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NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , JULY 2002
tempered by their own personal involvement in civil rights
in the American South, registering blacks to vote, marching
with blacks and sharing the violent reaction. The other major
influence was the Vietnam War which provided the ignition point
of youthful, mostly white rebellion and added hardened veterans
of the war to the largely college-oriented movement opposing it.
The veterans like the civil rights activists were experienced with
violence and capably reacted to attacks by police and state
militias attempting to quell the revolt against national policy.
The veterans who crossed political lines to oppose
the war that seasoned and repelled them became immersed
in leftist ideology although many did not approve of it. Yet
the political right had failed them, had inducted them into an
unholy war cloaked in righteous deceit; made them prisoners
of conscience. Whereas the early New Left had been inspired by
the civil rights movement and embraced liberation philosophies,
the veterans came into the antiwar movement angry and embit
tered. Most of the veterans had a limited focus that ultimately
was fatal to their campaign far short of its goal to end the war.
Similar to the the majority of New Left organizations, Vietnam
Veterans Against the War (WAW) was at first stimulated by
argument but eventually debate and disagreement degenerated
into quarreling animosities that broke the group apart. All that
survived were two mutually hostile splinter groups that orbited
a far and exotic fringe.
The U.S. government's most powerful counterstroke
was to virtually end the military draft which almost immediately
diffused the rebellion. Draft age males assured of avoiding
combat service lost interest in the immorality of the war and also
stopped thinking and talking about ideas and issues that grew
from the war. Only diehards and incurable idealists persisted
against the new wave of apathy, driven by hopeful or grim
visions. The New Left dissipated into a pabulum of New Age
kitsch.
There were always contradictions among the counter
cultures of the 1960s: hip culture chasing a buck in contrast to
politicized hippies who wanted to abolish wealth; nirvana seek
ing acid heads versus hardcore speed freaks and junkies; but
everybody was against and in fear of the cops. The flower power
dream of transcending materialism with goodwill failed but not
before it seeded the environmental movement and made ideas
about pacifism, justice and equality respectable. The most far-
reaching legacy of the inspired and self-indulgent 1960s is the
women's movement. The lingering problem, however, is that
the fun-seeking nation adopted the sex, drug and party habits
of the young boomers but not the philosophies or politics.
Young Ben Braddock, as portrayed by Dustin Hoffman
in the film version of The Graduate (written by Charles Webb)
spoke for a disillusioned generation of Baby Boomers in early
maturity when he said, "I don't know what I am, Dad, and I don't
particularly care." Later that spiritual emptiness would gorge on
frenzied materialism, but for a short period a large number of
primarily affluent young Americans attempted to combat cultural
nihilism with experiments toward a moral republic which was to
be lightly governed for the benefit of all persons by intelligent
goodwill.
Some among the large restless tribe that worshipped
the image of eternal youth never got much older, swept up in
the war that everyone seemed powerless to stop. A few endured
jail to avoid the war or sought exile in other countries. Others
resisted the war and defiantly braved guns, clubs and disabling
chemicals of police and national guardsmen, many of whom
enlisted in state militias to avoid service in the war. The drugs
that opened the minds of thousands of alienated children seared
them to ash in subsequent years.
Although the Baby Boom generation temporarily
repudiated the corrupt leadership and incessant greed of the
nation, rapidly germinating (and degenerating) dizzily heady
ideologies and social solutions, it grew increasingly fond of the
riches it had previously loathed Most softened their resistance
to the 7-11 values of their culture as they grew older. Communal
patterns and politics were abandoned; business networking
among the former rebels replaced communalism The happily
CHILDREN OF SATAN
I am left handed, which is easier to be than in the past.
Catholic nuns vigorously attempted to make me right handed
when I started school and accused me of being a son of Satan
when I refused.
I don't know why most people are righthanded. Because
they are the right hand is the hand of sustenance and labor, and
the vile left hand began its evil reputation in ancient times when
it was used to clean away the body’s excrement. Thus from
antiquity has developed a sophisticated aversion to the left side
of things. Prejudice against people who are left handed predates
more familiar bigotries of race, religion, nationality, gender and
homophobia. In every culture before record, all that is good and
righteous has been accorded the right hand, while everything
evil, ugly, wrongheaded or simply bad luck is the left.
