Peace/love: a golden oldie
I went out dancing the other night.
No, not ballet. My ballet days are over, I’m afraid.
And no, most assuredly not the tango. My tango days are over, I’m very happy to say.
This was dancing to the music of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. Golden oldies, silver oldies, brass oldies, tin oldies. The music of that last decade, the 80s, is a bit unfamiliar to me. But the rest of the songs rang a bunch of pleasant although somewhat rusty bells.
A portion of those bells involved raucous fraternity dances with spilled beer and even cigarettes (yes, yes, I smoked! But never inhaled; I just enjoyed making the most well-formed and longlasting smoke rings on earth.) Other bells rang for even earlier memories—of dancing in somebody’s knotty-pine-paneled basement to an old record player with a stack of 45s that dropped, one by one, onto a turntable.
This dance the other night was held in a so-called ballroom, a large hall with one of those revolving globes with mirror fragments that cast moving points of light onto the wooden floor. It was a lot of fun; I think I’ll do it again some time (the next day I was only slightly, rather than terribly, sore). I discovered that one of the benefits of getting more–ahem, mature—is that I don’t have to worry quite so much about making a fool of myself on the dance floor. I just assume I’m doing so—at least a little bit—and, at this point, who really cares?
You might think, by the way, that being a former ballet dancer would make a person confident as a social dancer. Not so; the two genres are exceedingly different.
This was a Valentine’s dance. You could tell that because most of us women—and even some of the men—managed to wear something red. And there was chocolate all around.
And then, as the evening was coming to an end, the youngish DJ came over to me and handed me a gift. Or maybe it was a prize (although for what, I don’t know; maybe just for the courage to have gotten out there).
It was a tiny object sealed in a little plastic bag, sort of like something one might find in a crackerjack box. When I opened it, I found this pendant on a chain (those are sparkly blue rhinestones, by the way):
Maybe the DJ was trying to tell neo-neocon the chickenhawk warmonger something or other. Or maybe not; maybe his hawk eye just recognized an ex-semi-hippie-chick when he saw one.
But looking at that peace symbol brought back some other memories. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if peace–real peace, meaningful peace, peace because the need to make war had gone away—were possible? That’s the only kind of peace I can imagine, not a false peace that happens because we’re tired of defending ourselves, or because we’re lulled into a false sense of security by the lying words of an enemy.
I remember back when “All we are saying is give peace a chance” actually seemed like all one needed to say on the subject. Would that it had been so then; would that it were so now.
I remember back when “All we are saying is give peace a chance” actually seemed like all one needed to say on the subject. Would that it had been so then; would that it were so now.
Indeed! As I recall it — because I used to believe fervently in such things too — the idea was that we all needed to trust one another and believe in peace, and peace would just happen.
And, you know, it’s true — if everybody believes in the power of peace, then peace will prevail! The problem is that we’re working on the honor system here… which only works among the honorable. (And it often only takes one determined unbeliever to upset the applecart for everyone else.)
What happens when someone comes along, sees the circle of people holding hands at the campfire singing “Kumbaya”, and does NOT think “wow, how cool, I want to join that” — but instead thinks “hmm, opportunity, looks like they’ve piled all their purses and bags in a corner and nobody’s guarding them”?
It would be wonderful if we could all trust one another. The sad fact is, though, that some of us have excellent reasons to mistrust certain others. And because of that, unfortunately, for some of us it is not enough to have “Rise Up Singing” on hand — we must keep our powder dry and our spears sharpened as well.
I wish it were not so. But wishing won’t make it so.
respectfully,
“Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not.”
Why not? Because there may be some fanatic with dynamite strapped to his body, ready to blow you up. It’s all well and good to “visualize world peace”…but until humankind has changed drastically, it’s better to “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Well justaguy, no one can argue with that. Unfortunately for you, however, it’s not for the reasons that you think.
yours/
peter.
stumbley:
You quoted: “Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not.”
