I was a teenager in the 60's living in San Francisco during the 60's. I watched a generation act very stupidly, sometimes in a good cause, sometimes not. (Can't quite bring myself to crank it up to the glory of madness like Ginsburg.) I did no drugs (my parents were pharmacists and we had great respect for chemicals and ourselves). I think the 60's was pretty much a mistake apart from the civil rights movement, the beginning of the environmental movement and landing on the moon. At least someone official in South Vietnam actually asked the U.S. to come in and help even if the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was the perhaps next biggest lie after Iraq-al Qaeda linkage. The war and the draft were the power that drove the counter culture. (We know better now, use volunteers and mercenaries, tax cuts, and send the bill on to our grandchildren. Voila!, no mass protest! heroes and yellow ribbons all round. The lesson learned from Vietnam: Don't make selfish Americans too aware of their duty and responsibilities to execute, oppose or even be aware of US policy. Any war worth fighting is worth getting drafted for.) From that we get the impetus for both drugs and radical leftist politics, both destructive to the credibility of any so-called movement of loyal American citizens (and in the case of drugs destructive to the individuals themselves) in opposition to an unjust war. It is no excuse that the 50's were "boring". What I saw in the 60's was shameless self indulgence in drugs, promiscuity and a great deal of general vandalism that congratulated itself for its transcendent wisdom, infinite compassion, and moral superiority while doing exactly what it felt like doing and when it felt like it. Summer of Love indeed, summer of self-centered indulgence! There was no shortage of spoiled brats past puberty in the Haight-Ashbury. Then there was the politics. Why is it that to oppose US policy in Southeast Asia, a right of citizenship, is it necessary or even attractive to embrace and espouse the political theories of the very worst despots of the twentieth century? Political theories that in practice would have put every single one of them in a prison camp or a grave, probably unmarked. What part of "Gulag" and "Re-education camp" don't they understand? It was clear to me that what was required material on the constitution and history in general at my school were wasted on most of these people. They did not understand the precious rights they had that few on earth have ever had, and how they should be used (, and how they could be lost if instead of redress people sought mere disorder that would justify repression. They also did not really understand the basics of sex, drugs, disease or apparently personal hygiene. (If you do not believe me, dig up an archive of the Berkeley Barb, and read the letters addressed to the Dr. Hip-pocrates column.) The acceptability of drug use that infected our culture from those days is a continuing blight. There would be no drug problem without droves of ready willing customers. How much the legacy of that time continues to contribute momentum to the authoritarians of the religious right I am not sure. The series shows quite clearly how short a time it took for the veneer of spirtual advancement to flake off revealing the rotten core of self-centered pursuit of a high at any cost for its own sake. Drug culture (of heroin) corroded the core of jazz, the legacy of Bird that is conveniently over-looked. On the larger scale it (heroin, cocaine, crack, meth etc ad nauseam) corrodes the entire culture to extent that it is accepted. (This is not an endorsement of the Drug War, merely a condemnation of the demand that drives the drug trade.)
Sure love those Doors and Airplane albums though, eh? Acid rock and groovy posters are not enough compensation for the damage. Especially when I consider that the Vietnam generation for the most part went Jay-Walking (*) about its business while the neocon chickenhawks and their closely allied war profiteers took the US military and its amazing box of expensive toys to Iraq on bigger lies and a less convincing pretext that Johnson used to go into Vietnam, or Nixon into Cambodia. I don't see anything useful was learned. If something had there would have been an immediate and unmistakable howl, accompanied by a precipitous dip in the all-important poll numbers, when that neocon wet dream, the Iraq war, was first proposed publicly after the justifiable pursuit of al-Qaeda into Afganistan as going well and still far from complete. It seems to be "no draft", "no problem!". At least so long as the death, devastation and carnage is inflicted unilaterally. Anything is ok, until the body bags start coming back (an event that has been skillfully suppressed in the media, perhaps the other lesson from Vietnam?). Some values.
CB
Good Times, Noodle Salad
(*) the bit where Leno does not have to work very hard to find "average citizens" who know less than nothing about the world, world history, their country, its history, or even current events.
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