In politics as well as society a crude bicameral cleft is
made between right and left. The established order that resists
change is the political (and cultural) Right which usually defends
itself with tradition, religion and autocratic power. The political
Left is the force of change and reform that calls upon the future
instead of the past and explores new ideas and innovative social
and political approaches to greater freedom and well being of
the common citizenry. Left is about justice, not privilege.
The Left is the opposition; once in power it automatically
reverts to the right.
The oldest struggle after survival is for freedom, of
being a part of a community, not enslaved by it — the eternal
pitiless struggle between haves and have-nots, the despairing
rage of those condemned to live bitterly wretched lives in the
shadows and as menials to the economically and politically
aristocratic elite who are in their turn angrily terrified by this
rage.
History shrieks with the pain of injustice, only briefly
muffled by excesses of gross brutality. Sometimes the
oppressed overthrow or forcibly reform their lords and bosses,
but elites always rise in even the most originally classless
societies. If the American Revolution is accepted as more
than a revolt of colonial bourgeoisie and that it gave birth to
an essentially egalitarian society in which the common citizenry
had a chance to be their own rulers, it should also be realized
that every reform has been bitterly and often bloodily fought
and adopted only with great reluctance. Reforms that have
been adopted are usually countered with vicious backlash.
For all the problems western democracies have had
with communism and socialism (words that mean community
and society when stripped of ideological abstraction), the ideas
at their roots grew as alternatives to rapid industrialization in the
19th century, demanding in philosophy if not practice more than
servitude for the mushrooming working classes as their share
for producing the technological revolution throughout Western
Europe and North America. Fascism (and Nazism) is an
extreme rightwing reaction to these “leftist" heresies of class
(i.e., social and political) parity. That communist and socialist
societies generally become totalitarian states of the political right
should not repudiate the underlying perception shared with the
democracies, themselves flawed and corrupt, that there is
enough for everyone and everyone is equal under law.
Reform, resistance and rebellion to contemporary rule
in the United States has since at least the Russian Revolution
been called by assaulted authority “leftist,” a sinister (from Latin
sinis meaning 'left' or 'unlucky') hint at Bolshevik conspiracy;
a suspicion of alien agents or homegrown dupes of foreign
strategies to destroy the American Way of Life operating within
its very heart. In other words, dissent and resistance to authority
and/or injustice in this land of liberty and justice is implied to be
treachery.
Perhaps because of ancient and immediate hostility
toward left handed people, we are usually supporters of under
dogs and outcasts and feel personally sympathetic to ideals
of personal and political liberty. Left handed people share with
women and minority races and religions (not to mention people
with physical and mental handicaps) the problems of survival
in a world designed with no consideration for their presence in
it, or much worse, designed to eradicate their presence.
GODFATHER’S BOOKS
AND ESPRESSO BAR
Audio Book Salts & Rentals * Cards * Pastries
Incense * Occult i Metaphysical * Lattes i Literature
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Phone: (503) 325-8143
acquisitive, workaholic, well-dined yuppie metamorphed from
the angst-riven flower child hippie who thought universal love
and open sex would make the world a better place. Yuppies
contortedly justified their pursuit of wealth and status as fully
compatible with their lingering sympathies for social justice.
Now the Baby Boomers who made so much trouble to
their families and their country while they were growing up are
as old or older than their parents a generation ago.The war that
traumatized their vulnerable youth is long over (although its
residue continues to disturb amnesia). The psychopathic cold
war they grew up with ended abruptly with the collapse and
disintegration of the Russian communist empire. The Summer
of Love was the generation’s iridescent mirage, the watershed of
its vanished youth. They were born after World War 2 and their
memories don't include the daily sounds of bombers and bombs
that tormented and killed children all over the world a few years
earlier; yet their continuing angst is a legacy of their parents' war
— they were born under the sign of the mushroom cloud. More
than their rebellion against prosperity and its flaccid corruption
of spirit, their dread of nuclear holocaust defined their passion
ate protest against the Vietnam War; more even than personal
fears of young males they would be drafted into it. This first
nuclear generation (also the first TV generation) felt a shared
stake in the future, and apart from hype and herd instinct they
tried to be kind to one another. They are so large a generation
they crash through history as irresistibly as fire, remaking every
thing they sweep past. They are so accustomed to the attention
of society (particularly its merchants) they believe they are the
force of history itself.
- michael M c C usker
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