The age of Aquarius revisited
I wrote the following back in January, 2008. I think it bears repeating.
* * * * *
Many liberals I know are enthralled with Obama.
As far as I could tell, this was based primarily on the feeling he gave his supporters: hope, trust, excitement. It was as though the optimistic part of the 60s had come back after a long absence and many dashed dreams.
A lot of people who went through the 60s keep yearning for that special feeling they’d gotten back then (when they weren’t stoned, that is, or maybe when they were stoned): a sense that wonderful things were possible and just around the corner, that all it would take was the right attitude and the casting off of the old and fusty, that charismatic leaders with inspiring words and good intentions would lead the way.
The way to where, and to what? The goals were fairly clear: liberty and justice—and equality of outcome, not just opportunity—for all. Oh, and the end of bigotry, war, and the economic exploitation by the nasty rich of the noble poor.
Not too much to ask.
Exactly how this was to be accomplished wasn’t as clear. Thinking it and saying it, and sweeping out the old (don’t trust anyone over thirty—that is, anyone with enough experience of the world to rain on this particular parade), and bringing in the new and pure of heart.
Pure of heart, yes, that was the ticket. That would be enough to reorder human nature and usher in nothing less than the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
Well, it didn’t quite work out that way, did it? And yet, to the aged ex-Sixties-hippies and their young friends (at least the latter have the excuse of not having lived through the earlier disenchantment) hope springs eternal, even if a bit diminished and tarnished.
The ability to exhume and tap into that feeling of generalized hope, long-buried relic of the 60s and perhaps its most seductive product (maybe even more so than sex, drugs, and rock and roll), is Obama’s great strength.
This fact was brought home to me when I read “The Choice” by George Packer in this week’s New Yorker, about the differences between Obama and Hillary. The word Packer uses to describe Obama’s effect on his Democrat supporters is “inspirational.” It’s a special sort of inspiration; the linkage to the 60s is clear and overt.
Greg Craig, old Clinton buddy from their Law School days during the early 70s, was head of Bill Clinton’s defense team during the impeachment fight. You might think Craig would be a Hillary supporter in the 2008 campaign. But if you thought that, you’d think wrong:
In spite of his long history with the Clintons, Craig is an adviser to Barack Obama’s campaign. “Ninety-five per cent of it is because of my enthusiasm for Obama,” he said last month, at his law office. “I really regard him as a fresh and exciting voice in American politics that has not been in my life since Robert Kennedy.” In 1968, Craig, who is sixty-two, was campaigning for Eugene McCarthy when he heard a Bobby Kennedy speech at the University of Nebraska, and became a believer on the spot. Since then, Craig has not been inspired by any American President. As for the prospect of another Clinton Presidency, he said, “I don’t discount the possibility of her being able to inspire me. But she hasn’t in the past, and Obama has.”
This is exactly the sort of comment I hear from friends. When I think about it, I realize not only how far I am now from this kind of thinking, but how far I was then, as well.
I often describe my earlier politics as having been typically liberal Democrat, although never Leftist. But I also had more than a dollop of political cynicism in my makeup. “Inspiration” is a word I would have rarely identified with in the political arena. I’d have to look either in the past for inspiration (Churchill, Lincoln) or in my childhood, the last time I really felt that sort of trust in a candidate.
In fact, I never understood the reverence and hope people invested in Bobby Kennedy, the political inspiration Craig cites. Had RFK lived I might even have voted for him, I suppose. But something in me was naturally wary of the sort of adulation that I saw others have for him—the hope that he could magically, by dint of his very personality and his rhetoric, heal the profound wounds of America at the time.
We’ll never know, because he was assassinated. Perhaps he could have been a wonderful President. But I saw nothing in his history that would indicate so except the fact that many people believed he had magic.
Maybe that would have been enough, because belief and trust can go a long way. But I tend to doubt it; Kennedy was charismatic to those predisposed to agree with him, but a polarizing and distrusted figure to those who did not.
In his New Yorker article, Packer continues with another friend from Clinton’s past:
Robert B. Reich, the Secretary of Labor in Clinton’s first term, who now teaches at Berkeley, told me that he believes political inspiration to be “the legitimizing of social movements and social change, the empowering of all sorts of people and groups to act as remarkable change agents.”
