Ross Douthat penned an interesting column in a recent issue of the Altantic saying that post-9/11 America has, culturally, returned to the paranoid style of the 1970s.

Conservatives such as Noonan hoped that 9/11 would bring back the best of the 1940s and ’50s, playing Pearl Harbor to a new era of patriotism and solidarity. Many on the left feared that it would restore the worst of the same era, returning us to the shackles of censorship and conformism, jingoism and Joe McCarthy. But as far as Hollywood is concerned, another decade entirely seems to have slouched round again: the paranoid, cynical, end-of-empire 1970s.

He then goes through many film genres and compares recent films to those made in the ’70s. He even gives shout-outs to some of my favorite television shows: The Wire and Battlestar Galactica.

. . . [T]he first great revisionist sci-fi serial, Battlestar Galactica, helmed by an ex–Star Trek writer and featuring enough sex, violence, and religious fanaticism to set Gene Roddenberry spinning in his grave.

Most important, though, is that he questions the reason we have returned to such a style:

This last reality brings us to the question of how authentic our back-to-the-’70s moment really is. The Vietnam War was a cultural phenomenon in part because it couldn’t help being one—there was no way for Americans to keep the war at arm’s length, not with more than 50,000 dead, a million deployed over the course of the war, and every able-bodied teen and twentysomething at risk of conscription. In contrast, the Iraq War, a lower-casualty conflict fought by an all-volunteer military, takes place at a greater distance from the everyday lives of those Americans who don’t have a family member deployed overseas. The objective correlatives needed for a truly pessimistic era simply don’t exist for many Americans today. The last time around, we were participants; this time, we’re voyeurs.

It’s an interesting view. Read it yourself.

In other news, the Supreme Court has just ruled “that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.” This is just bad public policy that hurts the poor, minorities, the elderly and the disabled. Ugh.