Posted on 07/01/2004 8:34:16 AM PDT by qam1
I’m a baby boomer and that’s a curse. You see I’m stuck with the idiots from the sixties till my dying day as they whine and moan about injustice and mentally dwell forever in the days of tie-die shirts, incense, and free love.
The news media, now controlled by baby boomers, keep the myth alive that everyone from that era got high and protested in the streets disgorging their revolution to enforce a “new America.” They were revolting all right. The very sight of them turned my stomach.
The truth is that those who perpetrated the anti-war protests didn’t really care about the Vietnam War except for how it affected their draft status. They had no compassion for the pro-freedom forces in South Vietnam who were sacrificing everything to try and stop the takeover of their part of that country by a very brutal communist regime. As the protesters carried their Mao signs and chanted “Che, Che,” their purpose was to rip apart traditional America and rebuild it on the ideals of Mao and Che. What ideal was that? Communism.
The tragedy of the sixties was that so many young people simply didn’t understand that their chants and posters and the promised “new vision” were really in support of a communist America. Nor did they understand that their actions were helping the communists to sentence millions in Southeast Asia to the gulag. Worse, those baby boomers had no sense of the brutal reality of life under communism. Most still don’t.
Case in point is Country Joe McDonald. He and his group, “The Fish”, performed the song that became one of the anthems of the Woodstock Generation. It was called, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag.” Usually, Country Joe would start the song by shouting to the crowd, “Give me an F!” The other three letters of the cheer would follow as Country Joe would ask, “What’s that spell?” The crowd would respond by shouting the well-known profanity. Country Joe would then begin the catchy rag which asked “One, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam.” It was all so, well, revolutionary.
Country Joe became a major voice in the “revolution.” So what was Joe fighting for? He did help force America to abandon an anticommunist ally; resulting in its becoming an enslaved nation. Is that what he wanted? Is that what he hoped would happen? Is he happy now? Apparently Country Joe doesn’t have a clue.
Recently he was invited to Hanoi to receive a World Peace Music Award. However, Country Joe says he won’t go because “as a hippie protest songwriter I could not exist in Vietnam.” Why on earth not? Isn’t Vietnam now exactly the communist paradise he and his buddy protesters wanted it to be? Apparently Joe misunderstood back in the sixties.
“Communism tends to be totalitarian, and I am not for that,” says the self-proclaimed revolutionary. Even worse, his complete ignorance of communism’s principles is shocking. “My parents were American Communists for some time, but they left the Party because of a lack of democratic positions by the Party,” he naïvely admitted.
Like a lot of the baby boomer generation, it seems that Country Joe McDonald just got a thrill from protesting. He had no idea what he was against or for. It was just a social event to go down to the local protest, carry a sign, and meet some “groovy chicks.”
The consequences of his actions? His nation suffered worldwide disgrace and millions of innocent Vietnamese remain enslaved to this day. Oh well, it was “kool.” The whole pathetic lot of ‘em make me want to barf!
Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of The DeWeese Report and president of the American Policy Center. The center maintains a website at www.americanpolicy.org.
I read the article to state just what you said. The media protrays their vision of the majority, not the actual majority.....
Let's you and him fight!
(*) By "Baby Boomers", I'm referring to the leftists and self-centered egotists and not the more admirable members of that generation, who most certainly exist. I'm also not referring to the people who actually escaped the folly of their youth.
Hey, I was born in '68 and I have to work for and with these people. You think you got it bad?
That's it in a nutshell. The whole scene was mostly about getting laid, and the nostalgia that these burnouts feel for that era is nostalgia for that.
The final paragraph pf Jason Muravchik's Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism reads:
By no means all socialists were killers or amoral. Many were sincere humanitarians; mostly these were the adherents of democratic socialism. But democratic socialism turned out to be a contradiction in terms, for where socialists proceeded democratically, the found themselves on a trajectory that took them further and further from socialism. Long before Lenin, socialist thinkers had anticipated the problem. The imaginary utopias of Plato, Moore, Campanella and Edward Bellamy, whose 1887 novel, Looking Backward, was the most popular socialist book in American history, all relied on coercion, as did the plans of The Conspiracy of Equals. Only once did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it.
