one a member of the Problematic Generation, the source of all the Young Protagonist’s external troubles (and he is not wrong about that);

notices the Evil Plans these problem causers are using, invented by these people; and the people who are using them, Themselves a Part Of the system they created (they are indebted to it and compromised by it):

who then is Pure?

Whatever could the answer be?

And, paraphrasing, the reviewer writes:

… it took us a little while to realize that boomers were not going to save the world and that any significant change would be up to us.

You call that insight? But The New York Times has done us a service: the manic energy of ‘progress’, there in a nutshell.  The new come upon the old and what is the thought? – And then what happens, when the new system is in place?

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The fool reading this might say, as I was tempted to do (always quick to speak like a fool, being foolish to the bone), that when the young protagonists look at the co-opted perpetrators of man-made misery as their Future Selves, then … – then what?

That would save us? So those are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For!    

Then they would grow up, that’s all. – But to ask the young to grow up when they are young is to ask more of them than we could ever have done. It is to ask the impossible.

You figure it out. Maybe you are one of the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For.