Heaping Coals Upon Our Own Heads
I follow the politics forum on the Well, where I also get my email service. On the whole, the group is outspoken, intellectual, and liberal, a lot like me. It’s my echo chamber, although I assuage my conscience with the fact that one of the virtues of an echo chamber devoted to critical thought is that it does, on occasion, turns that critical thought on its members. That’s a good thing on the Well politics forum, because, unchecked by demands for evidence and historical context, several members would drift off into baseless assertions and even conspiracy theories.
One of the regulars (johnmorris) recently stated that he views the whole rise of the right in American politics over the past thirty or forty years as a backlash against what the upper class perceived as the chaos of the sixties and early seventies. I’m not so sure how far I’d agree with that—I think the upper class has always been rapacious, and merely used that chaos to win over the rural south, and with it, political control in the nation. But the statement isn’t really subject to testing, so, right or wrong or somewhere in between, I’m going to let it lie. But if johnmorris has a useful grip on events, if his view could somehow be tested and found applicable, there’s a huge irony in considering the rise of the right a backlash against the hippies.
The craziness of the sixties and early seventies was itself a backlash against an establishment that had clearly abandoned the American people and their interests. Our politicians built their careers by ruining helpless and insignificant people for hoping workers could live a better life. Our generals were engaged in a bloody senseless war with poorly armed peasants over a part of the world which held no vital American interests. Our ministers railed against allowing a black child to enter the same school as a white child. Our media did everything it could to transform us from producers into consumers. Our scientists had built a bomb that could wipe out all human life, and continued to develop more thorough, more certain methods of annihilation.
And the establishment lied. Big, unabashed, damned lies. Obvious lies. Our scientists told us, in the event of nuclear holocaust, to duck and cover. Our media told us that the Indians were evil, and deserved what they got from the cowboys. Our ministers told us that marijuana turned people into psychopaths, although liquor and cigarettes were still okay. Our generals told us victory in Vietnam was certain while we could see the war grinding to an embarrassing loss. Our president told us he was not a crook after everyone knew he damned well was. The establishment lied so often, and so badly, that people began to deprecate what few truths it offered.
The more obvious the lies became, the more people began to look around and complain about all the lies, the crazier the establishment became, until it started turning on its own people. Tear gas in Harlem. Attack dogs in Selma, Alabama. Rifles in Kent State.
Is it any wonder that so much of the youth of America, privileged to enjoy the advanced education which had become available in the post-war boom, began to question, and then to reject damned near everything the establishment embraced? Taken to the extreme, this was pretty silly, since the establishment believed, among other things, that people should work for a living, and that regular bathing was a good idea. But emphatic and widespread denunciation was understandable. If the establishment was terrified by the chaos of the sixties, it was terrified by a monster of its own creation.
It turned that fear into a powerful political weapon, profiting off the chaos it had created. But the policies that created chaos have been around a long time, well before the craziness of the sixties and early seventies.