1962: The Dawn of Modern Pop Culture
In Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, James Piereson wrote that the enormous gap between the stated ideology of Lee Harvey Oswald, President Kennedy’s communist assassin, and the efforts of liberals to pin the blame on the American right* caused the cognitive dissonance that birthed today’s modern left. In the first volume of The Age of Reagan, Steven Hayward argued that it was the enormous gap between the stated utopian goals of Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s successor (simultaneously winning the moral equivalent of war on poverty and racism; winning another moral equivalent of war, the space race; and winning a real war in Vietnam), and the failure to achieve the majority of those efforts that caused the left to become cynical, angry and disillusioned. (Of course, the root causes proposed by Piereson and Hayward need not be exclusive to each other.)
Similarly, Charles Murray begins his recent book Coming Apart with a flashback to the culture of November 21st, 1963, to remind his readers how much life has changed since the day that JFK was assassinated. But as Terry Teachout writes in a must-read essay in the Wall Street Journal, the culture had already begun to shift before that momentous and tragic day. In retrospect, the changes in the American culture that we would eventually dub, in shorthand form, “the sixties” — more specifically, the late ’60s, even more specifically, 1968 — had already begun forming the year before Kennedy’s death:
Take a second glance at the guest list for Carson’s “Tonight Show” debut and you’ll note the unexpected presence of Mel Brooks, whose raucously, unabashedly vulgar movies would soon help to undermine Hollywood’s long-established sense of the appropriate. Nor was Mr. Brooks the only portent of things to come. Nineteen sixty-two was also the year when Bob Dylan cut his first album. Andy Warhol’s first solo show, an exhibition of Campbell’s Soup cans, opened in Los Angeles in 1962, and Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway. As dissimilar as these now-venerable objets d’art may seem to us now, they all had in common the iron determination of their creators to break decisively with the earnest, self-confident tone of postwar culture.
Nowhere is that collective break with the past more apparent than in the halting, drunken second-act monologue from “Virginia Woolf” that is spoken by George, a bitter college professor who has seen his youthful dreams of glory come to naught and now hates himself for ever having dreamed them in the first place: “You endeavor to make communicable sense out of natural order, morality out of the unnatural disorder of man’s mind…you make government and art, and realize that they are, must be, both the same…you bring things to the saddest of all points…to the point where there is something to lose…then all at once, through all the music, through all the sensible sounds of men building, attempting, comes the ‘Dies Irae.’ And what is it? What does the trumpet sound? Up yours.”
Yes, George’s monologue sounds unexceptionable today, but nobody had ever talked like that on a Broadway stage in 1962, nor had any American playwright engaged the attention of a popular audience by declaring that the values by which it lived were false. Then, 13 months after “Virginia Woolf” opened, Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy. Two months later, Mr. Dylan released his third album, “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” By then, few Americans were inclined to doubt the truth of his ominous warning that “the line it is drawn / The curse it is cast / The slow one now / Will later be fast.”
As Paul Mirengoff writes at Power Line, “If Teachout is correct about 1962, and I think he is, then we should question the familiar narrative that views baby boomers as the driving force behind the rise of the counterculture”:
Baby boomers were too young to drive cultural change in 1962, nor at that time did Mel Brooks, Edward Albee, and Andy Warhol have much appeal to boomers. Their appeal was to older generations, including portions of the one dubbed “the Greatest.”
Liberal boomers grabbing retroactive credit for pretty much everything – and I mean everything — that occurred in the 1960s (or at the least everything from their perspective that they consider “good”) was the subject of a memorable William Kristol column from 2007:
Q: If the World War II generation was the “greatest generation,” what is the Vietnam War generation?
A: I don’t think the full judgment of history is in yet. There is certainly greatness in the ’60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue.
–Tom Brokaw, interviewed in the November 19 U. S. News & World Report, on his new book, Boom! Voices of the Sixties.
Whoa! The ’60s generation changed our attitudes about race in America? Rosa Parks, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr.–were they from the Vietnam war generation? Earl Warren, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey? For that matter, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, murdered on June 21, 1964, in Mississippi? None of these was a member of the “ ’60s generation.” None was a boomer.
There really was greatness in the “greatest generation.” It fought and won World War II, then came home to achieve widespread prosperity and overcome segregation while seeing the Cold War through to a successful conclusion. But the greatest generation had one flaw, its greatest flaw, you might say: It begat the baby boomers.
The most prominent of the boomers spent their youth scorning those of their compatriots who fought communism, while moralizing and posturing at no cost to themselves. They went on to enjoy the benefits of their parents’ labors, sacrificed little, and produced nothing particularly notable. But the boomers were unparalleled when it came to self-glorification, a talent they began developing as teenagers and have continued to improve up to this day.
As Kristol wrote, liberal boomers were “also good at bamboozling their parents, and members of the ‘silent generation’ like Tom Brokaw, to be overly deferential to them–even to the point of giving them credit for things they didn’t do.”
in the 1960′s – via the “no nuke” movement and the peace movement, the kgb took over “the new left” shifting their focus from trying to control washington via moles to co-opting a generation.
these brainwashed postmodernists took over the academy – both college faculties and high school unions, and the media – via music, movies, and the “newsrooms”.
the rest is history.
Until we have a full account of the cultural work of the USSR in America, we won’t understand anything that happened in the 1960s. I attempted a beginning here: http://clarespark.com/2012/07/19/communist-ideas-go-mainstream/. Personally, I would go back to the 1920s, or even earlier, as many vanguard notions that were deeply anticapitalist began with the Progressive movement and its offensive against “the money power.”
And if you want to go back to the 1920s, you can go back earlier and look at what capitalism and industrialization had wrought: child labor and horrible working conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in the noughts. Vanderbilt and the monopoly railroaders with the farmers paid less or else see their harvests rotting.
In short, the conditions that spawned the labor movement.
And if the Greatest Generation was responsible for attacking segregation, who were they attacking? Other members of the GG. The George Wallaces and Strom Thurmonds, who realized that playing the race card got them re-elected. The Bull Conners. The people of Little Rock, including the boomers who taunted the teens trying to integrate the high school.
So what I’m saying is that generation divides cannot be so neatly subdivided as this essay suggests, and that there is value in liberal pushback against businesses that willingly exploit workers for profit. Unfortunately, they show a terrible record of being able to do anything about it. Just ask the GM workers who saw their pension benefits cut (and, in my neck of the woods, the former steel workers whose benefits were assumed by the govt after Arcor Mittel acquired the plant).
Finally, what we’re really seeing — in this age of widespread dissemination of information — is that effective government (and by that I mean institutions capable of enforcing its laws quickly and efficiently) does not scale up. Heck, sometimes (as in the cities) they don’t scale at all.
How does a business unfairly treat workers? Did a business go out and grab kids off the street? Did they commit kidnapping? Is that what you’re proposing?
