Posted on 07/24/2008 11:10:17 AM PDT by K-oneTexas
The Sixties Won’t Go Away
What more can anyone say about the 1960s and all its legacies?
By Victor Davis Hanson
Those who protested some 40 years ago often still congratulate themselves that their loud zeal alone brought needed “change” to America in civil rights, the environment, women’s liberation, and world peace. Maybe. But critics counter that the larger culture that followed was the most self-absorbed in memory.
Everyone can at least agree that the spirit of the “Me Generation” is not going quietly into the night — especially since that generation ushered in a certain coarseness and self-righteousness that still plagues our politics.
Take grandiose sermonizing about changing the world while offering few practical details how to do it.
Al Gore recently prophesized that America within ten years could generate all its electrical needs from “renewable resources and carbon-constrained fuels” — mainly wind, solar, and geothermal power (which currently together account for less than 10 percent of our aggregate production).
In truth, that daydream has about as much chance of being realized by 2018 as Al Gore this year swearing off the use of polluting SUVs and gas-guzzling private jets as he whizzes to his next environmental pulpit.
Barack Obama, a child during the ’60s, is imbued nonetheless with that decade’s “hope and change” messianic sermonizing. Now he wants a new mammoth government-funded “civilian national security force,” one “that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the Pentagon.
Sounds utopian, but at a time of record aggregate national debt, are we really going to borrow another half-trillion dollars a year to fund a kinder, gentler version of the military?
Gore and Obama may mean well. And we may someday rely mostly on wind and solar electrical power, and even benefit by having more aid workers abroad. But they discredit their proposals with ’60s-style exaggeration and feel-good fantasies that cannot be realized as promised.
Another permanent ’60s legacy is the assumption that the ends justify crude means. The so-called netroot bloggers often celebrate online with glee the illnesses or deaths of supposedly reactionary political opponents.
The crass anti-war group Moveon.org was not just content to object to Gen. David Petraeus testifying before Congress last autumn. In the fashion of 1960s agitprop, it had to go the next step in demonizing at a time of war our top-ranking Iraq ground commander as a traitor — a “General Betray Us” as the group’s ad in the New York Times blared.
Due to a “grassroots effort” to garner thousands of petition signatures, the city of San Francisco will have on the November ballot a measure to change the name of one of its water “pollution control plants” to the “George W. Bush Sewage Plant.” What a national trend that would be! Should red states follow that pettiness and rename their own sewers and dumps after John Kerry or Bill Clinton?
We still suffer from the same 1960s juvenile petulance when the powers that be did not immediately fall in line as protestors demanded.
Now the spirit of that age permeates Congress, whose members won’t drill oil off our coasts, along the continental shelf, or in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Yet in infantile fashion, they rant about “Big Oil’s” high gas prices. So, Congress instead threatens to sue OPEC to be fairer and to pump more oil. And we beg the Saudis to drill and pump more in their waters so we don’t have to do so in our own.
Even in the much-poorer 1960s, it was hard to take seriously the idea of loud middle-class suburban kids as street revolutionaries, given the fact that America was the richest and freest society in history. And it’s even harder now when many of them are rich seniors and the country itself is far wealthier.
So when a member of the aging baby-boom generation finger-points at us that drilling oil is the moral equivalent of invading Iraq, or that America has become two nations (the haves and have-nots), we can often expect to discover that the self-righteous sermonizer is a hypocrite. Green Al Gore uses a lot more energy than the average American. Populist John Edwards lives in a huge mansion.
By now, we’ve grown accustomed to elites railing about America’s pathologies from the comfort of their own privilege — along with the usual ’60s-style apologies that their own lives don’t need to match their rhetoric, and that we should just concentrate on their near-divine messages.
In their defense, they can’t help it — it’s still a ’60s thing.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal and the 2008 Bradley Prize.
Great article.
Thanks for posting, I love VDH.
Another excellent article by VDH.
The 60s will go away when the Baby Boomers all die...and not a moment sooner.
Pity.
Great article. Dr. Hanson is a fine writer and a good thinker.
But the legacy will live on.