There’s that popular word again, “change” (the current use of which Gerard Vanderleun neatly skewers in this essay). Change for change’s sake is meaningless. What’s important is not the general but the specific: change what, change why—and, most tellingly, change how.
That’s a great deal more difficult to describe, and a great deal easier to criticize when the details are fleshed out. So inspirational candidates do well to keep their remarks general.
Inspiration in and of itself is not a bad thing, and the Right is not immune to wanting some and to bewailing the fact that their candidates are lacking in it. That’s probably part of what the current nostalgia for Reagan, the Great Inspirer of the Right, is all about.
But the Right tends to want more specifics as well, as the Anchoress points out, and to be miffed and unforgiving if inspiration doesn’t come with ideological purity of thought and action.
The Right is interested—very interested—in the details, and tends to require them before it will allow itself to be inspired. This can lead the Right to embrace candidates with the correct conservative doctrine who have no chance of winning—which proves that being on the Right is no guarantee of a pragmatic attitude towards politics.
Thomas Sowell has written a piece on the subject of inspiration, entitled “Dangerous Demagoguery: beware candidates who inspire but don’t inform.” He calls for specifics to ground rhetoric:
Uniting people behind the thoughtless mantra of “change” means asking for a blank check in exchange for rhetoric. That deal has been made many times in many places ”” and millions of people have lived to regret it.
It is not too much to ask politicians to talk specifics, instead of trying to sweep us along, turning off our minds and turning on our emotions, with soaring rhetoric.
Optimists might even hope for some logical consistency and hard facts.
Barack Obama says that he wants to “heal America and repair the world.” One wonders what he will do for an encore and whether he will rest on the seventh day.
“Heal America and repair the world.” I hadn’t heard those exact words before, but they perfectly illustrate my point. I tried in vain to find a link to Obama’s speech so I didn’t run the risk of misquoting him or quoting him out of context. The best I could do was this, in which an online community commenter writes that in Obama’s NH speeches he said:
…this is a defining moment for this generation. New Hampshire, if you will stand with me in four days, I promise you that not only will we win the New Hampshire primary, not only will we win South Carolina, not only Nevada, Florida and the democratic primary, not only will we win the general election and the presidency, but united with you, we will unleash the spirit and the strength to finally HEAL AMERICA AND REPAIR THE WORLD.”
And they say neocons are naively optimistic about what America can do!
Politicians always engage in hyperbole, so I don’t want to be too hard on Obama for his. But this is an especially over-arching sort of goal, almost religious in nature (as Sowell rightly points out), and therefore wariness is especially indicated.
Obama seems to be telling “this generation” (the one that missed out on all that 60s good stuff) that they will have their Age of Aquarius too, at last:
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revalation
And the mind’s true liberation.
Aquarius!
Aquarius!
When you were born in 1955 you were old enough to be aware of what was happening around you, and yet not a part of it. I watched with fascinated detachment the enthusiasms of the Older Cohort Boomers. But I also noted their excesses and where they just seemed out of touch with reality. But that’s because I was a quiet, shy kid who didn’t get swept up in it, and only many years later after I had left the Left in 1987 did I, in stages, begin to understand the period of The Sixties.
I don’t understand the nostalgia for it. The politics of that time were almost detached from reality. I was never swept up in it. And as a younger Boomer who later took the journey into Marxist intellectual currents, I kind of thought the Sixties’ enthusiasts were not rigorous enough in their thinking. And that impression has not changed at all since I have left Marxism behind.
I have not listened to any Obama speeches. Not one. Even when he’s on the radio or t.v. I tune him out. I pay attention to policy and what he does – not his stentorian voice luring in the lemmings.
The other day I was watching Woodstock, trying to revisit the idealism I felt in those days in order to better understand how we ended up in our improbable position today with a president who is half-black, half-white, who fellow-traveled with black radicals and white Weathermen, and who was elected surfing a wave of hope, change and peace.
You can draw a pretty straight line from Woodstock to Obama.
I wish the world was a simple and wonderful as the Sixties visions were, but I fear that it is not and there will be a terrible price to be paid in this century for that lack of realism.