There is no escaping the invisible hand, NO worker will work for less than they are worth (for very long anyways), or in conditions that are not acceptable, as long as there is rule of law. It is no more possible than a business to exploit workers (outside illegality) than it is a worker to exploit a business (unions, theft, laziness). These conditions can last for a short time but inevitably will change. For example the auto industry, unions have gamed the system for years, making far more than the skill they provide and now the industry is moving South and/or overseas.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/a-u-s-president-raised-on-kgb-propaganda/?singlepage=true
and in 999/1000 cases “poor conditions” situations are already improving before the lollygagging leviathan gets its tentacles involved
the libs hate the invisible hand
A labor union at Common Law is a criminal enterprise — a conspiracy to commit extortion. Of course, there’s not even a discussion that a strike is extortion. When wrong actions are not only de-criminalized, but made protected rights by law, then you have the terminal stage of societal devolution. Relations among people can be distinguished into two groups — those that work and those that fracture society’s framework and make living together impossible. Today no one society dominates the state. The power vacuum is being filled as we speak, although who will fill it is still in doubt. The former white/American society looks like death warmed over, but the African and Hispanic societies each lack the numbers needed to take control. Interesting days, but keep your passport handy.
Copernicus, Newton, and da Vinci persecuted and suppressed? What planet are you beaming from? Even Galileo was only prohibited from publishing his theories until he could offer proof that they were correct. The evil of the time wasn’t the Church, but the Enlightenment. An entire philosophy based upon the premise that man is born tabula rasa, without any instincts or proclivities, although obviously wrong to anyone who ever read history, much less got out of the house, this philosophy provided the foundation for all the utopias that followed. All being based on the belief that man’s nature could be manipulated at will by anyone who could control his environment. The french Revolution proved so successful at creating a “New Man” that the Communards, Comunists, Socialists, vegetarians, and Libertarians have been leaping from success to success ever since.Look up Lysenkoism for a good explanation of Leftism and environmentalism — the connection is crucial.
Clare,
Your comments show that you are making great efforts to research and understand the slow destruction of normal-America’s culture.
Your comment: “Until we have a full account of the cultural work of the USSR in America, we won’t understand anything that happened in the 1960s.”
Funnily enough, I”ve published the seminal work in this regard.
My book: Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness,
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0983426406/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=willinaccomp-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0983426406
provides the closest thing to “a full account of the cultural work of the USSR in America.”
What you’re calling “cultural work” is actually an intelligence operation the KGB called “Active Measures.” We call it covert action. One type of covert action is covert influence.
Willi Muenzenberg was the KGB’s covert influence (and propaganda) genius. He ran the operation, beginning in the 20s, designed to destroy normal-America. The culmination of his op was the emergence of full blown PC-Prog anti-American politics in the 80s.
Muenzenberg’s operation had two important facets. The first was the payload (see below), and the second was the creation of the PC-Prog attitude–membership in the Elite Vanguard, oh-so-smart, compassionate, caring, and just-better-than-you-moron-millions.
The payload was best expressed by Willi’s wife:
The hate-America-first payload, designed by the KGB’s master of covert influence, Willi Muenzenberg, was simple and direct:
You claim to be an independent-minded idealist.
You don’t really understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break.
You believe in open-mindedness.
You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here in our own country.
You’re frightened by the racism, by the oppression of the workingman.
You think the Russians are trying a great human experiment, and you hope it works.
You believe in peace.
You yearn for international understanding.
You hate fascism.
You think the capitalist system is corrupt.
Full details: http://willingaccomplices.com/willing_accomplices
I’d be happy to provide you with a review copy.
Thanks.
Kent Clizbe
The first Leftists were the Federalists, who staged their coup in Philadelphia. They had one goal, and that was to obtain the taxing power for the Federal Govt. Under the Articles, the Feds had to beg the States for every penny. God knows (well, we all know now) how many wonderul schemes for the general welfare that problem had caused to be side-tracked. Next csme the anti-white Radical Republicans, who were the protoypes for the Leftists to come at the turn of the 20th century. However, the vanguard of the Leftists arrived in the 30s as the Frankfurt School. They destroyed higher education in the US within 20 years. It’s all simple Gramscian Cultural Marxism. The only known treatment is to kill Gramsci.
I also believe there is a much more conspiratorial aspect to the cultural shift. I believe that is the reason the media smear machine came down on McCarthy the way they did. Once they had succeeded in destroying McCarthy, they knew the coast was clear to openly attack the culture, and if someone called them out on it, they could demonize them as a witch-hunting McCarthyite.
Relia,
You’re on the right track, you’re just off by about 40 years.
The KGB’s covert influence operation to destroy American exceptionalism began in the early 1920s. Willi Muenzenberg’s first influence operation was the Sacco and Vanzetti protests. He quickly realized that American “liberals” were ripe for the plucking. His ops penetrated to the heart of America’s cultural transmission belts–the media, education/academia, and Hollywood.
Full details: http://www.willingaccomplices.com
These operations came above ground in the 60s, after McCarthy and HUAC’s well-aimed shots across the bow in the 50s drove them underground.
And only in the 80s did the ops reach full flower–as the Politically Correct Progressive (PC-Progs) movement.
Ultimately, Muenzenberg and the KGB created Obama and his clique.
Kent Clizbe
kent@kentclizbe.com
Mr. Clizbe,
I was wondering if, in writing your book, you encountered a couple of points.
First, from Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism”: “Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries.”
Second, Ron Radosh describes in his book “Red Star Over Hollywood” how Dalton Trumbo (among others) was harshly criticized by his fellow Communists in an early version of political correctness. In a screenplay, he wrote that a Negro boy was “polished and dressed in his very best”. This was bad because this implied he was “clean only on special occasions”! This sort of thing was described by another Communist as a “witch hunt”.
you wrote:
These operations came above ground in the 60s, after McCarthy and HUAC’s well-aimed shots across the bow in the 50s drove them underground.
And only in the 80s did the ops reach full flower–as the Politically Correct Progressive (PC-Progs) movement.
I AGREE; THAT’S WHAT I WAS SAYING.
The liberal baby boomers gave us pet rocks and Disco. But boy they were good little followers.
Yes! the Boomers are just good followers. The helmsmen that turned the cultural ship were between the Greatest Gen and the Boomers. the men that didn’t go to war. Keruack, Bruce, Ferlinghetti . . . all my heroes in the 50′s, but for me, so was Dwight Eisenhower.
What went wrong was the badly raised Boomer gen slavering after the adult toys in the Great American Post War Victory Pigout we thought was economic expansion.
Image Media, as Driscoll points out, led the lemmings off the cliff with financing from the Soviet Disinformation Campaign, well documented by post 1990 defecters. Here’s what happened:
Image Media presents our mostly unwitting mass culture dreams. Freud had much wrong, but this he had right:
“dreams are the fulfillment of our wishes”. Hollywood, TV, Youtube and ubiquitous celvideos are unfolding the Boomer dream.
Boomers rule now. Run! The nightmare’s barely begun. Go Galt!
Not all of us boomers are idiot socialists though. Some of us had enough brains to wake up, and first join Reagan, and now the Tea party.
Some of us have been conservatives all the way along.
A look at two books from the preceeding years may be worthwhile: “Advise and Consent” by Allen Drury, and “Witness” by Whittaker Chambers.
