The Return of the Sixties? - Uhhhhh....huhhhhhhhhh?

It all started when a 14-year-old daughter of a pastor of mine came up two weeks ago and gushed, "I'm really into the Sixties now."  I smiled.  I wasn't sure why, but I went through the Sixties (actually what we mean by the "Sixties" were really the years 1967-1973) in all its headiness, hopefulness, giddy idealism, muddiness, dashed hopes, and personal dysfunctions that affected an entire generation.

Then Occupy Wall Street started a week later, and to cite the now trite Yogi Berra remark, it was deja vu all over again.  The only difference was that it came on with full fury much more quickly (that's accelerating "change" timeline Alvin Toffler in Future Shock wrote about forty years ago), it "went viral" (a phrase we didn't have then) much more quickly thanks to social media, and it was about something far more complex than it was at the time (the Vietnam war and the repression of civil rights had been concrete things that could be addressed by simple policy options, whereas the slow global economical unravelling we are now experiencing is transnational and impossible to turn around with straightforward, national political initiatives). 

I still fondly remember the Sixites now, because what happened then brought about real and important changes (if only sometimes indirectly and through the long haul), although with serious, long-term collateral social and cultural damage that in retrospect could have been avoided.    At the time everyone exulted in what the French called "the events", while no one anticipated the collateral damage.  How can you when you're intoxicated with promise?  

To say you're wiser now, of course, doesn't help or do anything at all for the younger generation.  But you can offer advice, even if it's bound to be disregarded.  

In the Sixties the slogan was "you can't trust anyone over thirty."  The sentiment behind that slogan was based on the supposition that no over thirty would understand the way we did what was actually going on, and if you took their advice you would end up being compromised or manipulated.  Since our elders at the time had created the mess we were all protesting against, why were they worth listening to?  Will anyone today listen to a banker about how to solve the global problems of banking?  You've gotta be kiddin'?

But I didn't really anticipate the fierce pushback from the twenty-somethings that are on my Facebook page as well as in personal discussions when I dared to suggest that maybe they ought to step back and twice twice a little bit about "the events" that started in Manhattan and now are happening most places around the world.  I cited numerous somewhat ambivalent or even skeptical articles from my older contemporaries, but the general response I received was - as in the Sixites - if you're not with us, you're against us!

I avoided talking about the Tea Party while it was receiving all the media attention, because it obviously had a different genesis, and in the academic world no one wants, or still wants, to understand the Tea Party because it is considered merely to be part of what H.L. Mencken disparaging referred to as the latest incarnation of America's "boobocracy" - small-town, small-minded, narrowly focused people who just work, go to church, hate diversity, hate ideas, and of course hate change.  

In retrospect I realize the difference between the Tea Party and the fledgling OWS movement parallels the difference between the "cultural revolutionaries" of the Sixties and the George Wallace for President movement about the same period.   If George Wallace, who was clearly more "reactionary" than the TPers are today, had not been brought down by an attempted assassin and, although he didn't actually die, rendered politically ineffective for the rest of his life, the 1970s might have turned out quite differently.

But then what if John or Bobby Kennedy hadn't been shot either?

What I myself learned in the 1960s is that history matters.  I didn't learn it after the fact.  I saw history in the making (I did get an MA in "historical studies" at Berkeley, and almost went on to get a history rather than a philosophy of religion PhD) , and I learned the lessons at that time, which quickly changed my attitude about what was then happening.  Most of my contemporaries then, as well as my younger contemporaries now, still believe history sucks.  Or if it doesn't, it's because at least for ideological reasons you can use your own, carefully selected metaphors to justify what you already wanted to believe anyway.

No, this is not the Sixties redux - actually!  How do I know?  I lived through it, I analyzed it through education at the time, and I've continued to do so ever since.  I'm doing it right now.

Nor is it a "new civil rights movement."  Nor is it The Revolution finally and decisively on a global scale - finally and decisively - as people who read Zizek all the time might want to believe.  Nor is it HOPE!  Remember, we voted someone into office decisively only three years ago, and now we've supposedly lost hope.  Go figure.

I'll spend time in this slot explaining what not only is happening.  I will also explain, not with the meaning of Lenin's phrasing early in the last century that had more than a whiff of menacing subtext for which we now know the horrible implicatons, but with a certain tentative irony, the following: "what is to be done."   

What is to be done?  Don't get ahead of me.  

I'm going to write this regular blog even if you are sure, as we did, you know what is happening and what needs to be done.  

Except we got a lot of it wrong, and I'm not convinced you're going to get any more right.

But what do I know?  I passed the thirty mark years ago. 

 

 

 

Comments

[Alan Richard]

I'm very interested in what you'll be saying in upcoming entries. Are you going to visit any of the Occupy groups? Even in a quasi-Baudrillardian world, there is a difference between what you can get from being there in person and what you can get from vicariously witnessing it via news media.

Also, I'm glad you acknowledge that the sixties are something other than a model of failure. I am a beneficiary of the activism of the 1960s: all of who are gay are beneficiaries, as are women. On the other hand, the collateral damage was tremendous. My view has always been that much of this damage comes from an untrammeled optimism that misread the right as a kind of decadent vestige of the past rather than as a contemporary movement that allied economically powerful elites with angry white southerners and transplanted southerners. The Mencken dismissal is the lens through which the boomer idealist left viewed the white southern and midwestern working class, when it wasn't romanticizing them. This dismissal is a tempting path to take even if you grew up with half or more of your family being members of this class: its culture, rife with hypocrisy, meanness, and narrowness, is not easy to love. But we must try to understand it. Failure to do so undid much of the potential of the sixties.