60's Counterculture: Through a Bong, Darkly

[NeonLX]

Chevy II > Hyundai Elantra

Dianna Ross > Beyonce

Walking down the street getting stoned > Walking down the street yammering on the cellphone.

[MacCruiskeen]

At least the (cable) TV is better.

I'd say that's no accident, Jack. TV's a more profitable drug than acid and heroin combined, and these days it's spoonfed legally to children, who soon learn to feed themselves.

It's highly educational, of course. TV is where they learn about the War on Terror (serious, mature, adult business) before relaxing with Amy Winehouse and Green Day (the counterculture). Then, just before bedtime, the far-left Jon Stewart teaches them all about irony, which is quite indispensable in the 21st century. Most human resources managers insist on a mastery of it these days.

But what about mimeograph v. internet? That's a tough call!

Hmmm. I don't know. At least mimeographing (and distributing the stuff) was a communal activity involving more than ten fingertips and one pair of eyes.

...oh dear... I seem to be attached to this machine... how did that happen? ... must free myself... must type more... must read more... must type more... must read more... must type more...

[compared2what?]

And in the mists of history, perhaps "nothing" and "everything" are sometimes indistinguishable.

Thanks for clearing that up, Gary Kamiya. Obviously, you really did your homework before composing this review, or you would never have been able to write such a persuasive and well-supported conclusion to the case you made in all the words that went before it, which, once you remove all the less well-supported, partial, rhetorical, stylistic or ahistorical flourishes, boils down to: "Someone wrote a book."

I, for one, am now fully convinced of the truth of this assertion.

But worse than that silliness, in DeGroot's view, was yippie leader Jerry Rubin's solemn belief that "theatrics of this sort could end a war." "It was a total cultural attack on the Pentagon," Rubin said. "The media communicated this all over the country, and lots of people identified with us, the besiegers." DeGroot comments, "In truth, self-indulgence undermined otherwise impressive commitment."

For the sake of argument, I'm going to assume that this is an accurate characterization of Degroot's view, that the quotation comes from the book, that it is responsibly sourced within the book, and that Kamiya agrees with the premises he summarizes, as the placement and tone suggests that he does. I resent having to do that, because making that many assumptions is shoddy scholarship. But unlike Kamiya, I'm not getting paid to assess the writings of others, so it's the best I can do in the time available to me.

(a) If Jerry Rubin ever held a publicly expressed belief at any point in his career that could be rightly characterized as "solemn," I am unaware of it. I strongly object to the random application of adjectives to nouns in any work that purports to adhere to an intellectual standard that ostensibly distinguishes them from Mad-Libs for middlebrows.

(b) Irrespective of who said it and with how much gravity or conviction, it is simply unacceptable that any professional thinker writing in the early 21rst century can describe the concept that theatrics have the power to effect popular sentiment on issues of war as "silliness," as if the notion were so manifestly ridiculous as to be self-evident. It is -- at a stretch -- conceivable that Kamiya is pig-ignorant of every one of the thousands of iterations of this concept in the history of Western thought that, whatever else they are, cannot be dismissed as silly. But that doesn't mean I have to be. Literally theatrical action is a universal, fundamental, and non-localized part of all military strategy, and that's a position held by almost everyone who has ever seriously considered the subject. It is not indicative of political tendencies, and has been so prominently expressed wrt American military action in Iraq within the last two decades that there is virtually no point on the political spectrum that has not made it the basis of its argument. To cite just two examples, here's one (Situationist) from The War and the Spectacle, Ken Knabb:

The orchestration of the Gulf war was a glaring expression of what the situationists call the spectacle — the development of modern society to the point where images dominate life. The PR campaign was as important as the military one. How this or that tactic would play in the media became a major strategical consideration. It didn’t matter much whether the bombing was actually “surgical” as long as the coverage was; if the victims didn’t appear it was as if they didn’t exist. The “Nintendo effect” worked so well that the euphoric generals had to caution against too much public euphoria for fear that it might backfire. Interviews with soldiers in the desert revealed that they, like everyone else, depended almost totally on the media to tell them what was supposedly happening. The domination of image over reality was sensed by everyone. A large portion of the coverage consisted of coverage of the coverage. The spectacle itself presented superficial debates on the new level of instant global spectacularization and its effects on the spectator.