I’m still wading through “Witness,” but the nihilistic rot running through modern culture has roots reaching back into the Teens and Twenties, as Chambers relates.
Drury wrote his book in 1959, and its movie adaptation appeared in 1962. It would also be the last time a bestselling book would receive such extensive literary honor.
“… roots reaching back into the Teens and Twenties …”
Very true.
Well said. The American 50s-60s radical opinion leaders (the fountain from which the boomer left flowed) might be the echo, post WWII, of what Western Europe suffered from the generation lost [whether killed or with its illusions destroyed] by The Great War. “Goodbye to All That” …..
THE FULL FRONTAL GRAMSCIAN ASSAULT ON OUR CULTURE REALLY DIDN’T GET GOING UNTIL THE 1960S, AND I THINK THAT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT.
KERRY AND OBAMA ARE THE FRUITS OF THAT SEEDING.
Drury wrote five sequels that further developed the themes in Advise and Consent. I recommend them all (although I remember thinking the last was a little weak).
Much of what came after the Kennedy assassination was bubbling under the surface for years prior to it, in certain selected areas of the country. It was just that, pre-November 22, 1963, there was a certain disconnect between the ideological left that had seen it’s momentum stalled in the U.S. during the 1950s, at the ‘beat generation’ which was actually a larger group of people rebelling against what was seen as post-World War II conformity (America had a bemused and mild disdain for the lifestyle, but it was apolitical enough to allow Max Shulman to use the image for laughs and make Bob Denver a star on “Dobie Gillis”).
It was the killing and Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam conflict that helped the left gain power within that group, under the guise of protesting the war, when the real problem was fear of the draft (had LBJ done in 1965 what Nixon did seven years later and instituted the volunteer Army, the anti-Vietnam movement would have likely look about like today’s flaccid anti-war efforts). But the other factor was the turf war JFK’s death created within the Democratic Party, and specifically the Kennedy cadre, which felt the presidency and its power had been stolen from them, possibly in some sort of Texas mafia conspiracy by the vice-president. Their desire to take back the White House led to the Kennedys’ alliances with the far left and basically gave it the opening to get back into the mainstream of Democratic Party politics they had been cast out of in the late 1940s.
So the seeds were there prior to 1962 and might have found some other outlet to germinate had JFK lived. But the left wouldn’t have gone through the front door in Hyannis Port to gain control of the party. If they had been agitating against John F. Kennedy in the mid-1960s over his Vietnam escalation, we would probably be talking about a far less liberal (if equally morally corrupt) legacy of the Kennedy clan today, because they would have seen groups like the SDS and other True Believers as their enemies, not as allies to help topple Lyndon Johnson or using as their long-term power base.
Excellent summary.
The issue of confidence in one’s civilization is very important, and we’re seeing the devastation wrought by the current lack of confidence. The British TV series “Civilisation” by the great art historian Kenneth Clark is very good about this. Clark mainly discusses Western art and culture from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Age. He doesn’t cover the post-World-War-II period much, but he talks about ideas that are very relevant.
To contrast the confident achievers of periods such as the Renaissance and Victorian Ages with the frauds of today is very striking.
One might add in the influence of Rock and roll music when the boomers were in their tweens and teens. Almost all the major rock and roll stars of the 50′s were born in and products of the 30′s.
Wow, the main thing that stands out from the Albee quote is how pedantic it sounds today. Guess you had to be there.
Yep.
I never saw the play or the movie, figuring it was probably a bore-fest.
When I hear somebody talking that way, I feel like spinning him around, kicking him in the butt, and saying, “Shut up and go away, you worthless crybaby!”
Well, George IS a college prof, so of course it will be pedantic and pompous. That’s part of the point of that speech.
If you make a list, you’ll find that most of the leading counterculture figures from the 60s were NOT Baby Boomers. The cultural, philosophical, political underpinnings for the counterculture were mostly provided by older people – members of the so-called “Lost” and “Silent” generations of the 10s, 20s and 30s. With their encouragement, Boomers adopted radical ideas and tried to live by them – with varying degrees of success. They were the Pied Pipers of the 60s; the Boomers were merely the rats.
It says something about the Boomers that today, they take credit for being the generation that changed everything, yet in the 60s, they were profoundly lost and willing to follow ANYONE except their parents to ANYWHERE except their parents’ world. A popular word back then was “guru.” Boomers followed real Indian gurus, drug gurus, sex gurus, music gurus, fashion gurus, and unclassifiable gurus like Charles Manson. If anyone personifies the darkside of the Boomers’ “achievement,” it’s Manson’s murderous “family.”
Manson was not, himself, a Boomer. He was born in 1934.
Boomers: Those who believe in nothing, will believe in anything!
Too old to be a Boomer, too young to really be a Silent/Beat – I consider myself to be the last of the Big-Band Generation (Thank You, Chuck Cecil).
Virtually all of the Chicago 7 also fell into that category. The left used the baby boom generation as a cudgel against the status quo, and were helped along by a sympathetic media, who spun the most liberal of the early boomers just reaching adulthood in the late 1960s as the voices of their generation as well as helping the protestors in explaining actions that would most likely get on TV. And it’s not a coincidence that the bright, wild colors of the Summer of Love and on into the early 70s showed up at the exact same time all three networks went to full color broadcasting — CBS, NBC and (to a lesser extent in their news division) ABC wanted colorful images to give to their viewers, and the anti-war left obliged, as the monochrome outfits of the Beat Generation (or even the circa 1964 Beatles) gave way to what would look the most eye-catching on that new $750 Zenith in the living room.
The signs of impending change look obvious in hindsight in 1962, because ’62 is as close as you can get to being before 1963. Some changes may have been inevitable with the boomer generation, but JFK’s murder gave the left the opening they needed, and they and the media of the day basically used the boomers in the same way Maureen Dowd used Cindy Sheehan, by ascribing some sort of Absolute Moral Authority to them and the youth culture, in order to legitimize what they sought to destroy.
Amen, Mr. Driscoll.
Murray: “the iron determination of their creators to break decisively with ….” One can easily add “whatever” to end that sentence.
The one common personal characteristic of their new world order was rebellion. Adolescent rebellion, carried into adulthood.
In retrospect, I can see the first flickerings of it in MAD magazine and the music of the late Fifties. Think Playboy and Peyton Place. Chuck Berry singing of his ding-a-ling. Titillation and rebellion, hand in hand. Rebellion which was, after all, not without a cause. Limits must be pushed slowly, slowly.
I am one of the last of the Silent Generation, son of a career Marine who enlisted two years before Pearl Harbor.
I hate everything the Liberal Boomers — aka the “Sixties Children” or the “Woodstock Generation” — say they stand for.
They stand for nothing except themselves. Coming into adulthood amidst indulgent plenty, all they wanted, and want, is more.
Then you’ll have to hate nearly every generation since about the 1880s. That’s when the Modernists start to take hold. The reaction of artists against the institutional schools (think Picasso and the impressionists, which were the punks and rappers of their day). The Dadaists and Surrealists. The free-verse poets. The musicians like Stravinsky and Stockhausen. The writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.
