Blaming The 60s

I, for one, will never apologize for "the 60s." I was there and I was not high on anything. I remember it all.


I've also observed the good that came from that era. It wasn't all about drugs, sex and Rock 'n Roll. As a matter of fact little of it was, compared to what the Right-wing would have you believe.


The Right has been allowed to define "the 60s" for far too long. What they say bears little resemblance to the truth, as many of us saw it.

August 27, 2008

Get Over It

By BOB SOMMER

THE SIXTIES. That’s where the trouble began. Just ask Rush Limbaugh or David Brooks or Bill Bennett, or just about any right-wing pundit. THE SIXTIES is the problem. Of course, they don’t mean the decade but rather THE SIXTIES, a casserole of selected ingredients that includes the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, the chaos of the ’68 Democratic National Convention, and the myths of Woodstock and Haight. This familiar, even clichéd, stew excludes far more than it includes and always paints these events in the brush strokes of mindless anarchy, somehow implying that COINTELPRO and bombing Cambodia maybe weren’t so bad, after all.

Consider this recent comment by Washington Times columnist Victor Davis Hanson: “Those who protested 40 years ago often still congratulate themselves that their loud zeal alone brought needed ‘change’ to America in civil rights, the environment, women’s liberation and world peace. Maybe. But critics counter that the larger culture that followed was the most self-absorbed in memory.”

Why is change in quotes? Is it too distasteful a word? And what’s the logic here? That separate drinking fountains were better than the perceived solipsism of a generation? That lattés and organic food stores were too high a price to pay for recognizing the environmental havoc of industrialization? That every baby born from 1945 to 1955 turned up in Chicago in 1968, or would have if he or she could?

Or that segregation would somehow have faded away and the Vietnam War would have been “won” without the zeal of activists who had run out of options in the face of a recalcitrant administration (an all-too familiar problem)? What would it take to get the attention of all those nuclear families eating their TV dinners on TV trays in front of their TVs?

The narrative of how THE SIXTIES doomed America is familiar: An over-indulged generation of suburban babies born into the postwar boom became The Me-Generation. Pass the first dose of blame to Dr. Spock. Then move on to television, birth-control, Elvis (or the Rolling Stones, according to Alan Bloom), Timothy Leary, Earth Day, marijuana, acid, Abbie Hoffman, and lately (because of a loose Chicago connection, déjà-vu-all-over-again) Bill Ayers. Gordon Gecko, it’s fair to assume, would have stopped off at Yasgar’s farm on his way to Wall Street. The Port Huron Statement, the 1962 manifesto of the SDS, presciently anticipated the argument, opening with these words: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”

Why this obsession? For one, it suits well the Rovian tactics that have become the trademark of right-wing discourse: Strawman and ad hominem attacks have replaced actual debate. You can demonize anyone by attributing this mythologized heritage to them. You can add dirty words like socialism and communism and welfare state. You can invent ties between Obama and the Weather Underground. Best of all, you can make him responsible for losing another war, even though every major strategic assessment he’s made has turned out to be right—and some, like the Iraq timeline and negotiating with unfriendly nations, have been enacted by the Bush administration.

But THE SIXTIES is flexible. You can blame it for anything—national debt, high oil prices (we could drill, if it weren’t for those hippie tree-huggers and their obsession with caribou in the ANWR), Janet Jackson’s malfunctioning wardrobe (oops, what about Foley, Craig, Vitter, and company?), and godlessness (which has infinite possibilities).

This revisionism, of course, discounts (or mangles) the other historical and cultural influences of the postwar era, including McCarthyism, the growth of the suburbs and our ensuing reliance on the automobile, the application of scientific and medical discoveries to our increasing affluence and improving health, the expanding ties of American (and foreign) corporations to our expanding military (and its expanding presence around the globe), the mobility of Americans, and the explosion of the entertainment industry. It dismisses the rejection of consumerism by the anti-establishment movements of the Vietnam era, as capitalism, like the Borg, assimilated everything it touched, creating a need for endless growth and expansion—with consequences that have now begun to manifest themselves in the housing collapse, the debt crisis, and the international turmoil and environmental disasters we’ve created.