And here's one (Imperialist) from the mouth of Donald Rumsfeld in 2006:

In many ways, many critical battles in the war on terror will be fought in the newsrooms and the editorial board rooms. Unlike the Cold War, this is an era of far more rapid communications, with the Internet, and bloggers, and chat rooms, and 24-hour nes channels and satellite radio. Just as millions who were trapped in Eastern Europe during the Cold War were given hope by messages that filtered in from the West, similarly, I believe there are reformers in the Middle East who have been silenced and intimidated, and who want their countries to be free.

(c) To whose truth, whose self-indulgence, and whose impressive commitment does DeGroot refer? In political and cultural terms, there was then as there is now, little interest in the first, equitable and non-partisan distribution of the second, and very, very little of the third. If by "truth," DeGroot means "historical truth," and -- again, for the purposes of argument, you grant that there is such a thing in any singular form -- whether you agree with the handful of actually impressively committed counter-cultural luminaries of the period or not, you'd be hard put to argue that explicitly calling attention to what they regarded as historical truth, and on what grounds, was not part and parcel of their impressive commitment.

Given the Whitman's sampler of ideologies (not all of which were sincerely counter-cultural, but never mind) to which the Chicago Eight were impressively committed, and that each of them came with a more fully elaborated basis in historical truth than the ideologists to whom they were opposed ever even attempted to provide, I'm just going to let them serve as an example, because I have to go do stuff for which I might be paid. I fully concede that the subsequent activities of Weiner and Froynes tend to suggest that their impressive commitment was neither impressive nor committed, and that it is not at all clear to what historical truth they actually subscribed. But that was not apparent at the time. And anyway, it is DeGroot's fucking job to explain that. He's the one who opened the door.

(d) Kamiya's vagueness vis-a-vis the dreamy self-indulgence that prevented serious work from being done makes it impossible to say with confidence exactly what the fuck he means. But as far as I can tell, it seems to be the undifferentiated lack of serious purpose traditionally associated with anyone who frankly admits to enjoying sex and/or drugs and/or rock and roll, at least in the minds of people whose impressive political commitment does not include a very detailed approach to historical truth.

In broad terms, I don't dispute that the overwhelming majority of particpants in any of the various countercultural movements of the 1960s that had a significant overlap with emphatically enjoying sex, drugs and rock and roll did not get much serious work done. However, as previously stated, the same overwhelming majority did not have any serious purpose. So I don't consider it to have much relevance to the political validity (or lack thereof) of the name-brand activists to whom it is here being applied. Certainly not as much relevance as the obstacles to serious accomplishment represented by being beaten, locked up, harrassed, forced into hiding, or murdered. In short, I call bullshit on this particular stand-in for reasoned argument.

(e) Forget every other nationwide moratorium involving millions of people subsequent to the failure to levitate the Pentagon in 1967, as well as whatever prison riots, campus take-overs, student strikes, migrant-labor protests, civil rights rallies, protests, and sit-ins, and so forth you can think of that took place more or less continuously for the next four years, and which separately or together, briefly and serially shut down numerous institutions without which power cannot operate.

Just consider these three events:

(1) The March on the Pentagon, which wasn't levitated, was one of many actions that took place in October, 1967, when approximately 100,000 anti-war demonstrators from a wide range of radical, liberal, academic, and, yes, vaguely counter-cultural backgrounds converged in D.C. That number seems to reflect the consensus count.

(2) On November 15, 1969, another anti-war demonstration took place in D.C., mobilized in part by the same or similar counter-cultural forces as the one in 1967, drawing somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 participants, depending on whether you go by police count or the activist count, which were and are famously disparate.

(3) By the time of the Stop the Goverment rally in D.C. in April 1971, what I infer to be the police count puts the number at 500,000.

That was, in historical truth, by no means an all-uphill trend, nor was it solely the result of countercultural movement activities. However, it didn't happen without them, and in an organizational sense, absent those activities, you could make a very strong argument that it couldn't have.

The exact wording of the quotation varies from source to source, but Ronald Reagan accidentally called bullshit on the Kamiya/DeGroot analysis regarding the non-threat posed by '60s counterculture in an April 7, 1970 speech to the Council of California Growers, saying, ""These students want disruption. They seek to prove that this system of ours, when faced with crisis, does not work. If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with!" Or words to that effect.