They all had the same goal: to tear down the institutions that channeled and censored artists to allow for more honest, more free forms of expression.
And, as technology changed, so did the forms those expressions took. Think Andy Warhol’s plastic mylar pillows, the electric guitar, the four-track record (hey Beatles!). Norman Mailer’s “fug” novel “The Naked and the Dead.”
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Take World War II and the vets who came home with various forms of what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. Even in a “Good War,” many of them probably wondered what the hell it was about and if it was worth it. Enough to have an impact on the culture.
And then Korea and Vietnam, where the goal was not to win, not to conquer, but to hold the line until … what?
Now we’re in the process of leaving Afghanistan, while at the same time committed to hanging on for another decade. Until … what?
This essay moans the lack of confidence in the culture. I submit that when we see institutions failing, when we see mendacious go not only unpunished, but celebrated, when we see immoral actions from our leaders with no consequences, what are we supposed to feel confident in?
Read this book for an excellent picture of what it was like to be a “foot soldier” of the ’60s, North and South, and of what it took to recover from those strange days:
http://www.amazon.com/Younger-Than-That-Now-Passage/dp/0553380486/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343136664&sr=8-1&keywords=Durstewitz
See also (though he’s kind of a leftie) Thomas Frank’s “The Conquest of Cool”.
The first session of the Second Vatican Council was held on October 11, 1962. Before Vatican II the pews in the Catholic Church I attended were packed for five masses every Sunday. Before the Council ended in 1965 the church had started to empty out.
I was there and was one of the first of the Baby Boomer Hippies. The whole counterculture was already there waiting for me when I found it at age 16. All of it created by “The Greatest Generation” and promoted by the mainstream press. My generation didn’t invent that, it was invented by older people and sold to us.
I learned about how much fun kids out in California were having with sex and drugs in the uber subversive Time & Life magazines. I learned it was cool to take LSD in a movie by Peter Fonda. Timothy Leary was born in 1920. I first heard of him by reading Time/Life in my parent’s living room. Rock & Roll music was promoted by the big record companies, movie houses, TV networks, and radio stations which were all run by “The Greatest Generation”. The Beatles, and most other big rock stars were introduced to the US on the Ed Sullivan Show. The original Hippies were the old Beatniks. Levi Strauss & Co made a fortune selling bell bottom jeans.
I was in Madison, WI during the 60s, I ate lunch in the Rathskeller many days, and the Commies leading all the war protests were all from “The Greatest Generation”. The place was crawling with older Commies and their young apprentices from the East Coast. Hippies were Libertarians without knowing it and found them laughable, but the college kids ate it up.
Looking back, I am convinced that the whole 60s Revolution, with the drugs, rock, feminism, ecology, and hatred for America was packaged and sold to the Boomers by members of “The Greatest Generation” who were counter culture intellectuals and outright Commies from the two coasts, particularly LA & New York.
I have to say in our defense, while we may have screwed up a lot, we did create the personal computing revolution, which saved the US economy when the smokestack industries were destroyed by the Unions and other Democrats, and gave the Right a way to communicate its ideas outside the LA/NY controlled media. The last part was accidental, but it wouldn’t have happened without the PC/Internet universe we created.
I also do not think “The Greatest Generation” did a very good job of parenting or teaching in schools, based upon my personal observation. Their values and ethics were good, but they seemed to be unable to transmit them to their children. As my kid would say, Epic Fail.
From beatnik to boomer was a rather smooth transition, with leftist radicals doing something that was brilliant tactically and morally bankrupt.
They hid.
Boomers are cowards at their core. They are Fabian Socialists or as one of the lead cowards calls himself and his mindless lemming followers, “small c communists”.
They are not “large C” or large anything, except ego and hubris. They indoctrinate through propaganda, lies, forgery, distortion…and then run behind the skirts of “protections” of a free society they wish to bring down.
If ever there was a more despicable, traitorous, treasonous, lying, sniveling generation…it was hopefully wiped out by disease or an asteroid and lost to history.
The “Boomer” is nothing if not contemptible. Obama is their nadir. A man of little substance and all form. A pre-fab perpetual candidate who does nothing, says little and acts a role, spouting dorm room platitudes and destroying from within, while hiding his true intentions.
Having first seized the communication vehicles, poisoned the information stream, built indoctrination farms out of secondary education and foisted upon us an entertainment industry so morally depraved and ethically starved that we get nothing but celluloid crapology infused in nearly every entrant into the “awardfest for narcissists”, prizes and trinkets for best traitor each year.
In a word, boomers…suck. Spoiled, arrogant without basis, intolerant, close-minded, treasonous.
I was born in this unfortunate period. It shames my country and debases our nation. Not everyone born in this period fell for the scam. Just about everyone engaged in mass dispensing of news, entertainment and education, however, is part of the worst generation. And, we are all the worse for it.
Personally, I’ve always rather enjoyed being the bulge in the python, and forcing everyone else to do it Our Way through sheer numerical superiority. A decade or two ago, some of the XYZ Generation types tried to put down our music by calling it “dinosaur music”. Guess what’s still being played, and guess what’s gone out of business / bankrupt trying to produce and flog said XYZ Generation tunes. I’m sort of wondering what’s causing your spittle-flecked self-hatred, but kindly keep me out of the swath of your pissy prissiness.
So your response to his long, but basically accurate treatise is “But, we have cool music and kids still like it!”?
Human history is jam-packed with vicious, contemptible, or simply unpleasant people who would agree wholeheartedly with your first sentence.
“Not everyone born in this period fell for the scam.”
Actually not many of us fell for it beyond our college-aged dalliances and those that did fall for it in the main got mugged by the reality of the ’70s stagflation and malaise as we were getting married, having kids, and trying to buy a house with almost 20% mortgage interest. The only way you could keep the dumbass ideas that floated around in the marajuana smoke of a college dorm room in ’69 was to go directly from school to a job in government, in the non-profit/interest group sector, or in media or entertainment. Outside those sectors the only Boomer-aged remainder of ’69 is with the bitter, divorced, or never married/gay women and the gay men who survived AIDS.
Obama, b.1961, is technically a Boomer, b. 1946 – 1964, but since he wasn’t really raised in America, he hardly counts as a Boomer. Oh, and I know it sucks, but you and all the young’uns are going to be working for us for some time to come.
Art, I will be spending my last year in my fifties from now until next summer.
We, the boomer generation…allowed the despicable radical left to dominate our information stream, to seize our national narrative, to treat our men and women in uniform with absolute disgrace, to indoctrinate our children…with barely a whimper in revolt.
It’s not merely that you and I …and many, many others were still loyal, honorable countrymen toward the nation…we (as a group, not as individuals) sat idly by and let this land of ours be disgraced by traitors. 2008 didn’t happen overnight, it started in 1968.
It was our collective silence that is the shame of it. We didn’t do enough to stop them. Many were peer pressured into saying nothing, doing nothing, defending nothing, standing for nothing.
To this day, the leftists do not make up the majority of this country, but they are the ones who have built everything the world thinks of us. They are always on offense with out national narrative and we are permanently on defense.
