I like that Rick Perlstein had the chance to sum it up in this relatively short retrospective of the riots (police and less so students) at the 1968 Democratic Party convention. I always felt Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were mostly into destruction than anything policy based. They, and too many of the protestor leaders (Paul Krassner and Phil Ochs get important passes from me) were petulant and ultimately reactionaries themselves at that point (Rubin was a network marketer in his last years, proving he was always a cynical sales marketer, while Hoffman settled into a more positive left-liberalism and was even good on environmental issues).
The one thing I think was not highlighted, though, is the frustration the young activists felt about the Democratic Party, which was doing so much for improving civil rights domestically, and trying to help the poor, but was still prosecuting a war so awful it qualified as a war crime, as later admitted by Nuremberg prosecutor, Telford Taylor. The then-young activists never thought its own generation would settle into Archie Bunker-dum and walk away from the New Deal achievements.
I have always said I come from a 1930s American New Deal political tradition in the sense of pushing for public policy changes to benefit the many while protecting institutions through the reform of institutions. I am not a tear-it-all-down person, and do not have that do-your-own-thing sensibility of so many Yippies of 1968, hippies of that late 1960s era, or the so-called "Woodstock Generation." I remember, as a fourteen year old in 1971, being appalled by Hoffman's Steal This Book as destructive to the Commonweal and ultimately a pre-historic cosplay at revolution (I of course did not have the word "cosplay" for use at the time). As Zappa understood, that mindset led to phony behaviors and ultimately reactionary ends, which is terribly ironic since these very people thought themselves most "revolutionary" at the time.* It is why I remember saying to one of my close friends, upon the death of legendary frontman of the Doors, Jim Morrison, in July 1971, Morrison may have ended up as a real estate investor had he lived (though I continue to love the Doors, both for their musical sound and for their lyrical fury). Morrison's Dionysian sensibilities would have lead him eventually to Ayn Randian sensibilities since both are rooted in narcissism. When Christopher Lasch began publishing his books on narcissism in modern American life, and related topics, I found much to re-affirm what I was feeling and seeing. I even wrote a song in 1978 about it, later updated in one line about "E.T" when recording the song in 1984, called "Spoiled Generation." Apparently, it is a big ticket for record collectors these days. Imagine that...
I have long said future historians in the 22nd Century will see 1968 as the year the American Empire and American society looked at itself in the mirror and found itself wanting, and is the point at which the slow, long collapse of the American Empire and American society began. It is the point where we as a nation stopped having hope for ourselves or in ourselves, and began losing even the belief that our government could be harnessed in a way to help our communities. It is a point where the phrase "every person for himself, herself or itself" began to fester into the discourse and become an overarching political philosophy. "Rights, rights, rights" became a mantra, including the modern Christian Right line of a "right" to discriminate--when the only people who had a right to say "Rights, rights, rights" were African-Americans, who have been betrayed from the moment their ancestors were captured in Africa and brought here on ships as slaves, and gays, who, since the rise of Christianity, have had to endure a millennia of repression, oppression, and at least silence. The rest of us have less rights and more obligations to each other. This does not give African-Americans a "free" ride, however, for their own obligations to themselves and communities, and to the larger American community, have never been stronger. And it does not give gays license to suddenly find themselves without obligations to society once same-sex marriage is legalized. But a recognition of the institutional racism and homophobia that continues to oppress African-Americans and gays, from, respectively, us white folks, including white ethnics and Jews, and from us breeders, would be nice, wouldn't it--and this time, without the whine about "political correctness."
Anyway, I think we are at a point, fifty years on, where we may be able to remind ourselves how the Greatest Generation failed its children, how the Baby Boomers have been and remain narcissistic as a generation, and therefore failed, too, and how Baby Boomers and our parents (some Red Scare Teens, like my own parents' generation, and some of the Greatest Generation) got together to screw ourselves with the undermining of unions, pushing reckless tax cuts and trade deals, and continuing to expand Pax Americana, with our horribly beautiful technological violence. But nah. Let's just focus on the music, the long hair we used to have, bad cops in what a national commission acknowledged was a "police riot" (at least on the part of a "minority" of police officers in Chicago**) and passively wonder what happened. "We didn't start the fire," Billy Joel sang. But as I said at the time, "What are you even saying, Billy? This is just vacuous, stupid news headline reading and mindless name dropping--with a bare melody."
The biggest irony is we Baby Boomers hated our parents in the 1960s. Now, we join our doddering parents in hating our children and grandchildren. We have not looked into that societal mirror for fifty years...because I think we will know what we will see. Maybe going back to 1968 for a deeper perspective will help some of us, at least.*** But you know my take: Let's give the kids a chance to run things. As The Who sang once, "The Kids Are Alright." If only the doddering old people now had given more respect and credit to their own children...maybe the "kids" would not have acted out in 1968, and maybe we could have avoided the corrosive effect of the Counterculture. It is not to say the Counterculture was all bad. Not at all. But the corrosive hatred for authority and its cynical belief that nothing good can come from governmental organization or any organization keeps us mired more and more in a world where the economic royalty in our midst become more powerful, and more corrosive and ultimately destructive.
* Old 1930s socialist-minded Irving Howe, who had a hard time coming to grips with the War against Vietnam, and a harder time understanding "the kids," still had a wonderful line about the Yippie types. He said: "Those who attack me from the Left eventually attack me from the Right." In the 1930s, Howe, a labor left guy who liked Trotsky as an "underdog," had experienced hardcore Stalinists call him a Social Fascist, but, when those Stalinists later became right wing anti-Communists, called him a Communist. Howe made the remark, speaking of the likes of David Horowitz, the early 1960s Leftist who became a notorious right wing agitator, though I like the Wiki cite quote of Howe dressing down a student radical who attacked Howe, saying to the agitator, "You know what you're going to be? A dentist."
**Sorry, Commission study author Dan Walker. A minority of people who riot can do a lot of damage, whether by citizens or by police. And when it is official authority, i.e. the police, that is a real lot of damage.
***Yes, the title of this post comes from the late Norman Mailer's best book, Armies of the Night, where Mailer writes in an anti-scholarly, literary way about what he was seeing in Chicago and in 1968. I have never had much interest in finishing it, having found it too hazy in its writing style, and too full of Mailer's ego. But the book's title is a wonderful literary image that captured a flickering moment in American life in 1968.
