> on 03/22/2001 17:01, Carrol Cox at cbcox@ilstu.edu wrote:
[..]
> This has always been my nomination for the most offensive cliche in the
> English language. When, pray tell, did America ever have any innocence
> to lose?
>
> A book review in the (National) Guardian in '67 or '68 (I don't remember
> the book or the reviewer's name) began with (from memory) "Born in the
> blood of Indians, built on the bones of slaves, fattened on the riches
> of the entire world, the American experiment should be declared a
> failure and destroyed to make room for humanity."
>
> Carrol
I fear that these are equally cliche understandings about the world, and
both deserve the complete lack of respect that went into the failure to
do a reasonable analysis in the first place.
Half of the fun of watching the 'sixties bashers' run around and decry
the HORROR that all those 'liberals' brought about - is their equally
naive review of the whole process. So classically Agit-Prop as anything
that the 'red hordes' brought out.
It was amusing to watch the documentary on 'Dogma95' - the way too cool
new wave in cinema, that tips its hat to the artistic avante garde of
the 'sixties' - wrote some 'hard corp' "chastity rules" about how one
goes about 'really making films' - did their films, won awards, and
have opted to advocate that people should be at liberty to throw
away their rules. At least they 'learned' something about 'the sixties'
and the problems that come with both making rules, and whether or not
one is obliged to continue to defend them eternally. Or accept that
when one's own avante gardeness has become the cliche - to take the
other tack, and not print the legend, but to remember the humanity.
There is always going to be a 'gap' between the 'public myth' and
the underlying reality - since the 'public folklore' seeks to retain
only the parts of the public conscience that they find useful. The current
ongoing Jihaud between 'purist academic historians' and those meandering
around in the 'socio-cultural' relevance of 'folklore' is where we can
watch 'the professionals' try to deal with the 'air gap' - as well as
their inability to do any better a job at resolving how best to deal
with the cliche's of culture.
Show of hands kiddies - but how many folks really remember when the
hippies had their funeral for the whole Haight-Ashbury thing. Made
endemically ironic as the 'dot.commies' overran the south of market
section while the 'hippies' were trying to put on their 30th anniversary
of the summer of love - and the 'street people' were losing all of
their cheap living/working spaces to 'technoDweebs' who go to raves
and listen to 'trance' music....
The popular myth now is that america went into the last good war to fight
against the evils of anti-semiticism, only to find itself not too sure how
appropriate the 1947 movie "Gentleman's Agreement", with Gregory Peck, was
as the prequel to Black Like Me. But that way leads us into the sorts of
intellectual cognitive dissonance over such matters as 'the negro seaman
act' (1822 ) over and against say Connecticut's "Black Laws" of 1833 and
which was a 'true son of the south' and which was the land of those damn
carpet bagging yankee's. But would we really want to go mucking around in
the 'weakening of the abolitionist movement' that was brought about by the
question of the role of women then, or in the "sixties revival" that would
'finally' bring the matter squarely to the forefront that it should have
been the weather underground all along.
But do we really want to be impolite about the rank amatuer's in the whole
'sixties revolutionary fashion scene' - and their great dirth of knowledge
about how to be effective scab labor in a modern low intensity warfare
theory model? They were kids. They were living out their romantic
american age of innocence. Just like the current crop is working out
whether or not they are buying into the eternal bull market of the whole
new economy craze, and fashion risk.
In the last four years I have been ranting at 'the freaks' about,
"We left you a perfectly functioning drug culture,
what did you do with it?"
and the bright ones retort,
"But you didn't properly document the deliverable."
so another generation gets to figure out how they are going to learn
how 'free markets' really work as they try to wrap their head around
the digger's web page, and the NSA's release of their secure Linux OS,
because of the Gnu Public License requirements, while trying to
understand if 'stock options' as a core part of their compensation
packages will really 'pay the rent'....
And yeah, folks are correct, it's all whitey's fault - even if your
parent's didn't show up until after the fall of saigon, or the failure
of the Praha Spring, or that prelude to the last good war, or.... Those
people oughta pay for the complete failure of the correct age of american
innocence to be all that it could be....
Or maybe.....
Just maybe, things are never going to be simple. Godel's Incompleteness
theorum does lead to the church-turing hypothesis, and software geeks are
going to be selling patch kits to the Grand GodelianStringParser long after
the orignal generation of dweebs, who missed the summer of love, didn't
notice that we landed on the moon, dodged out on the whole vietnam
performance art schedule, but did get the first packets to flush between two
computers, are merely the great legends of our culture, and their pure age
of innocence has been surpassed by the arrival of the 'adults' into the
whole computer thing, with their stabalizing influence on the correct
economic theory.....
Street Hustler's, Pimps, Drug Pushers.....
Everybody relearns the old lessons:
Ass, gas or grass
no one rides for free
And like our glorious patriotic american forefathers before them,
understand that if you can get around puritanical parents to accomplish
what each new generation learns, and presumes is their own novelty,
getting around the british/establishment/corporate culture, is just
so much a walk in the park.
"A day cometh, and a day goeth,
and management has a new marketting slogan...."
Hey Kids, how about:
"Create the conditions you describe?"
ciao
drieux
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Mar 26 2001 - 20:16:08 EST