I’m not going to be around long enough to pay for what they have wrought, but pay we will. All of us. We already are paying. And, the price will steeply rise with another four years of small c communism in the pilot’s seat.
Somebody some place along the way said, “if you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you lack a heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re older, you lack a brain.” I’m not going to apologize for forcing Nixon out of office, being against the Vietnam war, smoking pot, and embracing birth control pills when I was young. I think for *you* to assume that no one in that age range has matured or changed since 1962 (or 1965 or 1966) is terribly pig-headed and blind on your part. Or maybe it’s just the latest easy way for one dyspeptic person to feel superior to a bunch of other people; i.e., all Boomers are awful, I am a Boomer and I am awful, but less awful than the rest of them because I recognize the awfulness of my cohort.
I simply do not believe that Boomers are mostly liberal now, because the people I see attending Tea Party rallies are mostly Boomers, like myself. They’re certainly not the airy-fairy little Occupy types. Can you *imagine* a Boomer being deranged enough to put up with that bullshit, after we already done did it in the Haight many many years ago?
I was born in the rural South in 1949 to an old, proud, and dirt poor family, dirt poor meaning we had dirt, but trying to continue to farm it meant we were poor, a kind of poor unimaginable today. I did have the benefit of a classically educated family, a long line of teachers, and I had the best education the South ever offered: National Defense Education Act money and Jim Crow schools, so the academic standards were very high. If you had an IQ over room temperature and any education and awareness by the ’60s you could not believe anything coming from lecturn, pulpit, or stump in The South, so by the time I started college in the fall of ’67 I was ripe for those ever so cool and tweedy leftist college professors. By the early ’70s I was your basic long-haired, dope-smoking, FM radio-listening liberal Democrat. It took me about ten years of Life 101 to get over it and I was pretty successful as a liberal Democrat, first in a hippy-trippy business in Atlanta and then going on to hold several fairly substantial positions in organized labor here in Alaska. But I saw through the shallowness, deceit, and corruption and also saw that the emerging leadership of the Democrats were nothing like the pretty much classic liberal leaning libertarian I was in those days. I’d been enough of a lefty in college that I recognized the Lenin and especially Trotsky and, later, Alinsky when I saw it; many didn’t and still don’t today.
I cast what turned out to be my last vote for a Democrat in ’82, and that vote was purely out of self-interest; I had left organized labor, was back in business for myself, and a friend in the Governor’s office is really handy in a state with a socialist economy. With the oil price crash of the mid-’80s accompanied by a divorce and custody of my kid, I needed more stability that private business in a faltering economy provided so I went to work for government; they get the money first here.
When I first started doing labor relations for the State of Alaska, the unions were pretty much old-time trade unions and even the white collar employee unions acted pretty much like the old boys though they were beginning to have ‘Boomer lefties in staff positions. My peers with the State at the upper level of the merit system, a level or two below the political appointees, were all ‘Boomers. We watched as the old-boys in organized labor were supplanted by younger and VERY radicalized ‘Boomer and slightly older leadership. When AFSCME took over our largest unit in ’88, it quickly became obvious that the National level staff they sent out to deal with us were out and out communists. Most of us were familiar with leftist strategy and tactics from the “protest” days, so we brushed up on our Lenin and especially Trotsky and Alinsky and spent the next almost twenty years sparring with them and I finished my career as a Republican political appointee that kept them all under contract and quietly off the streets for a whole gubernatorial term. My name is on the appearance line of hundreds of labor arbitrations and labor board hearings doing battle with leftist unions and actions that I initiated in arbitration or labor board hearings form the basis for most of the seminal labor law in my State, so it ain’t like I’ve stood idly by and “let” anybody do anything.
Wow, a little bitter there cfbleachers. I usually like and agree with your posts but you are a little off on the boomer generation. My generation was pushed into a nasty war that no one at the top had any intentions of winning. Then most of the veterans came home and raised families. So, cowards they were not.
Then a whole bunch of us boomers went out and helped Reagan get elected. Not the act of small c communists for sure. Whole bunches of us boomers battled our way through the terrible inflation of the late 70′s and early 80′s and were happy if we could get housing mortgages as low as 15% interest.
Sure, too many of us turned left and stayed that way and those individuals have way too much power in today’s politics and media. But the majority of us just lived our lives and began voting Republican and Libertarian in greater and greater numbers. Don’t believe me? Go to a Tea Party rally nearly anywhere. Lots of Boomers there.
Trying to tar us with a broad brush is just as wrong as ABC News trying to blame the Colorado shootings on the Tea Party.
You give a lot of credit to the Greatest Generation – yet obviously one thing they were not especially good at was parenting.
As for the culture of the early 60s, yes signs of the coming changes can be found – you mention several things from the “beatnik” years. I’ve recently started watching Mad Men (via Netflix) and have found it a jarring view on how different things were, even besides the nonstop smoking and drinking, attitudes towards blacks and jews, the treatment of women in the office and wives, etc, etc. What makes is jarring sit that it looks like the modern world. It would be easier to accept all of this in a far historical piece – you expect this in the middle ages, etc. The people shown in the 1960s only look like us. In terms of culture, it’s another world being depicted.
I don’t think MadMen is reflective of the greater culture, but it does reflect how the disease spread (and does today). Subtle cues that are placed in music, art and books. The classic case to me is Laugh-in, my mother wouldn’t let me watch it! Or “Love American Style”. They chose to define culture and trends and don’t reflect it. The same way homosexuality is treated today, as well as marriage.
I’d submit that the WWII generation’s parenting malpractice was a symptom of larger and broader problems. The vaunted mid-century American consensus was largely a function of that generation’s indiscriminate trust in top-down authority figures and “expert opinion”; it was the age of Dr. Spock, Robert Moses, and Bob MacNamara. One gets the impression that respect for authority had curdled into a complacent, misplaced reverence for it, one that cried out for skewering–though they certainly didn’t deserve the KIND of skewering their ill-raised children gave it.
Similarly, the age’s middlebrow culture seems bloated and fragile in a way that made it all too ripe for vulgar rejoinders. Under the surface complacency was a lack of cultural confidence waiting–almost begging–to be toppled. I’m pretty sure that even if confronted with their era’s equivalent of a Lenny Bruce or Beatles, the high Victorian, Restoration, or Gilded Age cultures wouldn’t have crumpled like a beer can under a tire.
In other words, I suspect that the Boomers and modern pop culture became so completely dominant because the preceding generation and culture had hollowed themselves out from the inside in many unacknowledged ways. So however much I detest the former, I feel very limited sympathy for the latter. They won a war, then in their fecklessness let decay so much of what they’d won. It didn’t have to be that way.
Le Cracquere: Do you know the book, “My Pilgrim’s Progress: Media Studies, 1950-1997″ by George W.S. Trow? I expect you’d find it illuminating (if occasionally maddening). Basically it’s an oblique, eccentric, but extremely telling explanation of how the America of 1950 “turned into” the America of 1997, and there’s nothing else like it. If you’re curious, here’s a link to an article about Trow & the book: http://www.nysun.com/arts/death-in-naples/49889/
Ed:
Somewhere in my garage, I have a copy of Os Guinness’s “The Dust of Death: The Sixties Counterculture and How It Changed America Forever.” It’s available on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/The-Dust-Death-Sixties-Counterculture/dp/089107788X/ref=la_B001ILOC6I_1_18?ie=UTF8&qid=1343146238&sr=1-18). He’s a L’Abri alum of some distinction, and this book deeply caught my attention. I hope you’ll pick up a copy, because he takes a smart-Christian look at the same phenomenon you’re discussing.