Those nostalgic for the 60s are nostalgic for a time when things were clear – when their opinions were clearly right: Civil Rights, Vietnam, anti capitalism. Glorious, sun-drenched, dopamine soaked days. GLORIOUS DAYS of being right. How they remember them!
Since: things are murkier. Only Civil Rights remains a clear victory. Millions of old leftists now marched with MLK. Risked their lives, in fact.
Were the beliefs/opinions of 60s aficionados wrong?
Aficionados don’t want to think so. Their entire self image depends upon their being and having been right about such matters. So they cling to rationalization: their theory was right, and only the execution of their theory has been wrong. Thus their fastidious watching of horizons for a messiah who will competently put their righteous theories into practice. That’ll show everyone! 60s aficionados have been right all along – at least since the Newport Folk Festivals of ’63 and ’64. The answers have been blowin in the wind, waiting for a Messiah to grasp them.
btw, I love Joan Baez’ voice, and appreciate her intellectual integrity. She was wonderful singing this Dylan song with Earl Scruggs: “Love is Just a Four Letter Word”.
ah…
and were did this idea of the Aquarian age come from?
now forget the illuminati tin hat part… thats not valid, its a smoke screen… what better place to hide your manipulative crap…
its where they put sangers facts before the internet allowed her autobiography to exist again.
one only needs to look at the way back machine and how people, institutions and political parties scrub information and change their appearance by doing so… its not new…
Alice Bailey, who had succeeded Annie Besant as head of the Theosophical movement, together with her husband, Foster Bailey, launched Lucifer Publishing Company, which published the theosophical periodical Lucifer. Though, they changed the name to Lucis Publishing Company. The work of Lucis Trust is carried out through its Arcane School of the occult, and World Goodwill. Together, they work to implement what is termed “the Plan”, as was revealed in 24 books written by Bailey, and published by Lucis Trust. Alice Bailey, though, claimed that it as Djwhal Khul, her “Ascended Master”, actually wrote the books through her while she was in a trance.
The focus of “the Plan” she was instructed to pursue is to usher in the “Harmonic Convergence,” also known as the Omega, Mind Convergence, Fusion or Turning Point, which can occur only when nations put aside their differences in a “New World Order” of global unity. When world government and religion are finally realized, the New Age, or the Age of Aquarius, will have dawned. Only then will Jesus Christ the Avatar appear, and the implementation of the New World Order fully begin. This “Christ” is also known as Lord Maitraya, said to be awaited also by Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, and Hindus, though he is known by these believers respectively as the Messiah, Imam Mahdi, the fifth Buddha, or Krishna.
the stuff goes back a long way to the SAME people again…
The Lucis Trust is run through an international board of trustees, whose membership is said to have included: John D. Rockefeller, Norman Cousins, Robert S. McNamara, Thomas Watson, Jr. of IBM, and former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, Henry Clauson, a Grand Commander of the Supreme Council, 33rd Degree, Southern District Scottish Rite, and Henry Kissinger, thus tying Bailey’s organization into the various Round Table groups, including the CFR, the Bilderberger group, and the Trilateral Commission
they tend to take a pool of facts. then draw nefarious conclusions that the data does not offer..
though the data in and of itself is scary enough..
and gets more funky when you look at members, lineage, symbolism, and more.
remember that some of this stuff ended up being promoted by herbert marcuse… they funded them… its a famous list and the organizations are STILL funding things (while many people think they survive on donations, many of these organizaions get almost no donations, and are funded through a system of charitable organizaion conglomerates, with the ford foundation being one of the biggest.
but this is all part of the shadow history that no one talks about… its there… you can look it up in good sources… ford foundation did kick the fords out (to which they wrote a letter railing how the group was socialist and was created by capitalists)
who funded the ACLU? check out who funded the tuskeegee experiment on blacks and other things…
huxley was part of the lucis trust… his brother was a one worlder who started the predecessor to the UN… and huxley wrote a tome that got many in the west to tune in turn on and drop out on drugs and lose their cultural connections and knowlege.
In a lecture to the California Medical School, in San Francisco, in 1961, Huxley explained:
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.[4]
again… what was and is seen as a natural thing… is NOT a natural thing, becasue since 1917… communists have been MAKING history, not reacting to it.
