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1968: Why I’m So Damned Angry
17 June 2008, the poet @ 9:56 pm

See, this is what I mean when I say that the Baby Boomer generation screwed up America. When I made that comment on Ron Silliman’s blog a few days ago, one member of that generation asked me, before he drifted off into the bleachers of the lone baseball field in la-la land, how I could feel so sad about something that I didn’t experience. I commented that I did experience it indirectly. He got lost in the bleachers.

This is the gist of my meaning, summed up in this paragraph from the above linked-to article:

Without the clashes at Grant Park, Karl Rove’s political success could not have happened; without the counterculture, Pat Robertson would very likely be a more obscure preacher than he has become; and without the antiwar movement, the ability of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to have led the country to war in Iraq is difficult to imagine.

It’s interesting that Alan Wolfe chose those four people to name as the conservative heirs to the 1960s liberal movement. To me, they represent the moral bankruptcy of today’s social conservatives. As a member of a mainline denomination, I’ve said before that we have entered into what I call a Protestant dark ages where salvation is sold to the highest bidder and indulgences offered by the entertainment committee.

Wolfe goes on to make other interesting points, but the essence of the Boomer generation’s curse on America has to do with its most endearing qualities. There is a natural inclination to rebel against authority, but that rebellion is based on, first and foremost, a disdain for reason and the intellectuals of the generation - both leftist and rightist - usually offer nothing more than a faux logic grounded in either rosy sentimentalism (the left) or cynical spiritism masquerading as faith (the right). The result is that the entire culture is destroyed as the extremes from both ends lock us in a deadening vice.

This phenomenon is further compounded by the fact that many of today’s leading conservatives were liberals in the 1960’s. The dominant arm of the Republican Party for the last eight years has been the hawkish neo-conservatives, who Irving Kristol, founder of The National Interest and The Public Interest magazines, said “is a liberal mugged by reality.” It’s interesting that Kristol’s son, William, is one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, through the enormously Trotsky-like PNAC think tank.

For my entire life the 1960s spirit has dominated American culture, either through the heirs of the hippie love-niks and their romantic notions of peace at all costs or through the heirs of Nixon, who opined “we are all Keynesians now.” Conservatives, who have traditionally argued for a non-interventionist foreign policy, which I support, ashamed at the national embarrassment that was Vietnam, have waited patiently for the day that they could prove Americans aren’t just a bunch of pussies fit only for defeat. Liberals have just largely wanted to get naked and have fun, but they wanted to make sure that the MIC wasn’t looking over their barren shoulders with loaded guns.

I joined the National Guard in 1997, after a 10-year hiatus from Reagan’s active duty military. That was the same year that Kristol the Young and, practically, Bush’s entire cabinet formed the PNAC (Project for a New American Century). Had I known then what they were up to I would not have joined the Guard and I’d have been spared wasting 18 months of my life on a failure of a political revenge call.

I may not be old enough to remember the 1960s, but that decade has affected my life in every way. Aside from Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, I’m pretty pissed off about it all.

3 Comments a “1968: Why I’m So Damned Angry”

1. Pam — June 19, 2008 @ 9:14 am
   

   Being a baby boomer (not by choice) I find your remarks interesting. The 60’s and 70’s did instill a deep sense of distrust in everyone and everything along with an increase in the use of sarcasm. I think, however, that the baby boomer protest era, etc. is not a unique experience that caused lasting changes to the culture. . . my parents’ generational experience of WWII certainly continues to shape the world today. The blind patriotism that sometimes swerves into nationalism still runs rampant.

   The disdain for reason is, I feel, not tied to the protest movement of the 60’s but seems to have its footings in the change over to the post-modernity movement which probably began in the WWII generation. What do you think the impact of post-modernity is having on writing and the arts?

2. the poet — June 19, 2008 @ 12:29 pm
   

   Good question, Pam. I’ll put it this way:

   If I were to enroll in a postgraduate level study anywhere in this country and offered as my thesis a two-part essay consisting of the first part being a critical examination of Aram Saroyan’s Complete Minimal Poems and the second part being a video essay of John Cage’s 4′33″ in which Part I consisted of nothing more than

   shiit

   centered on a blank page and Part II consisting of me sitting silent and blank-faced before a camera for 4 minutes and 30 seconds and the final three seconds consisting of me standing up and walking off the stage then I would likely be called a genius and given a prestigious chair at a prestigious university and asked to lecture on the artistic renditions of nothingness within a vacuum while endless streams of young rich kids flocked to powder my ass every time I stood to speak. What kind of impact do you think that is?

3. Lucas — June 23, 2008 @ 9:11 pm
   

   I’d be interested in your making good on your conjecture.

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