Beginning with 1962 is convenient editorially, in the service of a point, but to ignore the 1950s is foolishly wrong. It would be years till Mel Brooks put The Producers on the screen, but he’d been making people laugh all through the 50s as a writer. Elvis had been a far more powerful catalyst in 1955 for everything that’s followed. As for Dylan, his 1962 album is filled primarily with standard folk tunes that he didn’t write. Then there’s George and Martha in “Who’s Afraid…” George was a foul-mouthed character whose speech wasn’t meant to be persuasive; it was meant to illustrate and dramatize his own bitterness. He’s a bully (see: the dead son) and not to be admired.
How about the heavy handed nihilism of “Death Of A Salesman” 1949?
Gosh…What a complicated way to state the obvious: We boomers, the inheritors of the greatest power, wealth, and status of any group in the history of the world, were (and continue to be) SPOILED BRATS = A. I want what I want, and I want it now; B. I deserve it; C. It’s not fair; D. Give it to me!. I could go on.
But there is another, even more compelling, ingredient that must be added into the recipe of what formed the Boomer mentality: the inevitable development of the birth control pill. Nothing changed us like the pill!
You’ve expressed what I’ve believed for years, but I think there’s a logical question that follows: “Why were they allowed to become like this?”. As I recall (I was a teenager in the late 50′s), many parents (themselves relatively deprived children of the depression and the war) took pride in the material largesse they could lavish on their children. They didn’t say “no” because they didn’t have to — the highest material standard of living the world as ever known assured that they had a “right” to whatever they wanted materially. Then add birth control education/availability (especially the pill), and as the words of the song go you can “do what you wanna do, with whoever you want to do it to”.
I find looking at our own culture as the source of change rather than attributing it to some pernicious seeding from the outside (i.e., the KGB seed could only sprout in fertile ground, which is why it basically died except where it appealed to the frustrations of wanna-be elitists).
Re: comment #4, above. I have read that JFK really did not want to get embroiled in Vietnam, but given the anti-Communist fervor of the day, did not dare to say so, believing that it would cost him the election. Cognitive dissonance from the nominal author of “Profiles in Courage,” I’d say.
Really, the main dissonance is between the man of values and the man of politics, and the moral compromises that being a man of politics involves. OTOH, history has shown us that the Kennedys are no strangers to moral compromise.
What JFK would have done is forever an unknowable hypothetical. But the idea that he would have gotten out of Vietnam has been pushed by the Kennedy family and their supporters for years, yet many of them are the same people who thought Barack Obama would be out of Iraq and Afghanistan by 12:02 p.m. on 1/20/09, which turned out to be a tad off the mark. It’s a lot easier to say you’ll do something, or say with 20-20 hindsight that something would have been done, than it is to actually do it. Pulling out of Vietnam in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, running to the right of Nixon on foreign policy in 1960, and with Goldwater looming for JFK in 1964, means the president morphing ideologically into Teddy, circa 1974, wouldn’t have been so easy…
…which isn’t to say there wouldn’t have been an anti-war movement on the left badgering for withdrawal from Vietnam. The Port Huron conference and statement was in 1962 and it’s not like the left from the late 1940s ever really went away, they just laid low and/or were suffering from the exposures of their activities during the Roosevelt years.
So it’s questionable if JFK in 1964 would have felt the same as Teddy by the mid-70s — when he had become the official voice of the elected left — or even RFK in 1968, when he saw McCarthy expose LBJ’s weakness on the left side of the Democratic Party and decided to go for the prize (and Bobby’s assassination masked the fact that, had he lived and won the nomination, the fervor that had developed by the California primary and would have been a part of his campaign against Nixon would have resembled nothing so much as the 2008 Barack Obama campaign, the difference being the goal would have been to restore Camelot instead of installing the messiah). But if JFK had stayed in Vietman the left had ended up treating him as they treated LBJ, you never would have seen Bobby and then Teddy align with those same people and basically give them legitimacy to take over the Democratic Party (even if the idea of an alternate time line where Edward M. Kennedy is the Henry “Scoop” Jackson of the East Coast and his followers turn into early versions of the neocons is hard to fathom).
I agree with the view that we can only guess what he would have done in Vietnam. The Kennedy clan and sycophants have pushed the idea that he would have pulled out, but this is speculative, too.
What I think we do know is that Kennedy’s overseas adventures, the “Ich ben ein Berliner” comment notwithstanding, were mainly disastrous. He allowed the Bay of Pigs invasion to be launched prematurely (indeed, the conditions specified the plan may never have been met) and then failed to carry out the support needed. The Turkish/Cuban missiles crisis ended up a real “win” for the Soviets, with our agreeing to remove our missiles from Turkey and guaranteeing Cuban independence. His failed attempts to whack Castro are reasonably well known; who knows who else he and brother Bobby might have succeeded in having whacked. Then, when he encouraged the 1963 coup in S. Vietnam and allowed President Diem to be whacked, a multi-year period of absolute chaos in S. Vietnamese governance followed (indeed, real government stability didn’t really return until the elections of ’67 and ’68).
All of which may go the the idea that had he pulled us out of Vietnam, he simply would have screwed up in some other and perhaps even more destructive way.
Ther’s another name that had a great deal of influence on the upbringing of the Boomer generation. That wpuld be Dr. Benjamin Spock.
The ’50s involved a huge burst of affluence accompanied by enormous angst: Look up video of the Krushchev “shoe-banger” speech at the U.N. to see what I mean. These two factors induced a kind of schizophrenia that found expression in the ’60s, when young people (pre-boomers and boomers) were fighting a very nasty war (televised live for the first time) and prosecuting a riotous “anti-war” (sex — aided by the pill — drugs and rock ‘n’ roll) at the same time. I was a child playing by a stream near my suburban L.I. home in Ike’s America when I heard the news that Gary Powers had been shot down by the Russians. I wondered: Did this mean we should head for the bomb shelters?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Spock
Bio from wiki in case anyone is unfamiliar. Born in 1903, wrote his ubiquitous work on child-rearing in 1946.
Not to argue that any of the above is wrong, but the 1930s were the era of the New Deal, FDR, and the farthest left any administration was able to go in a single bound.
The 50s and 60s represented a social leftward shift, but much damage was done in the 30s and 40s.
Years ago, I was privileged to be at a poorly attended, given as it was in a basement classroom on the University of Rochester quadrangle in mid-winter, lecture by Christopher Lasch. Lasch disparaged the popular notion of describing history by decades. As an example, he rhetorically challenged the audience to find anything remotely similar between the years 1961 and 1969 and put to rest the fantasy of ‘the Sixties’. The alternative, real analysis of events, is a bit harder.
