My Peeps, An Intro

As the aleatory processes of the Universe would have it, I attended the University of California, Berkeley campus, during the years 1966 through 1970.  I sometimes free-ride on the modern cachet of this credential; that is to say, modern American kids who want to do likewise, those frenetic and obsessive grinds, look upon Berkeley as some sort of Holy Grail, and so my membership among its multitudinous alumnae is looked upon as something of a singular achievement.  In truth, I do little to dissuade them from this delusion.  Way back when, when California was a far less populous state and comprised mainly of Anglo-Saxon liberal arts majors, it really wasn't all that big a deal.  Berkeley was certainly nothing special as far as a place to get an undergraduate degree.  A professor actually interested in pedagogy was immediately marked by his peers as a scholastic mediocrity.  An award for excellence in teaching was virtually certain to get a prof knocked off the tenure track.

Still, because of the Vietnam War, Nixon, Kissinger, Cambodia, Reagan as governor of the state (you see, kids, bad times are not confined to the historical present), and Berkeley's well-deserved rep as a center of protest, the extramural aspects of being there then were definitely memorable. It was a wild scene, man, I'll grant you that.  The immediacy of an unpopular, scary, bloody war in which you might be compelled to fight gave everything a vivid realness - these weren't abstract ideas, like whether we ought to remake the Middle East along the lines of Neocon wet dreams.

Everyone who graduated from high school around 1966 is now either older than sixty or pushing up against that Rubicon. So it's fair to say that the past 40+ years have actually been The Generation of Flower Children Ascendant.  Whatever's gone on has been the handiwork of that generation's exercise of control. To be intellectually honest, we have to count George W. Bush among our number, but I consider him an outlier in the cohort. He was just sort of a weird anomaly from a half-wit dynasty.  Far more typical of our generation was Bill Clinton, a man who rose high above stupidity only to be brought down by cupidity.

Clinton, in fact, is something of a perfect avatar for the Sixties generation.  Possessed of an IQ two or three standard deviations above the population mean, and a big conceptual thinker, he couldn't really think of anything to do with the power he acquired other than to use it to satisfy his prodigious personal appetites. When he left office, he devoted himself to a feverish capitalization on his celebrity.  When it was revealed he had made over $100 million since leaving office, no one bothered to compare his singularity of true purpose (greed) with his idealistic noises.  It wasn't even worth talking about, and it was nothing that would even occur to those of us in his generation.

Paradoxically, I think the generation of which I was a part is one of the least idealistic generations in American history.  I'm mindful always of the blind-men-and-the-elephant parable (one of the more lapidary of our folk tales), and the trap it implies, but when I think back on everyone I knew in those Berkeley days, the thing that strikes me is that no one I knew (and I include myself, of course) did much other than slump down into the Suburban Project that the Clusterf**k Man rails about on the linked site to your right.  Despite all the noises that we made about "materialism" and America's hoggish overuse of energy, its disproportionate contribution to environmental damage, it wasn't as if we ever let that get in the way of our own pursuit of comfort, American Style.  We simply built on the modest prosperity of our parents' generation to provide ourselves with a more fully elaborated form of affluence.

The older I get, the more I believe that the one core truth reached by Karl Marx is in his Manifesto was his insistence that "material" conditions in a society are formative of consciousness. There was no "trial by fire" of my generation, no privation, no Great Depression, no Good War.  There was a war to avoid (and our national leaders, by and large, all avoided it), and the rest of life was devoted to acquisition, pleasure, indulgence. 

As I sort of said in the last number, one of the reasons I think the plight of the Palestinians has become such a hot cause celebre for modern Liberals is that outgunned brown people provide a kind of Revolutionary Fantasy Camp for our "idealistic compassion," which is always looking for someplace to alight.  In point of fact, Hamas is dedicated to the principle that a Jewish state cannot exist in the heart of the Muslim Arab world.  This is the announced policy of its leader, and it is the (non-idealistic) reality that Israel deals with.  It is difficult for Americans to relate to the urgency of such a situation because the truth of the matter is that we have no similar existential enemies.  We think that Israel should counter-attack a rain of missiles on towns bordering Gaza by writing blogs and letters to the editor, or by arguing vociferously at dinner parties, the way we Americans do.  Or even through street demonstrations, which we consider really, really radical.

On the Berkeley campus now one is much more apt to find a pro-Palestinian demonstration than any expression of support for Israel.  Back in the day, we all walked around with our hearts in our mouths waiting for the latest news of the Six Day War, wondering whether Israel would survive.  Such are the winds of change.  Nothing much really changed in the United States to account for the difference in opinion.  We remained the same fickle intellectual dilettantes, with no true skin in the game, that we had always been.  Our life's work has been the avoidance of pain and want and the maximizing of pleasure and wealth; yet paradoxically this vocation has brought us to the edge of the economic abyss.  I think, in the effort to make life easy, we have guaranteed that it's going to be very, very hard.  I kind of shudder to think how my generation will deal with true hardship.

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
And that's why I'm turning you in
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal.

Phil Ochs, "Love Me I'm A Liberal"