Here’s the Thing About Revolutions — You Can Take Them Back
In Andrew Klavan’s latest post, on “The Left’s Con Man Logic,” one of the cons he notes is the left’s selective utterance of the phrase, “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” As Andrew writes:
The Wall Street Journal this weekend had two writers of opposing opinions address the question: Has the sexual revolution been good for women? The feminist who answered yes began her argument with this masterpiece of disingenuousness: “Here’s the thing about revolutions — you can’t take them back….If you feel that the sexual revolution destroyed the American family by giving women power over their reproductive choices, and that power turned daughters and wives… into a bunch of wanton hussies, well, stew over your feelings all you want, but you might as well give up thinking that it is possible to herd us up and drive us back into the kitchen….”
Do lefties really fall for garbage like that? Why? Everything about that argument is meant to make you stop thinking. I need hardly point out that the relative chastity of the Victorian era in Britain followed the relative promiscuity of the Restoration period and was in turn followed by the roaring twenties which were followed by the fifties — so that, while, yes, there’s no going back, one can always go forward in a new direction. Nor need I point out that some of us who feel the Sexual Revolution hurt women may have our fellow creatures’ good at heart. The only thing you really need to know is that the writer is trying to obscure, not illuminate, the situation. That alone should make you start asking questions.
Like this one: Are you stupid… or what?
Beyond the example of promiscuity waxing and waning that Andrew mentions, hasn’t the entire mission of the Left been one attempt after another to either “take back” a revolution, or put the toothpaste of civilization back into the tube — or both? In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche declared God is Dead — and Time magazine would take their own whack at Him 84 years later, just for good measure. During the same period that Nietzsche was upending religion, Karl Marx rifled through the millenia of experimentation and accumulated wisdom that made up commerce and the marketplace, called it “capitalism,” and declared it similarly dead. (It certainly would be, wherever Marx’s ideas were implemented.) In the 1920s, the Bauhaus in Germany and Le Corbusier in France decided that a millenia of accumulated wisdom in architecture could be swept aside to “Start From Zero” — and Corbusier believed Paris as a whole could be swept aside to Start From Zero — a decade later, Albert Speer and his chief patron entertained similar notions about Berlin. Likewise, in the 1950s, American urban planners, explicitly following Corbusier’s lead, would bulldoze whole neighborhoods in the name of “urban renewal,” which proved ultimately disastrous. In the 1930s, FDR and the New Dealers thought that the American Revolution, which gave birth to the most laissez-faire federal government ever known to man could be yoked under an endless alphabet soup of agencies and stifling regulations. Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s, which sought to judge a man by the content of his character rather than the color of skin has been upended by the left into tribalization based on skin color, and in academia, a de facto return to Separate But Equal.
What is environmentalism (which Andrew addresses earlier in his post) but staring down the freedom that the Industrial Revolution brought to the American middle class, including comfortable homes in suburbia, electric light, cars and planes to transport them everywhere, and endless information and entertainment at the press of a button, and taking it all back in the form of higher energy prices, even more regulation, less reliable energy generation systems, and the overall ennui that the true believers of global warming want to foist upon all of us?
No wonder the MSM and the left (but I repeat myself) wadded their panties into such a tight bunch when the Tea Party emerged — they know better than anyone that while it’s not easy, how entirely possible it is to reshape society and how fragile their own hold on power could ultimately be.
Related: At the Tatler, Robert Wargas spots a writer at the far left New York Review of Books railing against the failures of the American education system in a similar — if screedier — fashion as Woody Allen shouting about New York City’s downhill slide in the ’60s and ’70s, without stopping to consider that in both cases, it’s his ideological brethren that controls the terrain. As David Solway adds, “The decline of education, which means also the fading out of historical memory and the dimming of literate curiosity, has been the case for some considerable time now. The insistent question is: how does one go about trying to rescue a culture in the throes of custodial dissolution?”
Update: Related thoughts from Kathy Shaidle.
More: From the comments, “As people living in today’s progressive utopias like Cuba or North Korea might ask, ‘What’s toothpaste?’”
In all fairness to King, he did not mean nor did anyone close to him believe he meant a color-blind society. He simply wanted an end to discrimination against Blacks. He felt it was fine to discriminate in favor of Whites. As he put it in “Why We Can’t Wait” : “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.” Source here.
John Lewis, Jessie Jackson, Andrew Young, Joseph Lowery, all were intimate associates of King and all assert King never intended a color-blind society. Rather one in which past centuries of discrimination against Blacks would be matched by centuries of discrimination against Whites.
The one thing you can say about Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan, is that they are consistent with that part of King’s message and ideology. Where King differed was in endorsing non-violence, as a political tool, to move Northern Whites who he knew well from his days at Boston University.
A quibble I know. But there it is. King’s failure, as a political leader, was assuming he and his heirs could push this system forever. It breaks down as Whites decline, Blacks are less than perfect saintly victims, and economic hard times linger.