Although demographics are important, over-simplification into generations seems to be a similar trap. The child born in 1946 and the one born in 1964 saw different, if only incrementally, worlds.
Read William Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” published in 1955.
The groundwork had all been laid out at our best Universities way before ’62. The boomers did not invent the counterculture, they just took it out of the classroom.
The Boomer’s didn’t create Social Security, counter-culture, nihlism, socialism, nor did they start the cultural drift or any of the negative trends.
What they did was embrace, accelerate and magnify all of it.
US culture has always been something of a pendulum, swinging back and forth between slightly conservative and slighly liberal. Whenever things swung a little too far, maturity would reverse direction. Every generation in American history has inhereted problems from the ones that came before and were faced with the task of fixing their grandparent’s errors.
Boomers failure was they didn’t do that. Boomers never matured as a generation. They never learned to see past their noses. When the time came for them, as a generation coming of age and taking the reigns, to fix the problems they inherited, they refused. They did with civilization the same thing Jon Corzine did at MF Capital, they lied, cheated, cooked the books and used every lever of power they could get their grubby, greedy, selfish little hands on to cover up the problems long enough to get theirs and get out.
They didn’t originate the problems. They just doubled down on them. Social Security is the perfect example. FDRs generation – four generations prior to the Boomers – created this ultimately unsustainable ponzi scheme. Boomers happened to be in charge when it became obvious that it was going to fail and could be fixed with minimal pain, but they refused to do anything about it. They refused to make any hard decisions or make even the least sacrifice. By the time their cold dead fingers are pried off the levers of power, it’ll be far too late to fix it without tragic suffering somewhere. That’s their legacy – kicked every can down the road for someone else to deal with.
It is more useful to talk about individuals. Individuals make changes, not generations. Individuals are not representative of generations. Leaders like Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Branch Rickey and Martin Luther King worked upstream against the majority in their times.
The draft was the hidden engine.
Self-serving dislike needs to be clothed in lofty philosophy. Leftism is a variety store of arguments why one’s ego should not be messed with by sergeants.
The Civil War draft was corrupted by substitutes deserting. The flat rate for substitution was bad.
The WWI draft was corrupted by the politicians and the boards. Why, everyone knows that the factory will grind to a stop if the son of the owner, working at the loading dock, is drafted. Also, exempt occupations were established by Congress, such as bandage-rolling. What better place for a young scion to be, doing essential war work in the company of a herd of young ladies? Bandage rolling is unskilled work which could probably be done by a motivated monkey.
The WWII draft got warped. Lying to the draft board about essential work was very difficult because of new Department of Labor reference materials. We had the rotten draft exemptions for divinity school. There were so many that they could have ministered to the spiritual needs of an armed force of 20 million.
The Postwar draft got worse. The divinity exemption was retained and a lot more odd exemptions were added. Congressperson’s sons needed opportunity. It was the unseen fuel to the antinomial actions of the thinking classes.
The draft ended. Then the Department of Labor reference materials were eliminated by the White House, a catastrophic blow to any draft and to Social Security Disability.
A returned draft should be the Civil War draft, with an improvement. Your number is up, you go. Or, get a substitute who has at the very least your profile of health, education, physical and intellectual performance, and history (legal, etc.). What you pay your substitute is something for you and your substitute to work out. If your substitute disappears, you will take the place of the substitute.
Ever notice that the exemption for fathers of a number of kids is based on the presumption that winning the war will be a piece of cake?
FTA: ” caused the left to become cynical, angry and disillusioned.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The Left is Totalitarian, not grumpy in essence. The perceived cynicism, et. al. of the left is merely impatience at having their agenda blocked or delayed.
Around the turn of the century a hundred years ago radical movements such as anarchy and communism began to appear. By the 1920s they had converted a number of high-culture types such as author Sinclair Lewis. In the Depression of the 1930s few people went to college but among those who did go quite a few began to take Marxist ideas seriously. In the 1940s and ’50s they had begun moving up in mainstream institutions and popular culture; the McCarthy movement was an ultimately failed attempt to stop the trend. Once McCarthyism fell, the radicals of varying degree quickly gained control of mainstream cultural institutions. The Baby Boomers — the first large college-educated population — became their pupils and brought radical decadence to the masses.
Speaking as a Boomer, myself, I would say that our generation’s one great uniqueness is that we were the first Young Generation — the first generation whose childhood happened during the present rather than somewhere back in history. What makes today so peculiar is that this is the first time in history in which we could remember when old people were young. That never happened before.
What? I don’t get your point.
I read a funny, dystopian story about our future- where once again, in the end, the right mix of corruption, deceit, graft, and grandstanding saves the day.
It’s title was from a common phrase: “The TTCB”.
“Those Twentieth Century Bastards!”
Good article and topic. I’m pretty sure Christopher Hitchens wrote a long article about the credit wrongly heaped on the Boomers’ cultural contributions in Vanity Fair, maybe ten years ago. Might be worth checking out if there’s a way of digging it up.
My culture is based on underground counter cultural movies and TV shows that are hostile to, and enemies of , Western and American culture, and would be considered evil by the mainstream public. For example yesterday I watched the musical “Meet Me in Saint Louis ” and looked at a 1960′s Perry Mason show. Since these shows aren’t obscene, don’t have bloody extreme violence, and don’t advocate free sex, they are evil and hostile to all contemporary American values.
Allen Ginsberg ( June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) is ‘best known for his epic poem “Howl”, in which he celebrated his fellow “angel-headed hipsters” and harshly denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. This poem is one of the classic poems of the Beat Generation. The poem begins “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…”‘ (See Wikipedia.) This famous poem is a lie, since “the best minds of his generation” were among the brave men and women who fought in World War II. Ginsberg and his fellow hipsters – the Beat generation – had much to do with what happened in the 1960s.
Yep. The best minds of his generation helped put men on the moon. The ones dragging themselves through negro streets were the ancestors of OWS.
All these comments are very interesting and contribute to an overall understanding of why our world is as it is. But most appear to place the blame for where we are on the mistakes made by recent generations. But I would submit that human nature is a constant, and therefore, what are seen as mistakes are merely human beings responding to the conditions in which they were immersed at the time. The primary human quality that, to me, stands out is resistence to that which we view as limiting us individually and/or as a race. I think back to the middle ages when the church/state demanded and enforced conformity to what was passed off as Christian doctrine. And yet people like Copernicus, da Vinci, Newton, Galileo though persecuted and suppressed, ultimately prevailed. Technological advances such as the printing press, the mechanical clock, the compass and the incremental improvements to sailing ships gave humanity the ability to exponentially expand literacy, knowledge and to travel widely, thus further weakening the bonds of authoritarianism and expanding individualism. The same sort of progress continued into the industrial age when anyone with a modicum of mechanical ability could invent and become successful. But this began to change, when discovering something new became more and more difficult. As inventing something new demanded more than native ability. It demanded delving more and more into the complexities of science and required a level of, and the kind of intelligence that could thrive in a realm of abstraction and mathematics. Technology left the common man behind. The common man began to live at the mercy of the technocrat. Where were the opportunities to strike out against the limitations of his life? If he is no longer needed on the farm, then no longer needed in the factory, how does he make his mark? By attacking his other restraints. The ostensible source of his pain Capitalism, religion, the social fabric (common morality, the family, sexual taboos). Many choose careers in the basic institutions of society–education, media and government with the intention of using the power of those institutions to make the ultimate mark on society–to control the lives of others–to enslave. It’s no wonder that a large segment of the population of western nations no longer respect or care about rugged individualism. It’s thwarted at every turn by the success of prior generations. It’s smothered by the weight of past glory.
