The editor at large of “The Prospect” Harold Meyerson has written a thought-provoking article linking the rise of the neo-conservatism to the civic disorder of the “Sixties”. He goes on to say that the neo con movement has now descended into a similar sort of chaotic and self absorbed excess. Their self-serving agenda has given and will always give Americans the following set of intractable problems.
I am admirer of Meyerson but I take issue with his characterization of the Sixties and what I think is a far too benign interpretation of the neo conservative movement.
If you read newspaper accounts of what happened during the " summer of love", you can easily come to the same conclusions that Myerson did. The press, then as now, served power. They peddled fear and distorted events.
I have credentials. I lived through these events at the center of much of its energy; the San Francisco Bay area and Berkeley in particular.
The sixties were a grass roots social movement that was inclusive, experimental and largely benign. The violence and disorder were secondary and often external.
The neo con agenda is a top down movement that is exclusive and is in its inception intrinsically destructive.
I don’t think the neo con movement has become excessive.
The underlying structure is excess personified.
It is a belief system that sets no limits against the tyranny and violence of a privileged minority. We have all been witnesses and victims to the amoral, “ends justifying the means” implementation by its dedicated practitioners.
A quick reading of the PNAC document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (signed by industrial military complex toadies Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney) clearly demonstrates the monstrous excesses of this New American Century entitlement complex. The planet, c’est moi.
The flower children fed the nation for decades with ideas and a populist agenda that came very close to creating the greatest good for the greatest number.
The poisonous agenda of the Neo-cons is not new.
It has been with us since the early days of the industrial revolution. It is more royalist than capitalist.
It is the last hurrah of the parasitic plutocrats whose day is done and whose privilege and illegitimate power can no longer be countenanced.
The pillars on which the privilege and power of the ultra wealthy has always rested are easily observable in the Neo-con agenda:
A handful of old line robber barons, their oddly warped children and a small group of industrialists have funded nearly the entire infrastructure of the reactionary right.
Richard Mellon Scaife, (industry, oil, banking)
The Olin Foundation (chemical, munitions manufacturing)
Koch Brothers (oil refining, timber)
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, (radio and electronics manufacturing)
Adolphe Coors Foundation (beer and homophobia).
These people are not ordinary Americans. They fear ordinary Americans.
They are a group of powerful individuals who see the handwriting on the wall and are frantically doing what all good plutocrats do; throwing money at a problem.
The problem for them is and was a government of, by and for the people versus institutionalized privilege and unearned income for them.
The primary victims of the neo-cons manipulative mendacity are the much abused “heartlanders”, the evangelical cargo cults and the southerners that their forbears manipulated into hating blacks instead of going after the true authors of their misery, the southern mill and mine owners.
These victims of Americans chronically underfunded and grossly uneven elementary and secondary school system have taken the neo-cons bait hook, line and sinker. However, they didn’t design the machinery and they don't run it.
What the neo-cons don't understand is that it was precisely the sort of society that they are trying to recreate today that spawned the social upheaval of the sixties.
It was the hypocritcial, authoritarian, class conscious social order of the fifties, with its dirty underpinnnings of misogyny, sexual repression, overt racism and covert corporatism that was the fuel for the explosion of social activism, anti war protests, bra and draft card burning and civil rights marches that was the social upheaval of the sixties.
It only needed a spark to ignite it. There were several.
Civil disobedience was a tool not the foundation of the Sixties agenda. It was a logical result of a government out of rhyme with its people.
The foundation was pacifisim. Remember the sit-ins? Marches? Raise your hand if you think the neo cons were ever pacifists or ever exhibited a social conscience.
There was an element of youthful rebellion and nose thumbing at the rigid mores of the time.
Every generation revels in outraging the generation before it in its attempt to define itself.
There were hangers on; folks along for the ride, the sex and the drugs. Most of the folks I knew were sincerely interested in inventing a more relevant future.
Most of them were kids in their teens and early twenties. Instead of clubbing and buying designer jeans they were confronting a machine that was eating up their less fortunate contemporaries. That is truly heroic and worthy of our respect.
When a government deals with civil disobedience with riot squads and billy clubs, things are bound to get out of hand and they did.
A college town sheriff claims they were going through $50,000 (1960’s prices) worth of tear gas a week. The government made sure everyone knew there would be a price to pay for dissent.
Surprisingly, only a handful of “peaceniks” in the later stages of the movement advocated violence for violence.
The students and activists were a motley crew that used disruption to bring a menacing power to a halt but it was the government that spun out of control. They murdered college students. The assassination of Martin Luther King was proven in trial to have been a government operation. The Kennedy murders remain under a cloud.
Then as now, the CIA and FBI spied on citizens and infiltrated social action groups.
They would try and push them into violent or foolish acts that would discredit them or justify military intervention.
The government was responsible for the institutionalized violence of Viet Nam and the quiet violence of poverty and despair that was the lot of most African Americans.
The disenfranchised people of color took advantage of the deteriorating conditions to make themselves heard. They stopped robbing each other on Saturday night and started to direct their attention outward.
Just as the frustrations of French “guest workers” (a permanent underclass) boiled over into violence when the students at the Sorbonne took to the streets this spring, so did America’s guest workers, (the descendents of slaves) frustrations boil over when our college students took up the banner for “people power” decades ago.
In black ghettos, living conditions were unspeakable and highly profitable for slum landlords who because of segregation had a captive clientele.
When the weather turned hot and sticky in the inner city slums, all hell broke loose.
Sad though it is, civic order is the not the friend of change. It is the friend of the status quo.
The French, by persistently taking to the streets, got their government ( rightly so because job creation is driven by increased demand, not decreased wages and mass layoffs) to relent on implementing the corporatist’s agenda.
Nothing really changed for the flower children until the nation caught fire.
Only then were the plutocrats and their yes men in government forced to relent on Viet Nam, Civil Rights, Women’s Rights and everything else from school curriculums to environmental law.
The spoiled children and beneficiaries of unbridled capitalism, corporate welfare and a docile work force were about to have their apple carts upset.
The cries of “what if they gave a war and no one came” by a generation who turned their backs on senseless violence and consumerism by “turning on, tuning in and dropping out” threatened the "ricos" snug little empire and it made them hopping mad.
Their wholly owned subsidiery of corporate America, the Governor of California called in the National Guard to make war on America’s children.
The plutocrats have been frightened and angry ever since.
Now the "ricos" want us to buy into their little devolution of cheap labor, no taxes for the rich and eternal war. They want us to keep them fat and happy without making a fuss and die quietly if they want us to.
I say their anger and insecurities are their problem.
Their insatiable greed and pathological selfishness are a danger to us all.
Every society has to learn to deal effectively with its predators and now its our turn.
Carol DW
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Blaming the Left For the Right
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