Patricia Schroeder: “Mr. Speaker, Newt Gingrich wants to move America back, back to the fifties--back to the 1850's. Earlier this week, the…”

“Mr. Speaker, Newt Gingrich wants to move America back, back to the fifties--back to the 1850's. Earlier this week, the Speaker announced that America needs to be more like Victorian England, whose heyday was in the mid-1800's. I have a difficult time believing that the Speaker wants to take us back to another age, much less another country--the one we waged our revolution against. But it is more difficult for me to believe that the Speaker, who prides himself on being a futurist, who claims to be a surfer of the third wave of information, who by his own admission was a free thinker of the sixties, and continues to use the tactics and language of the sixties, actually prefers to reinvent Victorian England here in America. As Dickens spoke of that age in his opening paragraph of ``A Tale of Two Cities'' in 1859: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epic of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. The Victorian Age was great for the privileged few and awful for just as many.”