dead revolution (‘summer of love’)
All the knee-jerk rotwanger bloggists are taking their cheap shots at the ‘boomers’ (read: ‘hippies’), because at this point, of course, it’s essentially a pseudo-journalistic freebie. I met some of my hippie era hippie friends a couple of years ago, and they’re all ‘professionals’, with emoluments and perks, as we say. But one or two of us have ridden the rock drill, and are still out here or in here, drilling on ther ock-face under the constant subterranean rain – or wherever it is that this cold subsists that we have not yet come in from. And some of us are breaking through. It’s not just a little light from a bore-hole, because no one’s out there trying to save us. So here we are trying to save the planet or the human race, or whatever the nonsense is; because every good rotwanger knows that we should pump and burn the oil just as fast as we can (because that’s how you make the most money, and money is god’s work) and the fact that every ten gallons puts 50 pounds of hydrocarbons in the air is a problem for god or the devil, and not something we need to worry about. Trust us: we have our reasons.
The key, of course is the 40th of the ‘summer of love’. Or maybe it’s the 50th of Kerouac’s On the Road. No matter. Kerouac, if you haven’t noticed, is a pure positive, according to the reviewers. But as for the cartoon summer, the rotwanger notices often don’t reach far enough to name the real ‘enemy’, those stoned-out, dayglow crazies in the parks and slums of ’Murika. And that was the real problem. At that point, the expressions or the products or whatever you want to call them were derivative and largely ephemeral. The music is still the only thing worth listening to on the radio – or in your private room for that matter. After the suits killed Jimi and Janis, by taking their bands away from them, they killed the music as well. Standard work for the well-dressed bureaucrat. The visuals are fun – warmed over art nouveau, in most cases, but still a kick to look at in a way – unless you’re old enough to remember the freedom they implied.
But the literature is largely throwaway. Most of the ‘hippie’ novels were so loose that they now look like newspaper pulped by the tide. The flavor is evanescence itself. But we were also suffering and intense. I read a rotwanger piece more than 20 years ago that said we almost had arevolution in the early 1970's, which is pure bullshit – there is no other word. You need more than 50 or 60 violent crazies – or even 600 – to produce a revolution. Maybe 98 per cent of the population wasn’t sitting infront of the TV scratching itself vigorously and saying, ‘what the hell…?’ But the bare-chested yippie crazies with their plastic M-16 replicas did have a substantial part of the population totally twisted with paranoia – a fact that they’ve made forcefully evident in subsequent politics. The little mindless rotwangers of today are the second and third generation progeny.
I have never been a political revolutionary. Never. But I was out at the farm practicing with the rifle. Because my neighbors had seen me with long hair, and I wanted them to know that I was prepared to defend myself. The crazies on both sides were creating an atmosphere. So when, after Kent State, ‘our’ plastic TV pseudo-hippie, pseudo-leaders decided they’d rather be stockbrokers, I could go back to my basic belief system – liberalism.
Liberalism is not ‘leftist’. Liberalism is not ‘tax and spend’. A liberal is someone who espouses personal liberty, the basis on which the constitutional structure of the United States is grounded. Liberalism is absolutely middle of the road in America. Anyone who isn’t a liberal should leave, because they don’t have a clue as to what this country is really about, and as long as they stay they are subsidizing the present aggressive drift toward tyranny with their paranoid suburban shuddering.
I have often thought the hippies were prophetic – not of a positive future, as many themselves supposed – but of the closing of society that was then in progress and has now been brought to fruition by the swarming, mindless little rotwangers. Forty years ago you could walk the halls of any college in America without being questioned. Many college and university libraries still had open stacks. You could walk into most newspaper editorial rooms. And often an editor would listen politely to your grievances or questions or articulated positions as long as you didn’t yell and scream or act like you were otherwise disturbed. Government buildings were open. I could go on and on. Today I expect a gathering of hippies would automatically get rousted. But ofcourse, we did get rousted, in the most insidious ways, by government moles and provocateurs. People have heard about the American IndianMovement and the Black Panthers, but they haven’t heard about the STP coalition, the Serve The People coalition, a small group of activists gathered perhaps half a mile from here. They were literally transformed into an actively revolutionary group by a government agent provocateur, who then turned them in. Innocent young people, caught up in the charismatic nature of the moment and the personalities did hard time in jail and had their lives radically distorted, if not ruined. And there is no telling how many small activist groups that originally intended to work for constitutionally sanctioned change wound up in the same situation in this country.