The Frankfurt School converged on the thesis that mass media could be used to induce “regressive mental states, atomizing individuals and producing increased lability”, in other words, creating passivity by fostering alienation. Following the Tavistock Institute’s study of war psychosis, and its breakdown of individual personality, as Wolf describes, in Brainwashing: How The British Use The Media for Mass Psychological Warfare:
From their work, an evil thesis emerged: Through the use of terror, man can be reduced to a childlike and submissive state, in which his powers of reason are clouded, and in which his emotional response to various situations and stimuli can become predictable, or in Tavistockian terms, “profitable.” By controlling the levels of anxiety, it is possible to induce a similar state in large groups of people, whose behavior can then be controlled and manipulated by the oligarchical forces for whom Tavistock worked.[8]
When the Frankfurt School researchers relocated to America, they were established at Columbia University in New York, where they also had links the Radio Research Institute at Princeton University. While All Souls College at Oxford University was the base for Round Table operations in England, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, established by Abraham Flexner, the prominent education theorist, of the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, was the center of activities in America
go ahead… look it all up… AND STAY AWAY FROM THE TIN HATs..
Lord Bertrand Russell, who joined with the Frankfurt School in this effort at mass social engineering, explained the basis of the strategy, in his 1951 book, The Impact of Science on Society:
Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called “education.” Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.
…The subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship… The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.
…Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.[10]
Aldous Huxley, published a book called The Devils of Loudun in 1952, where he described this phenomenon:
If exposed long enough to the tomtoms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with savages. Assemble a mob of men and women, treat them to amplified band music, bright lights, and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.[11]
The social theory of rock was elaborated by musicologist Theodor Adorno, who headed the Radio Research Project:
In an imaginary but psychologically emotion-laden domain, the listener who remembers a hit song will turn into the song’s ideal subject, into the person for whom the song ideally speaks. At the same time, as one of many who identify with that fictitious subject, that musical I, he will feel his isolation ease as he himself feels integrated into the community of “fans.” In whistling such a song he bows to a ritual of socialization, although beyond this unarticulated subjective stirring of the moment his isolation continues unchanged… The comparison with addiction is inescapable. Addicted conduct generally has a social component: it is one possible reaction to the atomization which, as sociologists have noticed, parallels the compression of the social network. Addiction to music on the part of a number of entertainment listeners would be a similar phenomenon.[12]
In 1939, the Radio Project published some of their findings in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Their conclusion was that Americans had, over the previous twenty years, become “radio-minded,” and that their listening had become so fragmented that repetition of format was the key to popularity. The play list determined the “hits”, and repetition could make any form of music, or any performer, a “star.” As long as a familiar form or context was retained, almost any content would become acceptable. “Not only are hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types,” said Adorno a few years later, “but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable.”[13]
now you know why movies suck… music is the way it is… art is the way it is… that the aquarian age was the start to prime the pump for a messaih..
anyone now think the same way about things?
Guys,
I think there should be a house limit on the
expresso.
Dan,
Turn the channel or have a discussion.
I know a lot of well-meaning progressives. They share their political views freely at choir practice. (I’m an Episcopalian: nuff said.) I have noticed that they don’t know much about how the world works, and they seem perplexed on many questions. But when the phrase “Civil Rights” is uttered, they become excited and certain that they know the right thing to do in every case. Most are perhaps a little older than Fred.
I conclude that they remember the Civil Rights Movement as a moment of CERTAINTY, when they just KNEW they were right and on the right side. Not to mention the pleasure of being aligned to a power that cannot be withstood.
There has been very little of that feeling for them since perhaps 1965 or 1966. I suspect that many of them have considered most of the period since 1980 as a long national nightmare, interrupted only by the false dawn of the triangulating Clintons.
These folks are euphoric right now. Age of Aquarius indeed.
Oblio,
What many of those people a few years older than I am do not understand is the FACT that very many of the generation older than they are were on the side of the abolition of Jim Crow too. They were quiet about it, but they taught their kids and their charges the right lessons about what the Gospel and our founding documents meant.
The religious sisters, brothers, and the priests I had in school through high school were on the side of full political enfranchisement during the Civil Rights struggle.
