"Ideals, conventions, even truth itself, are continually changing things so that the milk of one generation may be the poison of the next. . . . When a generation succeeds . . . in handing down all of its discoveries and none of its delusions, its children shall inherit the earth."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1924
"Give a professor a false thesis in early life, and he will teach it till he dies. He has no way of correcting it." -- John Jay Chapman, 1900
Can the "milk" of one generation become the "poison" of the next? Only if it goes stale and asks to be drunk as fresh. The generation of the Sixties started out with its "discoveries" about the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the deficiencies of America in general. From that dramatic moment, when ideals clashed hard against reality, the generation proceeded to its analysis of the causes of things, and as the Sixties New Left evolved into the Academic Left, it began to hand down to a subsequent generation its delusions about the meaning of America and the nature of history, delusions for which there seems to be no means of correction.