Notably absent (or grudgingly mentioned) in most accounts of THE SIXTIES (like Hanson’s) is civil rights, which somehow, we are to assume, would have resolved itself, given time, if only THE NEGROES had been more patient. Lynard Skynard summed up this complacency in its defense of “the southland” against Neil Young’s “Southern Man”: “Now we all did what we could do.” And that’s it. What more do you want? Whatever happens happens. Why stir up trouble?

As to Vietnam, according to the narrative, we “lost.” That is, we could have “won” if it weren’t for the traitors on the homefront. This narrative has been often retold in recent years. Of course, it leaves out “the most trusted man in America,” Walter Cronkite, muttering about Vietnam, “What the hell is going on?” which, granted, is more temperate than “UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER!” but still landed him on the same side of the divide. He finally went to Vietnam to see for himself—and now the nuclear families began to listen.

Whether stated or implied, THE SIXTIES is very much a part of the current presidential debate. Sturgis, South Dakota, echoed recently with a thunderous roar that seemed to come all the way from 1965, when the Hell’s Angels rolled headlong through an antiwar protest march in Berkeley. Thousands of bikers in Sturgis revved up their support for John McCain in a Harley hallelujah chorus that resounded with both their endorsement of the Bush-McCain non-strategy for Iraq and their disdain for the environment. And their hooting and cheers also mocked a half century of progress by women when McCain offered his wife up for the Miss Buffalo Chip contest as 100,000 leering eyes envisioned a topless Cindy McCain (and probably a banana). But you do have to wonder if McCain knew what a buffalo chip actually is, though the look on Cindy’s face suggested that she did.

Bob Sommer’s novel, Where the Wind Blew, which tells the story how the past eventually caught up with one former member of a 60s radical group, was released in June 2008 by The Wessex Collective.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Another mini-take on the 60's

Luv and Haight: A different Take on the Summer of Love
by Ron Jacobs Page 1 of 1 page(s)
http://www.opednews.com


June 1, 2007 saw the first of what is certain to be many dates celebrated in the media forty years after the so-called Summer of Love. That day was the day, of course, that the Beatles' legendary album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was released. According to most rock critics who look at the subject historically, this album heralded a new phase of rock and roll. The album was reviewed in normally staid newspapers that had previously considered rock music in the same way they regarded pig racing. In other words, it didn't exist unless there was a scandal. Of course, with rock and roll being rock and roll, there were plenty of scandals, usually involving drugs and sex.

I turned twelve in 1967 and was only slightly aware of the Summer of Love phenomenon. It's not to say that what I knew about it didn't interest me, but in the suburban town where I lived, boys were still being thrown out of junior high school for having hair that covered the top of their ears, and girls' parents were called if their skirts were more than two inches above their knees. Of course, that didn't prevent students from testing the rules on a daily basis, nor did it prevent the school authorities from enforcing their rules as if they were punishing hardened felons. Our radios played "If You're Going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)" and it seemed like the cool guy at the local record store played Sgt. Pepper's every time I went in to see what was new on the Top 40. The one or two kids that ran away to become hippies were the stuff of local rumor and legend, but no one really knew whether they had gone to San Francisco or, merely, to Georgetown--Washington DC's hippie ghetto. Both were miles away, literally (in San Francisco's case) and figuratively.

There was a fellow named Daniel I knew when I lived in Berkeley. He and I used to spend hours hanging out on Telegraph Avenue and many other places. Daniel was the quintessential street freak. If the Hog Farm and other communes were communities of freaks who lived in an alternative reality that they helped create, Daniel was the loner in the picture. He left Ohio in 1967 for Haight-Ashbury when he was fourteen, looking for the magical place he had read about. He found a lot of magic. but he arrived just in time for the first of many police crackdowns.

These occurred with almost weekly frequency, as the authorities tried to get rid of the situation created by the migration. As Daniel told the story, each attempt by the police to clear an area by force was usually met with resistance. This, naturally, resulted in a series of riots and an intensification of fear and anger from both sides of the cultural divide. Groups like the Diggers tried to help the migrants with food and clothing, while some of the local hip businesses tried to work with the city to calm things down. The carnival in the Haight was getting ugly, just as it was in other big cities across the country, especially New York and Detroit.