The paragraph is your friend. This swarm of undifferentiated letters is too hard to read. Must be my failing Boomer eyesight and impending dementia.
Well, at least it’s not long. Take a deep breath and try again.
Yes, what about Allen Ginsberg and the beat generation. Why were they beat? Because they had nowhere to go. They were beaten before they could even start. Life held no adventure, no potential for greatness. It had already been done. And they were too proud to settle for imitating the true pioneers. The only thing left for them, and for many today, was to drown their alienation in drugs, or in impotent protest. The movie, Rebel without a Cause, potrayed the sense of alienation and bitter resentment felt by many youth in the 50s. The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando as the nihilistic motorcycle gang leader famously replied to a girl’s question, “What are you rebelling against?” with “whadda ya got?” This is the heart and soul of the drug culture today.
As Kristol wrote, liberal boomers were “also good at bamboozling their parents, and members of the ‘silent generation’ like Tom Brokaw, to be overly deferential to them–even to the point of giving them credit for things they didn’t do.”
This was something I could not understand even as it was going on. As we boomers started throwing our weight around and wresting control of American institutions like education and the media, the existing power structure, our parents, teachers and other authority figures, just rolled over. Folded like a cheap suit. Even the mantra of the day (“never trust anyone over 30″) didn’t get much of a rise out of their hackles.
I’ve often wondered if this greatest generation after grappling with a Great Depression, fighting WWII and bringing up what would turn out to be the most spoiled, most entitled generation in American history just had had enough and couldn’t muster the inner resources for a large-scale generational struggle. And, after all, these were the people who raised and educated us. They had a genuine regard for us (I doubt they were “bamboozled” to the extent Kristol might think; our parents were wise to us far more than they let on to us at the time). We were smart; we were getting college educations; we would be successful. The future was in good hands. And they were weary of carrying the mantle.
In any event, they basically stood by while we trashed almost everything they had stood and fought for. It was interesting times and we still don’t know the full extent of the damage.
As I recall…… Vietnam became such a monumental screw-up, that it seemed as if the center could no longer hold. The wisdom of the domino theory went, “poof.” Kennedy and John followed fairly traditional responses to communist insurgencies, that seemed appropriate for a while, and then seemed so wrong, as it had gotten us into a no-win quagmire. Yes, there was an overreaction to “Tet<" but the reaction of not wanting to take heavy casualties in a far-off place against and outgunned, but not outgutted enemy seemed crazier and crazier. To protest the war became suddenly practical, as much as radical. When that political shift happened in the midst of all the rock and roll, drugs, and Age of Acquarius stuff, tectonic plates also shifted. It didn't take too long for boomers to realize via Altamont, a lot of bad trips, and the failure of the need to work to go "poof," that a lot of their/our fantasies were just that. People went in all directions including the neo-conservatism of Podhoretz and assorted other Neo-cons. The race and gender pieces really did change, though.
It was not the reaction which seemed crazier and crazier, but the fact that we were over there. It would be nice to have an edit function.
The emergence of women into college and the work force and commensurate athletic programs (just to give a smaller example) changed the culture. When I began teaching, there were one or two sports for the girls; by the time I retired there were many. The “values” that women bring to political culture tended to push us generally leftward, but then, we all know this.
Summing up his chapter on Tet, Victor Davis Hanson writes the following in “Carnage and Culture.” The whole book is a great read, by the way.
“The great, unsung tragedy of the antiwar movement was that its own lack of credibility, and fondness for hyperbole did as much to tarnish the hallowed Western tradition of open dissent and careful audit of military operations as did the worst excesses of the American military in Vietnam.”
You can see the same social changes by studying Kubrick alone: Lolita (1962), Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001 (1968), Clockwork Orange (1971).
If we accept ‘Clockwork’ for the satire that it is, then his next film Barry Lyndon (1975) should have been predictable. On the one hand it was a complete rejection of counterculture in form, yet also a criticism of strict societies and the absurdity of class. In the end, Barry spares Bullingdon by choice- not by conditioning as Alex endured, nor to appear as a hero like in Thackeray’s novel.
All great movies from Stanley.
Proud to be a Baby Boomer!! A few observations:
Aside from the tendency for some writers to castigate an entire generation with one swath of a very broad brush, this was a very exciting time to be alive. Up until the JKF assassination, anyway. I believe that what turned most baby boomers away from our culture was a feeling of deep betrayal. As a 10 year old in the 5th grade, I recall the awful feelings of betrayal and distrust I suddenly had when I saw the photo of the “magic bullet” in the news headlines. I knew, without a doubt, that I was being lied to. By everyone!! The media, the government, the “experts” we were supposed to trust to protect us! It was all a big game, a scam, and a lie!!
Add to that the sudden onslaught of leftist literature and teachings appearing everywhere. Margaret Murray O’Hare had succeeded in turning the First Amendment on its head, and now it was a prohibition against citizens free exercise rights and not a prohibition against government! It’s no wonder we escaped in the Beatles, the English Rock Invasion, drugs and promiscuity!!!
Thankfully, many of us realized the folly in this rebellion later on to again embrace the real values of family and freedom that we had been raised with. But now we’ve got quite a fight on our hands as the Leftist Basterds have taken over government and now behave as if we live by their permission, and not the other way around as was originally intended!
Other periods of change: Perhaps all contributed to referred to 1962 begin of “change?”
Movies – Then Talkies
Movie Star – Sexual Idols – Male and Female
Radio – Mass Nationwide Music Sensations
1919 – Women Vote
1920′s – Jazz — Veneration of “Wildness” and “Dancing – Charleston” “Self-Indulgence” “Fun! as Goal” “Breaking of Sexual Mores” (Women “Bob” hair)
Prohibition — Popular rejection and flaunting of breaking intrusive laws.
What’s the difference between a “BOBBY SOXER” and a “TEENAGER?”
James Dean – “Rebel Without A Cause” – Juvenile Delinquency
“The Wild Bunch” – Marlon Brando – sexy, likeable, villanous rebels
Arthur Miller’s – “Death of a Saleman” – American dream gone wrong
Tennessee Williams – “Glass Menagerie” – A critical look at motherhood
John Dewey’s educational theories, as presented in My Pedagogic Creed (1897), The School and Society (1900), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), Democracy and Education (1916) and Experience and Education (1938), continue to have a baleful influence on faculties of education and, accordingly, on schools and teachers. Dewey, though not wholly evil, maintained that schools are social institution wherein “democratic” social reform must begin.
Oops, “schools are social institutions”.
Greatest generation (WWII vets)
Least generation (boomers)