For these people to strut and preen as if they were somehow special is an insult to other Americans older and younger than themselves. They are just so caught up in themselves that they miss the forest for the trees.
I confess that I could never understand the adulation people seem to feel for Obama. He does not now, nor has he ever, inspired me in the least. I feel as if I am living in another universe than his supporters. He looks to me to be nothing more than a machine politician of modest accomplishment, whose facile bormides inspire his supporters to fits of extasy. It calls to mind Jim Jones and his ilk. What is the attraction? What makes otherwise intelligent people fall for empty promise like this?
I fear that what lies behind all of the talk of hope and change is a group of cynical manipulators who are using the idealists as a path to power. I do not see any way that this can end other than badly. Obama will not live up to promise because nobody could. How will the idealists react to this?
I was born in ’52. I was a rock and roll guitar playing long haired hippie from my early teens in the mid sixties until the mid seventies. For some reason, I got a haircut, some education, and a job. I wasn’t sure why, it just felt like it was time – if you know what I mean. A little later on came Carter, and the transformation was made complete.
I forget who said it, probably someone in and around the Nixon administration, but he stated one of the greatest threats ever, to America, was the hippie movement. Considering how it morphed into what we have now, turns out he was right.
Which reminds me of a joke:
Johnny: Mommy, mommy, I’m gonna be a guitar player when I grow up!
Mommy: Oh, come on now Johnny, you know you can’t do both.
Feel free to insert hippie, even perhaps baby boomer, where you see guitar player.
Signing off now. Peace, love, dove…hippie beads….and far out!
By the way, this “monkey” business is pure hypocrisy. How many times have you seen Bush portrayed as a monkey in political cartoons over the years? And there was no effort in their hiding what the cartoons meant.
Biggest problem the libs have is not being able to take what they dish out – much less look in a mirror. Well, besides being wrong, that is.
The Obamite worship reminds me of the scene in Independence Day when all the airheaded loonies in L.A. went to the top of the Capital Records tower with their Wecome! Peace! and Love! sings, waiting for the wonderful aliens to come down an bless them.
And the portals opened, and their upturned, enraptured, gormless faces turned to shock and horror as the blue beam lanced down from heaven — and blasted them to atoms.
signs, not sings!
BR549,
Yours and my stories are really close. I was a tad younger than you, being born in 1953, but the years of long hair, sex, drugs and rock and roll music ended for me too in the mid 70’s. I look back on some of those years with a bit of nostalgia, but I never want to go back there. However, I have acquired a reel to reel deck, and if I can get it to work, I will rip all the old band tapes to *.flac files and enjoy them once again. The band I was leader of started with “Smoke on the Water”, and ended with “The way of the World” by Earth, Wind and Fire.
Hard rock (Cream Tull etc) to Soft Rock (Seals and Crofts) to Disco (The Hustle, etc) was the path, the path caused by pure Capitalism since we had to actually start making money, imagine that! LOQ
Drew
I think this points out one of the basic differences between liberals and conservatives. Thomas Sowell describes in “Conflict of Visions” two basic mindsets. One sees life as a series of trade-offs and compromises; he calls this the “constrained” vision, where one realizes one’s wishes are contrained by reality. The unconstrained vision does not recognize limits. They do not focus on the details because to do so would be to recognize limitations. What is important to them is the bright, shiney future they want. This is why Obama looks so good to liberals. The details are simply unimportant. If you are asking about the details you obviously are stupid and stubborn and only looking to obstruct the grand movement of all to a better place.
Eh, what’s the old saying? A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.
Very interesting blog and post. Relevantly, as many nationally influential voices have repeatedly noted, Obama–born in 1961– is part of Generation Jones, born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and Generation X. Google Generation Jones, and you’ll see it’s gotten a ton of media attention, and many top commentators from many top publications and networks (Washington Post, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) specifically use this term to describe Obama.
Excellent op-ed on Obama as the first Generation Jones President in USA TODAY a couple of weeks ago, particularly relevant to your Age of Aquarius theme:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20090127/column27_st.art.htm
I was born in 1968.
You cannot imagine how f’in stupid this whole thing looks to me….
PS: I enjoy Artfldgers posts–particularly the ones on this thread.