This is famous quote from GBShaw’s “Back to Methusela”. The speech is given by The Serpent in the Garden to Eve, tempting her to eat of the Tree of Knowledge.
Needless to say, this argument works.
And lands humanity in a heck of a mess…
Be careful whom you quote, you might just….
Charlie, the quote was designed to be satirical; it’s a favorite of those who “wish” that things were better. It’s more famously remembered as the last line of Teddy Kennedy’s eulogy to his brother Robert, and pretty much sums up (IMO) the whole of the ’60’s: “if we just say we want things to be better, they will be.” Doesn’t matter if the economy can’t support cradle-to-grave welfare; doesn’t matter if the communists “want to bury you”—all you’ve got to do is “visualize world peace,” “teach the world to sing in perfect harmony,” “what the world needs now is love,” “all you need is love,” etc.
Sometimes you need something a little more powerful than love.
My sister defines peace as the absence of war. That peace is fairly easy to acquire and preserve: don’t fight — ever.
The problem is that people like her won’t think about the consequences of that position. President Clinton, when faced with the crisis in Rowanda, kept the nation out of war, and that made my sister very proud. What she doesn’t like to talk about is that fact that the US did noting while 500,000 to 900,000 people were savagely murdered. In Serbia and Kosovo, Clinton did nothing while the worse of the ethnic cleansing was going on. When he finally did take action, we all suspect that it had more to do with getting his sex scandal off the front page of the news papers. In any case, US action put a stop to the killing. In Iraq, Saddam was contained at a terrible price. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.1 million people were killed by his people to maintain power ot through lack of essentials caused by UN sanctions. People like my sister opposed the war, but were happy to allow the sufferring of the Iraqi people to go on and to keep US troops in Saudi Arabia. Both of these points were highlighted by bin Laden in his 1996 declaration of war against the US. My sister thinks that Clinton ran the best foreign policy the US ever had since WW2 because we avoided war at all costs. Millions of innocent people were tortured, killed, or hurt in pursuit of peace without justice.
Like it or not, the US armed forces are the police force for the world. Even in Kosovo, that happened at Europe’s doorstep, nothing could be done to stop the killing until the US came in to do the heavy lifting. When the US enters the new “post-Vietnam” era after Iraq is lost, millions more will suffer in a world without justice.
If Western intellectuals believe that counter-violence and killing are always wrong, then the West will always loose to people who believe in violence. The result is a world without Law as we know it.
By the way, on a slightly different note, my So and I are attending classes to add some swing moves. We get to see the Tango 5 class (yes, section five or seven). Wow. Everytime I see that class wrapping up I think about neo-neocon’s tango experiences.
I hope that you enjoyed your social dancing. I told my SO a long time ago when we first danced in a club: if you want to dance, THEN DANCE. It’s less about technique and more about attitude. Have fun, and don’t worry about how it looks to any one else. (And we’ve had a lot of fun since.)
Certain moments tell us that we are becoming “out of it”. I commented that I would be voting for whatever “yellow dog” Democrat was running, forgetting that (in the Thirties, I believe)a group of Democrats so referred to itself.
My reference was to the source of their moniker: an old political joke. It was said of certain die-hard Democrats that if someone tied a “Democrat” sign to a yellow dog’s tail and ran it down main street they would vote for it.
Of course, nowadays PETA and the SPCA would have one in jail for either the sign-tieing or the running down main street or both. Sigh.
I remember Pete Seeger singing “If music could only bring peace, I’d only be a musician” and thinking “yeah, exactly!” I was 15.
justaguy, I am truly puzzled. You seem to have no self-doubt about your contentions. Do you ever question yourself, and wonder “hmm, maybe I put that too strongly, or generalized too much, or leaped to a conclusion too quickly”?
Sadly, AVI, justadweeb isn’t here to debate or weigh overwhelming evidence against his own convictions, he’s here to incite. Like a good brownshirt.