The biggest rebuke of the arrow of history going only one way, particularly with the sexual revolution, is Islam. Islam will “dominate” as they say, and force European women to adhere to stringent modesty codes. As Mark Steyn points out, women at the University of Cairo wore modern clothing, no veils, in 1973. By 1993 they were all in chadors.
“Beyond the example of promiscuity waxing and waning that Andrew mentions, hasn’t the entire mission of the Left been one attempt after another to either “take back” a revolution, or put the toothpaste of civilization back into the tube — or both? In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche declared G-d is Dead . . .”
Actually, Nietzsche was trying to go forward in a new direction as his works focused on trying to get the Nihilists to believe in something again.
He was in fact quite anti-Left, viewing them as little more than Nihilists with some vague, residual direction, expressions of the Last Man.
And let us remember just who Nietzsche blamed for that death as well.
One of the disadvantages our current society has is the inability to forget through time. In the past it was easier for society to put the toothpaste back in the tube, because we didn’t have audio and color video images of those past times for the nostalgic bitter clingers to hang on to (and it may just be coincidental that the left’s Year Zero — the period we can absolutley not rewind any societal norms past less we turn ino some troglodyte fascist land — is roughly the 1967-70 period, which also coincides with the advent of widespread color TV programming and color film/video archiving).
James Lileks made the point a couple of weeks ago that 1967′s “Summer of Love” is as chronologically current to 2012 as the start of the Roaring ’20s was to 1967. But we didn’t have people still going around dressed in bowler hats or women gussied up to look like flappers in ’67. We do have people in 2012 who still want to look and act like they’re headed for Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock or (in the OWSers case) the Chicago DNC convention to teach that LBJ a lesson.
The left can cling to the changes and actions of the late 1960s, no matter how wrong those changes turned out to be, because technology helps them push the delusion that everything the left did then is as cutting edge now as it was 45 years ago, because those images remain vivid, and are not just preserved on some stereoscopic image, Victrola record or grainy silent black & white film.
Actually; that adage is out of date.
Back when Toothpaste Tubes were made of a metal material the collaps was somewhat permanant.
Now, however, with the new plastic materials, you can manipulate the tube and its contents to create a vacuum and pull expended toothpaste back into the tube.
Thus the woman is not only wrong, she’s out of date as well.
“that power turned daughters and wives… into a bunch of wanton hussies”…”herd us up and drive us back into the kitchen”
One interesting aspect of Progressives is that they only argue in extremes. Women must be either totally without inhibitions and with all power, or they must be slaves in the kitchen. Blacks must either rule over the rest of society, or be slaves. We must either totally convert to “green” energy sources, or die in our radioactive waste products. We cannot accept anarchy so we must accept tyranny. Any sort of balance, any reasoned course that weighs responses and takes into account side effects is anathema to them.
Conservatism, on the other hand, is all about choosing the best course. Not necessarily the middle course, but balancing the extremes and looking for the best course between Charybdis and Scylla. We do not seek to enslave women, or be enslaved by them, but we do recognize the importance to society of the traditional family structure and the proper roles of men and women in it. We seek to neither enslave nor glorify and particular ethnic group, but demand that they all behave in a civilized fashion (literally: that manner necessary for survival in a city). We realize that a reasonable standard of living requires a certain amount of energy, that the world will not come to an end if its generation produces a certain amount of pollution, and that the engineers will usually come up with something better in a few years anyway. We recognize that neither tyranny nor anarchy is acceptable and that since humans are flawed (and given the other vagaries of human nature) the best we can hope for is a balance that requires constant maintenance.
I’m trapped in a Toothpaste Factory and I can’t get out. But I can report that these machines they got, capital investment I think they call it, put the toothpaste in the tubes, over and over without fail, 24/7. Anyone that claims you can’t put toothpaste into a tube with a machine built to do that, just does not know what they are talking about.
Point is: If you can’t get the paste back into the tube after it was used, then: Mirabile Dictu! Just start with a new tube. We are human beings. We can do anything we set our hearts and minds to do. At least that has been our experience.
Or, as people living in today’s progressive utopias like Cuba or North Korea might ask, “What’s toothpaste?”
Heh.
“they [MSM/left]know better than anyone…how fragile their own hold on power could ultimately be.”
Why the doubt? — there’s no maybe about it. Of course the hold is fragile. A few well-placed pushes and they all fall down. Too many conservatives lack imagination and, often, the courage of their convictions.
Of course the toothepaste can be put back in the tube. We went to the moon with the equivalence of a 70s era pocket calculator, putting toothepaste back into tubes just requires a little thought, ingenuity, creativity, and perspiration. Wait, I just solved it, you just use the machine that puts toothepaste into tubes in the first place, that’s pretty much solved, Duh.