[Hope this comes through --via our 'old' system - tm]
Quite a few of these recent posts --the "generation-divided" discussion,
reflections on changes in
us over the years, New Left/ New Right, the discussion of 60s "revolution" and
nostalgic/
anti-nostalgic takes on the 60s-- touch on something I've been thinking a lot
about lately while
working on my book on "Framing the Sixties: Media Culture and the Eclipse of
Democracy" (or
something like that): namely, that generation is the wrong focal point for
understanding or
reconsidering the 60s, for three fundamental reasons: (1) Baby boomers (for
want of a better ID)
were all over the map in their politics during and since the 60s. Only a
fraction at any one point
--how large a fraction is obviously open to discussion-- could be called
"activists." There were
plenty of right-wingers, etc. around (as John Andrew's and Paul Lyons' work
demonstrates). (2)
Movements of the 60s, while containing a disproportionate (at least
numerically --might it not be
always so?) number of young people, nonetheless consisted of people of all
ages; at least this was
true of the civil rights and black power, women's, and antiwar movements; for
obvious reasons not
the student movement. (3) The Media culture consistently played up the youth
aspects of 60s
movements, again and again (cf. Gitlin's Whole World, for example), and to a
remarkable degree
the younger members of these movements (the "shock troops") responded to media
attention with
media-attracting behaviors as a vehicle for "getting the message across."
Media attention was
driven in good part by market considerations; thus the massive attention to
countercultural
accoutrements, which in turn helped to attract a largely apolitical,
second-wave of countercultural
'runaways.' These latter, media-hyped 60s behaviors, have been repeatedly and
consistently
hyped in the media as representative of something called "the Sixties"
(whether media folks have
done this for 60s-bashing propaganda purposes or for market-driven,
audience-attracting
purposes). Check out, for example, the ravings over the years of George Will,
or for that matter
the editorials of Time editor, Lance Morrow: it all boils down to a
generation. This, in turn, feeds
our own misconceptions (and, what, our self-importance?) that our generational
membership is so
important.
I would humbly suggest that this blinds us to what's really important, which
is the way the media
culture and the structural forces and elites it represents helped to deflect
(and repress) 60s
movements from a course that ultimately and radically challenged the
structures which today have
become only more pervasive and powerful (e.g., the market, most of all) --one
good example is
the deflection of a "freedom" orientation alive in both the New Left and New
Right (as John
Andrew rightly notes) into libertarianism rather than democracy; the former is
entirely compatible
with capitalism; the latter isn't (but more on that another day).
There's a brief discussion of generations in Stanley Aronowitz "The Death and
Rebirth of
American Radicalism," in which he refers to Ernst Bloch's argument that
'people inhabit different
worlds, or "nows" even as they exist in the same moment of absolute time." In
that sense there is
some meaning to generations, but not only "boomers" vs. "Gen-Xers" of typical
media fare, but the
differences that occurred between many people entering college in 1964, say,
as opposed to 1962
or 1968.....
I'd be interested in others' thoughts on all this....
Ted Morgan
================================
Department of Political Science
Maginnes Hall #9
Lehigh University
Bethlehem, PA 18015
epm2@lehigh.edu
phone: (610) 758-3345
fax: (610) 758-6554
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