Re: “Independence Day”:
“And the portals opened, and their upturned, enraptured, gormless faces turned to shock and horror as the blue beam lanced down from heaven – and blasted them to atoms.”
That was my second favorite scene in the movie, after the one where Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum get “outed” on the alien mothership and have to leave in a hurry. Well, I guess the fantasy of no more hippies will have to remain just that.
I’m one of those who thought the “Age of Aquarius” was a bunch of b.s., even at the time. While my early-boomer elders (I was born in 1956) reveled in their dope, their antiwar protests, and their lefty pseudo-philosophy, I took one look at it all as a young teen and ran like hell the other way. Never looked back, either. Maybe because I relied on my thinking and judgment (remembering my Meyers-Briggs here) rather than my emotions, I was largely immune to the appeal of a Bobby Kennedy then, or a Barack Obama now. “Nice speech, Senator. Now how do you plan on
Stupid touchpad. As I was saying,
…Now how do you plan on translating those pretty words into reality? What are the details?” I didn’t see too many on the Left asking that before November. They’re starting to, as is the press. But too little too late. We’re stuck with our prize for the next four years.
By the way, this “monkey” business is pure hypocrisy. How many times have you seen Bush portrayed as a monkey in political cartoons over the years? And there was no effort in their hiding what the cartoons meant.
bush is a member of the oppressor class, and as such is open to any attack till there are no more people in the oppressor class
only death will suffice, one cant convert since one cant be reborn as another class – ergo, its always leads to extermination – funnier if you read the stuff from 1880s you realize that class is synonomous with royal rule. [of course the guitar playing hippy didnt read what i posted which woud have explained why he was a guitar playign hippy and what was dont to him… all laid out 20 years before the 60s! stadiums of people listening to rock and roll was first detailed by huxley, i gave the quote above)
there is no way to turn this around… period
why? because if you cant get these people to read these texts to understand the history, they will not read things like this.
It is very popular to pose as a “friend of humanity,” or a “friend of the working classes.” The character, however, is quite exotic in the United States. It is borrowed from England, where some men, otherwise of small account, have assumed it with great success and advantage. Anything which has a charitable sound and a kind-hearted tone generally passes without investigation, because it is disagreeable to assail it.
read sumner, and you fidn out the truth as to socialism, that its a means to power… and it ALWAYHS was…
but since we dont read dead white guyus… eveyone is self confident in the lies they know…
and their attention spans are so small, that they think my posts are large!!! when compared to the past, my posts are TINY…
i have only been able to post up 2 or three paragraphs from books that are 1000 pages long as an average… and these WHOLE books are as clear and easy to understand as the paragraph above.
so the missive of not reading the dead white guys is equivalent to book burning in hiding the truths and analysis in them.
welcome to the game…
Hard rock (Cream Tull etc) to Soft Rock (Seals and Crofts) to Disco (The Hustle, etc) was the path, the path caused by pure Capitalism since we had to actually start making money, imagine that! LOQ
no… it was the path to socialism… the 60s was not a capitalis revolution… so it didnt lead to capitqalism..
see 180 degrees off and cant tell!
this was written in 52… BEFORE rock and roll invasion and large scale mass games! (do note the if you read this, and you were soviet, what would you think of rock and roll?)
If exposed long enough to the tomtoms and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by capering and howling with savages. Assemble a mob of men and women, treat them to amplified band music, bright lights, and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many aldous huxley (and i posted it twice in this thread since obviously almost no one read it the first time)
Dan, your crack about the espresso was funny and appropriate.
Does anyone follow the stuff about Gen Y on the blogs. The Gen Y propaganda defines the boomers in the exact same way that they described their parents. They are authoritarian who want young people to do boring jobs.
But Gen Y won’t stand for it. We’ve been using computers since we were three, they say, and we’re going to change the world.
During the 60s, the people who claimed to be different from their parents actually had different lifestyles for awhile. That doesn’t seem to be the case now.
Also, when speaking about the “60s generation” we are talking about a small portion of the boomer population. Nixon won a landslide in 1972. If there were so many hippies and Marxists who voted for him? And, that year, 18 year olds were allowed to vote.