Several weeks later, Four Dead in Ohio. (By some counts, 11.) But my point is, and without getting into the conspiracy question, during the course of various events at Kent State on May 4 - 5, 1970, some students got a bloodbath. On May 9, 1970, about 100,000 demonstrators marched in D.C., but that was on short notice. Local action across the country multiplied that number by many times.

The third action listed in my three-point time-line is not really like the others. In fact, it does not really represent an increase in popular resistance in the way that the '67 to '69 numbers do. That surge was pretty effectively ended not long after May 1970, for the fairly obvious reason that when popular protest becomes an occasion on which you are free to express yourself by being shot dead by a branch of your own country's armed forces, the organizers of those protests lose quite a bit of their recruiting appeal.

The '71 demonstration, technically the last -- I think; please forgive me if I am in error in the letter of this, because it is roughly true in spirit, and I do not have the time to check it thoroughly -- massive D.C. rally of the era, was heavily stage-managed, and carefully controlled by police and other armed enforcers of the law, who had a detailed advance copy of the game plan, and were thus able to keep it orderly and unexciting and generally help convey the impression that resistance to the agenda had weakened, and that the government was listening, as did the Winter Soldier hearings that were associated with the event. From around that time to the fall of Saigon four years later, and speaking with all the qualifications that should accompany any statement as general as this one, whatever popular prostest there was did not have a very significant impact on the conduct of or domestic sentiment regarding the war.

(f) This entire post, obviously, is not a comprehensive or definitive account of the political and social pros and cons of '60s counterculture. But it's a fuck of a lot more on-track than Gary Fucking Kamiya, and is not intended to do much more than highlight that his representation of those things does not follow the most basic rule of reasoned historical analysis, insofar as it fails to account for evidence that does not support the stated thesis.

I am so fucking sick and tired of doing other people's jobs for them on a volunteer basis, with absolutely no positive effect on anything or anyone anywhere, at this point, I am really only doing because it's a healthier exercise than setting myself on fire on the steps of the capitol.

ON EDIT: Three bouts of typo correction, absent word replacement, tense changes etc. Probably more required. Sorry. Copy-edit as you go.

[compared2what?]

It can get pretty lonely when there's no one to talk to but yourself, you know.

[OP ED]

It can get pretty lonely when there's no one to talk to but yourself, you know.

Indeed. Some nights I think I'm the only one here. But if you watch very carefully, the "views" numbers slowly go up. The magical invisible lurkers are watching us. Probably through a bong darkly, as it were.

[AlicetheKurious]

Hey, I'm here... I've been closely following this thread, but everything I would have said has been said by somebody else. Not that I've read the book, but the review gave me an icky feeling.

c2w thank you for your post: I read it with great interest, I intend to read it again in case I missed something as soon as I finish typing this, and the Ronald Raygun quote was chilling. xx

[IanEye]

The '71 demonstration, technically the last -- I think; please forgive me if I am in error in the letter of this, because it is roughly true in spirit, and I do not have the time to check it thoroughly -- massive D.C. rally of the era

10 years later, in another era, my mom took me to a Mother's Day Anti-Nuke Rally in Washington D.C.
I had a lot of fun, running around, taking any pamphlets or handouts that people were offering.
Lo and behold, i still have one in my archives and it details a local Catholic groups concerns over the fact that new VP George HW Bush is a Knight of Malta.

I got to meet Dr. Helen Caldicott, which was cool.

But to be honest, for years my main impression of that trip was that I got to see that long flight of stairs that the priest falls down at the end of 'The Exorcist'. I remember thinking it was odd how our new Prez was named 'Reagan' and so was the girl who was possessed by Satan.

So anyway, thanks Mom, for worrying about my safety and the wellbeing of other children on the planet.....

http://openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/19 ... BC-14.html
Headline: Mother's Day Anti-Nuke Demonstration
Abstract: (Studio) Mother's Day demonstration in Washington, DC protesting nuclear weapons reported.
REPORTER: Jane Pauley

(DC) Details of demonstrations examined; films shown. [Dr. Barry COMMONER - criticizes President Reagan and Democrats] Dr. Benjamin Spock's call for letter-writing campaign and warning of Helen Caldicott with regard to Babies Against the Pentagon (BAP) outlined. Last Sun's demonstration protesting administration involvement in El Salvador, economy programs and other issues recalled.
REPORTER: Gene Pell

[Seamus OBlimey]

I, (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

(1)

(2)

(3)

(f)

For orz' sake do you have to be so dramatic?

