We live amid a chaotic age.
As with the Age of Industrialization’s dawning, this Age of Globalization’s advent is a time of promise and peril, wherein many Americans’ cherished way of life is being “creatively destroyed” by a tsunami of merciless changes seemingly beyond control. The very concept of a sovereign nation-state is besieged by the discordant forces of disorder – and without order, there is no justice or freedom for the people.
In most American lifetimes, only societal tumult of the late Sixties and early Seventies is comparable, if not equivalent. Then, it was the “Destructive Generation” (as David Horowitz has termed the Hippy-Boomers) who assailed our nation’s traditional cultural, political and economic institutions. Out of this madness arose a hero to restore order, justice and liberty: Detective Harry Callahan.
Stripping away the character’s now clichéd Byronic veneer of an alienated anti-hero, Detective Callahan was at heart a harkening to the traditional Irish beat cop. The beat was different, but the challenges – imposing order upon disorder – were not. A deeply conservative figure for his times, it was no accident that Detective Callahan served as a law enforcement officer in San Francisco, the time period’s epitome of societal disorder and cultural disintegration. Here, in the radical New Left’s psychedelic citadel, “Dirty Harry” Callahan made his stand for tradition and the imposition of order to secure justice and freedom for law-abiding citizens. (more…)
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