Posted on 09/16/2009 11:19:56 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Both presidents were vilified by those out of power, fueling the rise of manic countercultures. Lee Siegel on what Glenn Beck’s angry army has in common with hippies.
Let’s all calm down. The Tea Party Express rally in Washington wasn’t the beginning of some political apocalypse that is going to plunge the country into civil war.
If anything, its noisiness was inversely proportionate to its power—the ugly images and inflammatory rhetoric were burbles of helplessness. Without cable TV’s magnifications, the peaceful, even cautious, demonstration would have come and gone with barely a notice.
Fundamentally, the gathering in the nation’s capital last Saturday was something entirely different: the rise of a new counterculture.
We’ve heard for years how the subversive culture of the 1960s has been gradually assimilated by the manic commercial culture of the 1980s and 1990s. Free love, drugs, “do your own thing,” public obscenity, provocative dress—what once shocked the American middle class is now the stuff of everyday American experience. (Viagra is Woodstock in pills.)
Up until now, society may have changed, but politics remained the same.
As the go-go imperatives of commercial life seemed to make just about every solid social norm melt into air, politicians went about their routine business. They cut or raised taxes, balanced the budget or ran a deficit, made war or preserved the peace. Through it all, they kept their hands off any legislative engine that would have a transformative effect on everyday life.
Predictable, routine, unchanging government became something like a sanctuary from the Animal House atmosphere of much American social and cultural life. The halls of power seemed a refuge for all those who had been terrified of the counterculture in the 1960s, and felt alienated by the commercial assimilation of countercultural values post-1960s. Patriotism, religion, morality—in the form of Christian-tinted government that promised stability amid all the social and cultural daily upheaval—became the war cry against the destabilizing culture of gratification.
But now, government itself seems dynamic and full of change. It promises to sweep away the familiar contours of everyday experience.
The mainstream assimilation of countercultural values is no longer just a social phenomenon. Government seems to have become countercultural, too. A black man in the White House. A transformation in the relationship between our health and the public realm (Our Bodies, Our Politicians). A fundamental restructuring of the government’s relationship to American business.
In society, culture and now politics, what was once considered countercultural is today the establishment. And so it’s no surprise that what was once considered the establishment—the war cry of patriotism, religion, and morality—is the new counterculture.
The parallels between today’s right-wing radicals and radical tactics of the 1960s are striking. Sixties’ Dada theatrics—e.g. Allen Ginsberg leading people in an attempt to levitate the Pentagon (my favorite)—are echoed in the alarmist and conspiratorial theatrics of right-wing cable television. Then, too, just as the radical left was inspired by a few personalities—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd et al.—today’s radical right is whipped up by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin et al.
And while the new counterculture’s racist images of Obama are sickening, they are similar in their emotional violence to the images of the old counterculture’s Representative Villain, Richard Nixon—caricatures which ran the gamut from violent to pornographic. Just as Nixon exemplified middle-class, middle-aged white, repressive stasis, so Obama exemplifies—for his haters—ceaseless, wearying, uprooting change.
Each man presented the perfect vexation to enraged opponents—Nixon a hurdle to change, Obama a wide-open door to an uncertain future.
But there are two important differences between the old and new countercultures. The old one grew in strength, after a long, tortuous time gathering into its antiwar fold decent people from all sectors of American society who were outraged by all the official mayhem at home and overseas. The new counterculture, for all its hollering, seems less numerous than loud, depending on liberal cable TV to eagerly pick up and opportunistically amplify conservative cable TV’s sensationalist assaults. Without the moral center of an unjust war—without any clear moral event, for that matter—the new counterculture will only become more hysterical as its numbers dwindle to a few talking heads and “maverick” politicians.
The other difference is violence. So far, no bombs have exploded, no conservative college students have been fired on by the National Guard, and no riots have engulfed the streets.
It could well be that comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin, calling him an illegitimate occupant of the White House, and accusing him of virtually executing a coup d’etat is, as some people say, an incitement to violence. But the ancestors of the same people hurling these slurs once accused FDR of being a "Jew" agent of the Soviet Union and claimed that his wife had caught syphilis from her "Negro" lover.