Recruiting Animal,
have you noticed that all discussions from those like dan and you are all so sure that everythig only happens now…
in other wrods, their discussions rarely go outside the realm of their own personal experience.
that the only reality worth talking about is the one that they exist in, and as if the universe came into being at that time, and so everything in front of them has an explanation that they can make up completely ignoreing that before they were born, there were a lto of thinkers, and a lot BETTER thinkers.
these new people stand on the shoulders of midgets and complain when others stand on the shoulders of giants.
look at the arguments of Recruiting Animal, they are all in the immediate…
why did these peopel suddenly claim to be different? waht influenced them. who declared “if it feels good do it”? what literature were they reading that changed their world? waht literature were they forbidden to read or deflected away from that allowed them to swallow crap so easily…
this is the difference between a true beliver socialist, and a reactionary.. the reactionary can only react to the history in front of them… the historian has the whole before them in context, and the socialist manipulates and lies to create a false one to move people around.
its interesting that if you give an IQ test to the people that complain most as to long texts and dry history, you will find that they are not that smart, but they have learned to appear smart by pretending to parrot the cliches and lines (as orwell said).
they swallow the whole false argumetn of class, in a country that has no roualty and so has no classes!!!
you can make up a term, and inject it into the converstation, and these people are so self confident as to their omniscient special knowlege from the ether, that they will “figure” out what it is and pretend to be knowlegeable way before they ever admit they dont know at all what its about!!!
one only has to look at the videos of people willing to sign to remove the pollutant hydrogen dioxide… (water)… or the girls willing to sign a petition to stop womens sufferage.
of course they think sufferage is suffering, and they never will admit that they are idiots and open a chance to learn. no… they will ridicule, and make jokes like too much caffeine.
and they managed to insulate themselves from any other message than one that si approved by their masters… the lords and ladies of PC.
after the idiots slap themselves on the back at how clever they are, they then get into their little bubble of the here and now, and analyse from no basis, and then are happy… of course they dont liek or attack with jokes anyone that might upset this, because their self worth is tied to their self esteem, and they have really nothing to justify the sefl esteem cause they are too lazy to read even a paragraph that appears too long.
why are things this way… because there are more idiots like this than smart noble people, and the smart nasty people use the idiots totheir own ends and dispose of them.
they are too dense to even understand that they are being turned into slaves.
The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C’s interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man. For once let us look him up and consider his case, for the characteristic of all social doctors is, that they fix their minds on some man or group of men whose case appeals to the sympathies and the imagination, and they plan remedies addressed to the particular trouble; they do not understand that all the parts of society hold together, and that forces which are set in action act and react throughout the whole organism, until an equilibrium is produced by a re-adjustment of all interests and rights. They therefore ignore entirely the source from which they must draw all the energy which they employ in their remedies, and they ignore all the effects on other members of society than the ones they have in view. They are always under the dominion of the superstition of government, and, forgetting that a government produces nothing at all, they leave out of sight the first fact to be remembered in all social discussion–that the State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man.
they think they are D, but they are C, and so they vote their own slavery!!!
and yet, they make fun of the others that would deliver them from their masters and make free individuals of them who could seek their own purpose.
is it any wonder that so many smart people change sides damning the idiots to their place because they WANT TO BE THERE!!! for those that didnt, wouldnt fight to preserve their ignorance so well.
Sum Ting Wong said
You no think too good,
You no think too much.
Shoosh!
Something worth remembering about The Sixties is that, in many ways, it was an American phenomenon. (Well, sure, American culture had great influence in the world then as well. But I believe that was a reaction to what was going on in America, not part of it.)
Think about what the Sixties meant — for people in Southeast Asia. For people in the Middle East. For people in South America. For people in Eastern Europe. These were not idyllic times, folks.
The Age of Aquarius types were not simply taking a vacation from history; they were ignoring what was going on in the world around them. (Did actions not have consequences in the rest of the world? Why should the United States be different?)
And we can see the pattern repeating today. Haven’t we seen prominent people make fools of themselves, by seeing strife in the world and thinking aloud that “we thought it would all be different once Obama was elected”?
The American people voted for Hope & Change, which knows no bounds; what they got was Barack Obama, who, unfortunately, must lead in the real world. We will see how that plays out.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
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