Why Detroit? Like most other cities that saw the summer of 1967 bring an influx of young people looking for the hippie culture, Detroit had been the site of a flourishing counterculture community before 1967. Chief among its members were John Sinclair, Leni Arndt and Gary Grimshaw. These three were members of a group that ran the Grande Ballroom in Detroit and put on concerts and other events in the Detroit hip community. In October 1966, these three were arrested, along with more than fifty others in a well-publicized dope raid. Sinclair went to prison for six months and, when he got out, the Summer of Love was in full swing. The police and city authorities watched the goings-on carefully and did their best to maintain, what they considered to be, order. Concerts were harassed and youths arrested for pot smoking, but the events in another part of Detroit that summer took most of the police department's energies.

Those events were, of course, the Detroit insurrection. This uprising by African-Americans began on July 29, 1967, after the Detroit police raided an after-hours club in the city's predominantly black west side. The police expected to find just the owners of the club present, but instead came upon close to a hundred men and women at the club celebrating the return of two local men from the war in Vietnam. Instead of retreating and coming back later, the cops began to arrest everyone in the club. As the patrons were put into paddy wagons, a crowd of local residents began to gather and yell at the police. Things soon escalated and, shortly thereafter, the uprising began. The riots and street fighting lasted five days and the uprising was one of the most destructive riots in U.S. history. U.S. President Johnson ordered thousands of army and National Guard troops into the city to mount what was, essentially, a block-by-block operation to regain control. At the end of the week, there were more than forty dead citizens, close to 500 reported injuries and over 7,000 arrests. The writer, John Hersey, uniquely documents the reasons for the insurrection and the event itself in his prize-winning book, The Algiers Motel Incident. Rumors continue to exist that U.S. fighter planes were seen flying over the city, either performing reconnaissance or actively searching for potential targets to strafe. In a scene that was inspired by these rumors from Ralph Bakshi's film version of R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat, the "camera" points to the sky during the riot scenes and one sees fighter planes soaring overhead, their roar growing louder as they come closer to the city streets.

As a friend of mine who was a nineteen-year-old living near the epicenter of the riot at the time put it: "I was thinking of going out to San Francisco and getting me some of the Summer of Love when I got my letter from Uncle Sam telling me to report for the army. I was trying to decide if I was going to do that when the riots started. After seeing all them police and army men with guns pointed at all of us black folk I decided that Vietnam might be safer for a black man than Detroit. So I signed up as soon as the curfew was ended." To emphasize the catastrophic nature of the Detroit uprising, there were also bloody African-American uprisings in several other U.S. cities and U.S. towns that summer including Boston, MA., Newark, NJ, Cairo, IL, Buffalo, NY, Memphis, TN, and Cambridge, MD. Yet, Detroit was the worst in terms of casualties and destruction.

Over in Vietnam, the U.S. war continued to expand. By summer's end, there were over 300,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. More than 11,000 U.S. troops and unreported numbers of Vietnamese died that year in the war. The number of U.S. deaths in 1967 was nearly double the number of U.S. deaths in the preceding year. In June, Muhammad Ali was convicted of draft evasion for refusing to be inducted into the service because of his opposition to the war. He joined thousands of other men with his refusal. At summer's end, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced the beginning of the construction of the McNamara Line--a network of 20,000 air-dropped listening devices, combined with 240,000,000 Gravel mine and 300,000,000 Button mines and 19,200 Sadeye cluster bombs laid just south of the DMZ between northern and southern Vietnam. The purpose of the line was to prevent unnoticed "intrusions" by northern Vietnamese troops. By October of 1967, polls showed that close to fifty per cent of U.S. residents considered Washington's involvement in the war to be a mistake.

The Summer of Love and the phenomenon it represented were many things. It was a media-contrived event and a human-created event picked up by the media. It was a mostly white-skinned phenomenon borrowed from many non-white skinned cultures. It was a rejection of the culture of war and the gray flannel suit and a celebration of eros. It was escapism and a new way of involvement. It was apolitical in the sense of having a party line and political in the sense that it challenged much of what the capitalist world stood for at the time. At its core, it was a spiritual movement with a chemical as one of its greatest sacraments. Like most spiritual movements, it was doomed to fail in its temporal goals. As its champions and adherents discovered when the authorities truly became threatened by the movement and the moneychangers saw the profits that they could make, love isn't all you need.

(Luv N' Haight is the title of a song on Sly and the Family Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On album).

Ron Jacobs is a writer, library worker and anti-imperialist. He is the author of The Way the Wind Blew:A History of the Weather Underground (Verso 1997) His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is now available at Amazon.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.