[MacCruiskeen]

Re: anti-60s-propaganda as nipping-in-the-bud:

Paris, April 10, 2008: At least 19,000 school students and teachers demonstrate against Sarkozy's planned educational 'reforms':



Some of them look pretty damn hairy, too...

[Banner in the foreground: "This year, May arrived one month early"

Banner in the background: "Do we need a new MAY '68?"]

[Crow]

We could make up a list...

Political Leaders and Cultural Heroes: 1960s / 2000s

Selfish, Stupid Decade > Unselfish, Clever Decade

JFK > George W. Bush

MLK > Barack Obama

John Lennon > Pete Doherty

George Harrison > Bono

Muhammed Ali > Tiger Woods

Jimi Hendrix > P. Diddy

Bob Dylan > Amy Winehouse

Peter Brook > The Blue Man Group

Timothy Leary I > Timothy Leary II

Alan Watts > Bill Gates

Monty Python > The Daily Show

Nina Simone > Madonna

Noam Chomsky > Peter DeGroot

...

...

...

...

Please keep this list away from the suicidal.

[MacCruiskeen]

"All You Need Is Love" > "Touch My Body"

"Gimme Shelter"> "Let Me Entertain You"

- oops, sorry, Crow!

One of my favourite Beatles performances (and songs) is "I'm Down", live at Shea Stadium in 1965. (2 mins 8 secs)

This was their first-ever US concert and they're in a state of complete euphoria. The place is a cauldron, but they're still playing out of their skins. Catch the kid forty seconds in glancing at his mother as if to say: Can you believe this? And the moment one minute in, when Lennon and Harrison lose it and start laughing. It's easy to forget what an amazingly good voice Paul McCartney had, and Lennon is just ecstatic here.

[yathrib]

Snotty books about the 1960s have been coming out *since* the 1960s. I've read a few, I think I'll give this one a miss. As I've said before, the 1960s in my place of origin were a lot like the 1950s, except that somewhere in the great beyond, other people were doing these baffling things. The mid 1970s were the 1960s for me and the small group of rebellious, brainy weirdos I hung out with, except we were conscious--and regretful--of the fact that the rest of the world had passed us by.

I think it is self evident that the 1960s counterculture--or at least those of its values that managed to filter into the mainstream in the 1970s--*did* have a major impact. Otherwise, why do conservatives, etc. still go ballistic over their legacy?

In regard to that list: You might have listed Noam Chomsky-->Noam Chomsky.

[MacCruiskeen]

In regard to that list: You might have listed Noam Chomsky-->Noam Chomsky.

No, yathrib, I don't see any decline there. Like Michael Parenti*, I might wish (very much) that the nearly-80-year-old Chomsky would take a different stance on 9/11, but that's his choice and I'm not gonna scream "Gatekeeper!" at him like too many other people who don't even approach his stature. Powerworshippers have been calling Chomsky a "conspiracy theorist" all his life for stating what is now common knowledge, but which first had to be made common knowledge, by him and by a few other exceptionally brave people.

Noam Chomsky is a moral and intellectual hero. Now as then.

* Parenti is someone else I admire enormously. But he too is not perfect, and I disagree with his position on Tibet, for instance. C'est la vie and so it goes.

[IanEye]

One of my favourite Beatles performances (and songs) is "I'm Down", live at Shea Stadium in 1965. (2 mins 8 secs)

-
And the moment one minute in, when Lennon and Harrison lose it and start laughing.

[yathrib]

Neon, you write:

Sounds like it's about time to trot out the old "antiwar protestors spitting on the returning soldiers" canard again.

It always amazes me that you can't convince people that it didn't happen, no matter how much evidence you dredge up to support the case. People really *want* it to have happened for some reason.

Truth is the spitting did happen, but it was older WWII vets and Korea vets who did it, regarding the Viet Vets as whiny losers. It turned out that spitting on returning vets wasn't very popular, so the mass mind decided to blame it on dirty leftist hippies, because no one liked them anyway, and the narrative made more sense.