On Sunday, November 11, 2001, at 09:06 , Marty Jezer wrote:
> What's this, the gang of two or the gang of four has read Gitlin out of
> the
> movement; not that he'd care. But the movement never spoke with one
> voice,
> despite the efforts of those who believed it only spoke properly in
> their
> voice. Gitlin comes out of a similar experience as most veterans of the
> sixties and has always, to my mind, been thoughtful even if sometimes
> right
> or sometimes wrong. A movement that can't take criticism, much less
> read
> it, is already brain dead; a cadaver rather than a movement.
I guess this is a part of the problem I have had with the whole
PC-fication
of 'the movement' since the sixties. Ok, it was starting during the
sixties
when there was not a clearly defined canon as to who could define who was
in and who was out of 'the movement' - and as such it was as hard on the
left, the new left, and the right, to resolve who the BAD PEOPLE were who
had to be opposed - and has become even sillier since, with the rise of
the NewAndImprovedRight who still have their nagging doubts about the
liberal
trend amongst the Old Right....
People are still 'dealing' with the 2000 election - without wanting to
notice
that it boiled down to a horrendous fight by both major parties to seize
the middle ground. What if we are still not willing to deal with the fact
that in the main 'the sixties' really was the problem of Having a Baby
Boom
and the convolution of market oriented economy willing to re-invent
itself
with what ever was the fad of the moment for the younger generation,
and a
younger generation that was, as they are by definition, clueless gits
about
what it really takes to run a country, let alone a planet.
We can all go back and look at the classic vintage 'Wild in the Streets'
and
deride it as mere Bourgeoisie Capitalist Exploitation - or we can
deconstruct
it into all sorts of esoterica understandable only by the people who have
attended all of the correct 'in crowd' classes/seminars/WhatEver that
knows
how to speak this hip jive - or we can step back and wonder the simpler
wonder
about, how prepared were we to really be 'the best and the brightest'?
How
much of the catastrophe that has been the intervening years really is
just
the transition from the movies lowering the vote to the 16 year olds,
only
to have the ten year olds come along and wonder about 'the older
generation'
and take off in some other direction?
It some how came as a News Flash to the GenXer's when I dragged them off
to the 30th Anniversary of the Summer of Love, thrown in S.F. - that
yeah,
it really is all about not only throwing a good party, but figuring out
how to make a little something out of the deal. And as they started to
get
clued into the history - the Panther Party started out buying the little
red book in S.F. and hustling it at UC Bezerkley because those Suburban
kids had the money to PAY the extra. That the FSM really had been as
conservative an organization as it really was - not the sort of dope
smoking free love wild orgy that Governor Reagon would campaign on...
And the worst of all nightmares, that the Diggers Motto really was,
Create the world you describe.
nothing really all that radical - just like so many of the basic open
source code projects - you think its worth it, give it a shot, see what
you can do with it.
And yeah, if the success of selling the whole Sixties Experience hadn't
driven us to 'stadium rock' there would have been no good reason to get
'back to our roots' with the punk music movement, that like rock itself,
would have to go over to the U.K. and become a cool import, before it
would be do-able here in the states, ok, maybe marketable would be the
more accurate word....
What if the real problem with so much of the current game of who is in
and who is out of 'the movement' remains little more than a bad rewrite
of John Water's Hair Spray as the "Style Council" tries to figure out
who is really suppose to be cool and who is not?
Maybe the scary-ist part of the process has been the combined failures
not
merely of the Evil Empire of Communism, but the eternal nightmare chic of
the American Free Market System, as powerhouse players like Enron who
were
suppose to have bought their own president, wind up as buy out bait,
because the still unresolved process of when is regulation too much
regulation, and when is it what needs to be done.
No one seems to have had the one singular correct answer back in the
sixties, and
no amount of correct deconstruction of the correct implementation of
the correct party line has given anyone the majik wand ever since.
Hey - why not just dance?
Clearly we're not going to get on the Style Council....
ciao
drieux
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