In other words, everyone, calm down. What we are seeing is the good, old American Berserk in action. It’s just that, ever since the 1960s, we are not accustomed to seeing it come from the other side.
Nope, the new Stalin. Right now the kindler, gentler version. Later, who knows?
He’s a new Karl, I always thought.
Kinder, gentler?
I don’t think so. If he had unlimited power, I don’t think he’d have a problem silencing his critics.
THANK GOD FOR OBAMA! In just 9 months (though it seems like years) he is on the verge of doing what 30+ plus years of elections has failed to do - DESTROY THE MODERN DEMOCRAT PARTY!
[. . .he is on the verge of doing what 30+ plus years of elections has failed to do - DESTROY THE MODERN DEMOCRAT PARTY!]
And the Silent Majority found its voice. A sleeping giant woke up and roared on Sept. 12.
I got a paragraph or two into this and thought, “too many words to say nothing” and had to stop reading.
Translation - “relax, big government and social liberalism are here to stay for at least the next 40 years and there’s nothing you can do about it, Tea Party losers - muhahahahaha”.
Of course like with every mentally challenged liberal, this assumes that more government and extreme social liberalism are somehow good for the country.
What will liberals do when they wake-up to discover that America is no longer a place they want to call home? I’m not talking about pointless political demagoguery like “Bushitler”. I’m talking about actual standard of living - a return to the America of the 1970’s (stagflation, crime, loss of national purpose) but on steroids. Forget about which political party controls the government - we’re talking about the GOVERNMENT itself losing control, resulting in an economic and societal breakdown under the twin crushes of mountains of debt and “mainstream, do whatever feels right” culture.
It’s amazing that liberals who supposedly “think outside the box” would continue to be so linear in this regard. If the end result of the counterculture movement is to fundamentally reverse the things which made America exceptional for 200 years, and that movement has now achieved complete power to make this outcome a reality, then America is no different than any empire which came before it, and like every empire before it will soon wither and collapse. They will NOT like the outcome.
BTW, I’m sure the author is a typical economics ignoramus but Nixon oversaw some of the most horrific economic policies (fiscal & monetary) in U.S. history. So the “Obama = Nixon” comparison is totally appropriate in that regard.
Yep, the racism card is sure getting “old”.
What we are seeing is Obama as Carter 2, on steriods. Look for history to repeat itself. Obama is as a “March Madness” term goes, “one and done”.
Plus the red blood of our troops that Obama is wasting will very much remembered by our same troops against Obama.
It's ironic that the author doesn't see the danger inherent in a government that sweeps away the familiar contours of the lives the citizens have built for themselves.
This author is either a complete ignoramus or a total, pathological liar. There's nothing at all uncertian about the future the Illegal Alien is striving to impose on America. It's called communism. The abominations it perpetrates can be seen in every present or former communist country. For examples try: Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union, Red China under Mao, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Cambodia, Vietnam, et al. Obama, a life long communist, is simply a wannabe Lenin and his "Czars" are actually commissars.
Three things I’m getting p*$$ed off about:
1. Disagreement = Racism.
2. Conservatives = Radical Right; LIBs = “Progressives”
3. Unanswerable Government
One thing you don’t want to do is get me angry; just ask my nine kids.
Obama more resembles Chavez.
When Nixon left office, he went home to his home state, California. When ozero leaves office, he will return to kenya.
Apparently you glossed right over the “Right now” in front of “kindler and gentler”.
The mainstream assimilation of countercultural values is no longer just a social phenomenon. Government seems to have become countercultural, too.
No. What has happened is that those who used to preen themselves as countercultural have awakened to the fact that not only are they The Man they've always hated but that they have been for some time. And that the "change" that they've insisted quite uncritically could be nothing but good is, in fact, being examined and found wanting. And that the take-over-the-street excitement that they've always claimed their exclusive province is being gleefully used against them.
It wasn't a "counterculture" after all, simply another malformed culture, there is no "reverse racism" at all, but only racism, no "positive discrimination" in the form of affirmative action, but only discrimination. Things are what they are, not what some social theorist hoped that they would be.
These are, in fact, the cries of children who never grew up, who now can stay up late and eat nothing but candy, and who are finding out that it turns out not to be very good for you. What a shock!
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