On Tuesday, December 11, 2001, at 07:24 , William Mandel wrote:
> Drieux: That's a very fine response. Bill Mandel
[..]
If there is a 'sin of the left' - or more particularly, of the
'new left' - from the sixties it is the Naivete that they and
they alone define(d) 'the movement'.
The Split between the 'psychedelic Freaks' in SF and the PolitBuro
over in BeZerkley, from the Radial Afro-Americanism shilling Mao's
little red book to both of them, should have been a heads up to
more folks that IF we are going to defend 'cultural diversity' not
merely in GooseSteppingPartyPractice, then its going to take some
hard work and real compromise.
I use the illustrations from my own brief life, and the amusement
that the second time around, the 'freaks' are still basically as
fuzzy as they ever were. Today they have the same condecension, that
comes with the lack of life experience, that allows them to be happy
about things like 'trance' - where we have overly electronicized music
that still allows 'uncle' to sit in on with his Sitar - blithely unaware
that their day is coming. When they will turn around and FREAK the
younger generation, by being able to speak competently to the new
'music' based upon the same solid generalizable principles, that really
it has always been about 'boy meets girl' - or the more abstract case of
"gender-affectional-preferenced-persons-appropriately-encountering:arg1
:arg2 :argVlist"
or how some ever the kiddies will be doing that then.
There will still be the debate about 'free world' v. TheyThemThoseOthers
and the vacuousness of language used merely as markettingShortHand from
context and content free grammars. There will be the stirring debates about
when where and how one should escalate from one stage to the next, and
what constitutes the need to take up arms, and in some shakespeareanesque,
or IdeologicallyNeutralPoeticSystemImplementorModality, or forebear the
slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune...
And new generations will re-invent the correct extension to the Wheel as
the alternative to the current socio-cultural malaise generated by the
last failure of the Luddites to prevent Technology....
How not at all ironic, the number of former 'radical activists' who wound
up with some equivolency of 'programmer' as their 'final gig' before dying,
that they waxed their surfboard and went out one last time to 'the new
frontier' to make a new start of it all, in that most american of ways,
becoming the 'manifest destiny' of the 'new jerusalem' upon the hill as
a beacon of Hope to 'the old world'....
perchance the core crisis of the Sixties has been the usual process of
ossification where the title meant more than the substance. But in a
land where one branch of congress is investigating the Collapse of Enron,
and the myriad of unresolved psycho-political-crisises meander like lost
kittens through the SEC, Labor, Justice, and the other branches of the
Administration - at times commented upon by those who had once trumpetted
them as the New Wave, The New New Age, the Hippest of the Hip - we find
congress, and america, undisturbed by the end of the 401(k) monies that
labor lost, and are going to get a chance to do the same with the whole
of the Social Security System....
Maybe the whole Naivete about history is not so much a 'sixties thing'
as just a part of the american way of doing things...
So should we scare them with the Actual Elements of the History? Or leave
them to resolve for themselves that which they will? To find them all,
irregardless of politics and pieties about Imperialism,
"Placing it all on one chance of Pitch and Toss...."
ciao
drieux
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