The communists won. The corporate communism that has conquered America by subversion and perversion from within is sucking the lifeblood of this country. No one can afford to be poor. Everyone has to work for the machine. And the machine is the only spiritual and cultural value, finally. And of course the true liberals look like wimps against the united front of political hypocrisy that the oligarchs can hire in the lock-step knee-jerk little rotwangers. A true liberal not only ‘believes’ in dialogue and compromise, a true liberal understands that there is no other process for legitimate democracy. But the oligarchs, since they only believe in money, can write whatever ‘policy line’ they need to present to win the vote, since they don’t believe in anything except money. Remember Nixon, the president whose entire career as a politician was based on criminal fraud and deceit? You do? But do you remember that he ran for the presidency on a platform of ‘law and order’?
But since the oligarchs only believe in money, they actually don’t believe in business. Or rather, they only believe in the business of credit. Over and over again, when the oligarchs – the so-called ‘conservatives’– get the political handle, they turn it into a credit crank, to crank up the credit. And of course the legitimate business people initially think they are getting a gift, because cheap credit is something of their holy grail. But the problem is that in an economy with an over-amped credit, the high profit is in credit turnover itself. And eventually the profitability of pure credit starts to devour the business base itself : first the manufacturing and then the commercial interests, because turning capital into credit becomes so much more profitable. But pure credit turnover is synonymous with ‘bubble’. Look back through the history, and notice how ‘conservatism’ (whatever that term actually means) inevitably precedes the bursted bubbles.
But the only way we can change this is if America – and that meansAmericans – can begin to find real spiritual and cultural values.Political revolutions now only produce blood, and the thugs always win. America was different because the colonies had already established fully functional independent governmental structures. Only the governors were sent out from England. So in effect, the American Revolution was simply a war of independence : functioning and established governments breaking away from what at that point was largely an imperial pretender.
And real spiritual and cultural values are not a dead dogma, either religious or political.
We’re doing our bit. Where the hell are you?
Hi Jt, Well done!
Lately I have been thinking about the nature of money and have tentatively distilled it down to mind versus heart. There are so many boundaries and barriers created by money. I suppose some are good...but it keeps people seperated, it keeps peoples motives twisted, it raises fear and insecurity, etc.
Accepting pain and suffering and ultimately death, as natural to life is an antidote to the money program....easier said than done, let death be a mystery that evades our vision with our heads in the sand...and the world is the sand... ram,ram,ram, ram, ram,ram,ram.
The solutions are there in the sharing...a people that doesn't take care of their own, can not be a free people, and a leader that doesn't care for the people is the worst kind of miscreant.
Anyway, thanks for the post!
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wanted to further note, that I very much appreciate your clarification about 'liberalism'....
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I am told I should identify my surrealist (or expressionist) nomenclature. I would refer the reader to Fritz Lang's Metropolis, although that bends half the fun of the pun (or perhaps a little less than a third). It's been so long since I've seen it, I wasn't sure it was precise, but a brief search suggests it is.
Obviously, I'm very tired of the little knee-jerk talking heads of that persuasion - if an empty attitude can be dignified with even the vague cogency implicit in that word.
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As a footnote, no breed of dogs was ever intended, directly or indirectly, as part of the pun. Rottweilers are too dignified and self-contained a dog to be subjected to such an odious inference.
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Just curious as to where this is coming from...very interesting comment, but seems there is a comment missing somewhere that instigated this response. Would you mind explaining?
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Yes, the thread went out of the blog. I got a note from upstairs, so to speak. I had some doubts about the accessibility of the reference, so when one whose opinion I value as much as yours questioned me, I decided for clarification. Hopefully not too arch or snide.
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