Recently I heard Tom Wolfe say we lost our country in the 1970’s when society ‘untethered man’s conscience from God’s laws and harnessed them with man’s.’
As long as the 10 Commandments are outlawed in public, we don’t teach the 7 virtues or even the ‘golden rule’, society will be at the mercy of man’s whims.
Humans need something greater than themselves to believe in and I’m not talking about the ‘State’.
Of course the scum bag left means it as an insult.....but the thought occurred to me that only with people who hate capitalism and industry and real work would see a sewer plant as something to be derided.....Steel Mills, Oil Rigs, Sewer Plants, in reality are the glory of this great nation.....folks in Africa would be happy to have these type of “dirty Plants’...but you get my drift
Al Gore is a sappy-headed hoax.
John Edwards is.. well, John Edwards. One look is all it takes to see that. IMO.
A Berkeley radical in the 60's, now I'm a card-carrying conservative. Things do change and the 60's are no longer with us.
I believe we should cede California to Mexico. I’ll miss the place, but the coming bailout is’nt worth it. The Cal govt is hopelessly commie and they are going to try to extort the rest of the nation to pay for their insanity.
Find out how someone feels about Vietnam and you’ll know how they feel about Iraq and indeed most of their politics.
I do remember the MSM employees praising the demonstrators as the most intelligent generation ever.
The '50s virtually crushed anti-communism. The derogatives "McCarthyism" and "HUAC (House UnAmerican Activities Committee)" were common and any anti-communist efforts were virtually dismissed as "red under every bed" paranoia.
We were caught flat-footed. A lot of the impetus for the outbreak came from the very MSM employees we trusted -- and in full color! no less. Almost all of them journalism veterans of W.W.II. whom we trusted. Little did we know.
Good point. These leftists and cultural quick change artists have given the 60's a bad name but they were only a part of the era.
They get most of the attention and press because they were (and are) so in-your-face, loud and vocal.
But that era also had it's share of real patriots who were proud of America, knew who George Washington, Patrick Henry and Benjamin Franklin were and who not only volunteered to serve their country, but were proud of it and proud to wear their uniforms.
It had some good music (not the political whining and acid rock stuff), most people still had manners, morals and respect for themselves and others.
People respected our laws and weren't surprised or upset when they were enforced.
Most kids, black and white, were born into married families and brought up by a heterosexual couple and it wasn't a hate crime to call them mom and dad.
People didn't view collecting welfare as a profession to be handed down from generation to generation.
We had solid industries, good jobs, good opportunity, and plenty of optimism.
We had muscle cars and cars that got over 30 mpg and you didn't have to be a lawyer or retired doctor to afford a new Corvette or Harley Davidson.
Kids that made it all the way through high school to graduation could actually read, write and do arithmetic in their heads.
Young boys belonged to the BSA, went camping and their parents didn't have to worry about lawsuits (or worse) from rabid homosexuals.
Boys who carried a jackknife weren't brought up on criminal charges and young girls weren't giving Lewinski's on the school bus "because the Presiident said it's not sex".
Young girls who belonged to the Girl Scouts weren't inculcated with militant feminism and didn't know (or care) what a lesbian was.
Its a shame the liberals came to dominate our culture.
We were a much more humane society before they began to change America to the anything-goes culture we have today.
I hope the ‘60s attitude dies with the ‘60s generation. Let’s see, an 18 year old in 1968 would be 58 today. Give it 20 to 30 more years. I’ll only be 49.
I've always thought it was somehow all connected with never having to grow up and accept responsibility which would help explain the infatuation with socialism and big government.
Kind of like "An Endless Summer" for communists.
Let me know if you want in or out.
Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/
NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
Pajamasmedia: http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/
Good comparison and the Iraq War is the Perfect Wave for the current time...
Many of these douchebags (smoking rooms in public high school, end the war, free love, do your own thing) are today’s moralizing fascists, and they have government jobs.
You said: “Find out how someone feels about Vietnam and you’ll know how they feel about Iraq and indeed most of their politics.”
If that ain’t the TRUTH!!!
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