Instant Karma’s gonna get justadweeb.
I grew up watching the ’60’s and ’70’s around me and on TV. I told myself(about the hippie types) I was growing up to be JUST like them. Then I grew up.
We all wish for things we cannot have, Neo. The blessing of America is that so much is possible on a personal basis, that they are capable of wishing things for the world.
Not everyone has a secure and protected base from which to view the world.
It’s a clash of opposites, not a clash of civilizations. It is the advancement of a caliphate that demeans human liberty OR the intervention of that which stands to stop crime against humanity and infuse the root cause with an opportunity for human liberty.
Well, despite protests to the contrary, justadweeb, you are just as guilty of epithets and insults as anyone here. The problem is, what most of us see as liberating people(this war, last war, any war no matter how we got involved), you “label”(as to demonize) “elitist manipulation, racist imperialism, etc.” So, in my mind, YOU are the one that hates. YOU’RE the one who wants to destroy(just cheering on jihadists is safer, though). YOU’RE the one who condescends to the “brown people”(for political expediency). And, most strangely, YOU’RE the ones who keep coming back time after time when you know you’re not changing any minds here. Seems like it’s a waste of time, if you sincerely want to debate, or be “open” to differing opinions. But, apparently, you get off on calling people “stupid, brainwashed, old, pathetic, feel sorry for you, etc. who disaree with you; then having the nerve to insist you’re the civil ones here. Don’t wash. So, do everyone a favor, if it’s that bad, go away. But, until then, you hateful Nazis will just have to live with the labels you’ve earned.
AVI,
Never trust a scorpion no matter how soothing its words.
Any of you nazis out there want to debate, or are you guys gonna just keep crying?
Well, c’mon justagoering, Wild Reich, neonazicon. We’re ALL wearing our labels here, so, we can get past that and debate, right? The subject is the “perception” of peace. Watcha think, Nazis?
Oh, Hi Ariel. Didn’t see you come in. Just playing with my nazis.
I thought I’d take a look at her latest post. Saw the typical off-topic troll comment and didn’t want AVI to fall for any of it. AVI generally reads everything here from what I can tell, so it was probably unnecessary.
I got a kick out of his fake concern for the US populace and the dollar/debt issue. He had an almost orgasmic case of Schadenfreude contemplating that very collapse in a comment to a previous post.
Uhg, the 60’s. All I can think of is how garish and self serving the whole thing morphed into by the mid 70’s.
The wild eyed idealists fell prey to hedonists who just wanted to tune in, turn on and drop out and didnt want to be hassled by “the man”. The left is still supporting these people and they in turn, are still being taken advantage of by them.
I guess neo-conservatives are born of the people who got tired of this cycle.
You know what that peace symbol looks like. It looks like the trinary output of a single meta-phased plasma cannon.
Or maybe it is 3 beams integrating into one big mega beam of death that will burn through any obstacles.
The peace symbol is actually derived from the semaphore signals for “n” and “d” and originally stood for “nuclear disarmament.” In case anyone cares.
Stumbley, I heard that years ago from a Quartermaster. Just did an internet check, seems your right.
Nice bit of trivia.
Yamar:
“You know what that peace symbol looks like. It looks like the trinary output of a single meta-phased plasma cannon.
Um, yeah Yamar, I noticed that too.
neo: And wouldn’t it be wonderful if peace–real peace, meaningful peace, peace because the need to make war had gone away–were possible?
Yes, it would. And the surest long-run path toward real peace is not through a top-down imposition of world order, whether through empire or “world government”, but rather through the gradual spread of democratic culture. Not because democracy is some magical guarantee of peace — in the real world, there are few guarantees of anything — but because it places upon people a sense of responsibility for their choices that, over time, tempers the kind of fanaticism that so often leads to war. Of course, democratic forces everywhere always have to contend with the murderous thugs in their midst who will do anything to hold on to power once they’ve gained it — otherwise we’d be able to see a couple of tests of this thesis playing out now in the Palestinian territories and in Venezuela.