That's a fact. I'm getting close to retirement (nevermind that I was recently laid-off), so keep working. Keep looking for and getting those high paying jobs, cause when I retire, I demand my SS & Medicare and all the other freebies I so richly deserve.
Read Jason Muravchik's Heaven on Earth for some good examples of why socialism cannot be democratic (I posted the closing paragraph in a previous reply).
Vietnamese Witnesses Say Kerry's Squad Initiated Killing in '69 Raid
http://www.countryjoe.com/vietarchive.htm#42
Well, Yes. But in a weekend dispute with a left-infected indicidual, who wanted an "anything but Bush Revolution" I suggested that perhaps before he used the word "Revolution" he should pay more attention to who actually has the guns...
But, what about us good boomers? There are more of us than them. Of course, you might not realize that due to the entertaiment industry.
Thousands of Baby Boomers gave their lives and limbs in Vietnam.
I don't thing Bush or any of the republicans in Congress or the Senate were rioters.
It was still Bush's fault.
Which is why the second paragraph of my reply exempted the more admirable members of that generation -- those who gave their lives in Vietnam certainly being among them. But when people talk about "Baby Boomers" in the media, they aren't talking about the people you are talking about. They aren't even talking about George W. Bush or John McCain. They are talking about the Bill and Hillary Clintons, the John Kerrys, the Jane Fondas, and the Billy Joels. I don't hear too many proud Vietnam vets talking about "Baby Boomers this" and "Baby Boomers that". In fact, if you listened to those "Baby Boomers", you'd think that everyone was against the war in Vietnam and we did nothing to be proud about there. Ever notice the total lack of interest in what Vietnam is really like since the Communists took over?
Other than a brief period of silliness in the late 1970s when I listened to Jackson Browne, read "Jonathon Livingston Seagull" three times and wore "No Nukes" T-shirts (not knowing quite what any of that was supposed to mean but Ronald Reagan cured me of that nonsense anyhow), I am cheerfully uninfluenced by all baby boomer culture.
I have never smoked pot, never flashed the peace sign and I think The Beatles are an overrated pop group. I also read Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool-Aid Test" and didn't get it. I even watched "The Big Chill" and didn't get that either, especially the sappy "blue-eyed soul" music that made up the soundtrack. Give me real soul music anyday like the Flaming Ember or the Chairmen Of The Board.
I hate being lumped in with the baby boomers.
Bill and Hillary Clinton are Baby Boomers (1945-64), but so are George W. and Laura Bush.
Ted Kennedy and the Beatles are/were members of the Silent Generation (1928-44), but so are Phil Gramm and Lee Greenwood.
Lyndon Johnson and Walter Cronkite are/were members of the G.I. Generation (1905-27), but so are/were Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley.
Earl Warren and Alfred Kinsey were members of the Lost Generation (1884-1904), but so were Robert Taft ("Mr. Republican" of the 1940s) and Friedrich A. Hayek.
You could take this chain back for numerous generations, back to the Enlightenment of the mid-1700s. Much of the public perception of strong, patriotic, taciturn World War II veterans, self-indulgent, leftist, promiscuous Baby Boomers, poorly educated, nihilistic, whiny Generation Xers are stereotypes, as much as those of lazy blacks, drunken Irishmen, and obnoxious Germans.
The cultural war is not an intergenerational conflict, a regional conflict (Northeast, West Coast, and Great Lakes vs. the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the South), nor a racial/ethnic conflict (Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and English/German/Scandinavian Northern tier liberal Protestants, vs. British Southern and Midwestern evangelicals, Germans and Dutch (both evangelical and Catholic), and white Catholics).
The culture war is nonetheless a war; Pat Buchanan was correct in labeling it as such at the 1992 Republican convention. It is a war of ideas first and foremost. When it is over, either the Christian and Western based, rational, moral culture that characterized this nation for its first century of independence or the naturalistic and humanist, emotive, relativist culture that is presently the mainstream culture will prevail. The losers will be marginalized and eliminated.
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