….Of course, the trinary output of a single meta-phased plasma cannon wouldn’t necessarily be that color.
One should gave some thought to why US has a whole generation of never matured Peter Pan’s, to whom wishful thinking became the only possible mode of thinking. Why this infantile regression to the very ancient, pagan magic? It has something to do with non-frustration pedagogics and non-repressive culture becoming fashionable after WWII. It has spoiled the whole generation of baby-boomers. It is obvious that non-repressive culture is oxymoron, since culture, by definition, is a system of repressions. Even heathens have their taboo. Nobody can grow matured person without adequate punishment applied for transgression of social norms. But the “greatest generation” showed absolute incompetence in providing their children with values, norms and beliefs needed for civilization prosperity, and now evrybody is paying terrible price for this failure.
Why is it that the most intelligent, sane observations of American culture in these comments have been made by a Russian?
Sergey, you’ve nailed it. My generation has screwed up royally.
Neo, remember this one from a while back?
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you” –Trotsky
I’m afraid the old monster spoke truly.
Giving duly prises to democracy and liberalism, one should also be aware of their inherent weaknesses ang moral dangers. Enlightenment has a dark side to it – skepticism turned to relativism turned to nihilism. And democracy should have counterweights in form of aristocracy of spirit, or meritocracy. Otherwise it devolves into conglomerated mediocracy. Evelyn Waugh nailed it his The Loved One, and gave some cures in Brideshead Revisited. George Orwell declared that Waugh was “about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions.” But half a century after these opinions do not seem to me untenable.
Why is it that the most intelligent, sane observations of American culture in these comments have been made by a Russian?
Shrink said that children of the baby boomer generation grew up without that veneer of suffering and sacrifice that their parents went through. This meant that it tends to cause such children to view themselves as all important, as eternal, the eternal child. And such narcissistic behavior tends to be anti-social in that if the only person that matters is you, then there is little group harmony, except of the mob variety.
Well, the Greatest Generation had been through the Depression, then they had to deal with Hitler and Tojo. They earned the good life; we haven’t, but I think we’re going to get our chance to.
Was it in Volpone? “Let’s die like Romans,. Since we have liv’d like Grecians. …”
There’s a load of stuff about narcissism i posted recently on my blog, but this one by shrink is the one I was refering to.
Link
How did we journey, in the space of 6 short years, from JFK’s famous speech to the Jefferson Airplane’s drug-induced, summer of love, response? And what does this have to do with the Demographic changes we are seeing in our culture?
In the last couple of days, first Glenn Reynolds, and then Donald Sensing, wrote interesting pieces looking at some of the factors that have led to a Demographic threat to America. In The Parent Trap, Glenn Reynolds commented on the various social costs of having children:
….
Implicit in both of these formulations is the heightened Narcissism of the child bearing cohort. This is a result of trends which began with the post-war “baby boom” cohort which came of age in the 1960s. In Part III of my series on Narcissism, Disintegration, Suicidality & the Fall of the West, I described how the confluence of material abundance and the decrease in childhood mortality led to smaller families in which each individual child was imbued with enhanced parental emotional investment:
I’m afraid the old monster spoke truly.
This was like before he got purged by Stalin correct?
Didn’t hear a peep out of him afterwards.
I suggest you read Solzhenitsyn’s address to Harvard from 1978. It is a stinging indictment of Western decline.
kevino: I wrote a post about that address, here.
Yes, thank you. Those that haven’t read it, should read it (and your commentary). For me, it’s a great summary of the narcisism of this generation and the role of the elites and the media in our society.
Favorite bumper sticker:
Visualize Whirled Peas
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.
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Hey, someone had to do it.
PJ Guy: Up until Chernobyl, my favorite bumper sticker was:
“More People Have Died In Ted Kennedy’s Car Than In Nuclear Power Plants”