Roger L. Simon isn’t nostalgic for the 60s, either
As Roger Simon writes in the Epoch Times:
“Off the pig!” Sound familiar? Not quite “Dead cops now” but close. Marx, almost right for once, famously said, “History repeats itself. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Only this second time isn’t really so farcical and may end up more of a tragedy if we’re not careful.
As for how much fun the first version was, I had the proverbial bird’s eye view. My Dartmouth college roommate was one of Leary’s original LSD test cases at Harvard. A year after graduation, a brilliant grad student in semantics at Columbia, my roomie’s car flew off the road when he and the driver were high on acid. He ended up a paraplegic who, not long thereafter, committed suicide.
Another view came a few years later, when I was a very lucky young screenwriter and—to my shame— in my early version of white guilt became a small financier of the Black Panther breakfast program. I did this until I discovered the two of my contacts were heroin dealers and one was wanted for assault with a deadly weapon.
Please read the whole thing.
On this blog, we had a discussion about nostalgia – or lack thereof – for the 60s here (see the NOTE and the comments).
Ahh! The sixties, no thanks.
Actually, I missed a lot. I was stationed in Hawaii until ’67, then deployed until ’69. We lost a pilot at sea while deployed. He was involved in some violent maneuvers, and no one saw him go down, and we don’t know if he tried to eject. We knew the rigger who was responsible for his chute, etc. was vocally opposed to the Vietnam war, and we wondered, but couldn’t know.
I recall the next phase in the ’70s with full blown race riots on our ships. While attached to the great carrier John F. Kennedy (CVA 67), there was a period when officers and CPOs felt like targets at times. I recall as Command Duty Officer in port, we were expected to walk through the ship before turning in to check everything secure. I know of no incidents, but, it wasn’t fun in a largely darkened, partially empty ship with openly hostile elements in the crew. One night I came on a CPO who was supposed to walk his area, and he asked to walk with me because he feared to be alone.
I expect officers in every service had similar, or worse, memories. My prayers for those who stand between us and chaos now.
Oldflyer- my brother was a ‘71 Annapolis grad and served on destroyers in the early ‘70s. He had similar experiences, and tells about the time an enlisted sailor threatened to kill him. Nothing was done to the sailor. The brother of a roommate of mine at the time was arrested for B&E, and the judge allowed him to avoid prison time by joining the Navy.
Intolerable paywall.
No Epoch Times.
Never.
Jahaziel Maqqebet:
They give you 20 free articles.
Oh, Chris B.
A story that was traditional; and a joke of sorts. I sat on a court martial in the early ’60s, when someone asked the defendant why he joined the Navy in the first place. He replied that the Judge told him it was the Navy or jail. A convenient railroad ticket out of town for troublesome young men. I am confident that it had been in play much longer.
That may not have been the case for the Royal Navy of yore, because there were not so many harsher sentences, and besides England had lots of colonies that needed populating.
I like Epoch Times; but not their occasionally annoying paywall.
I recall the 60s; 10th grade in High School. 1971. Everybody knows the 60s really only ended in 1973 with the Paris Peace Accords, right?
Or was it July 3, 1971, when Jim Morrison died?
I argued in favor of Universal Military Conscription.
For Equality.
Of opportunity, and meritocracy.
These reasons I still believe, but Freedom is more important, so I don’t support conscription of anybody — but an offer of the Navy (or Army) or Jail remains fair.
Now I support a voluntary Job Guarantee.
I was young then; now I’m old. Young is better; hopeful, future, healthy, able to leap between buildings and usually make it but also recover from small problems and even broken bones without “permanent damage”.
I’ve never done bungee jumping, and now I never will.
The 60s started so many revolutions, which continue now. The post WW II “world order”, dominated by America, Human Rights (imperfect), Capitalism (imperfect), and Christianity (imperfect and losing out, legally, to much less perfect atheism).
Too late to go back! What if the 50s were the height of civilized cultural norms?
The world, and America, will regret losing “American” Boy Scout values.
“You’re gonna run to the rock for rescue, there will be no rock….
You’re just robbing and a stabbing and a looting and a shooting,
no you’re too bad.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HrHuLa7y1E
I’m reading Great Society by Amity Shlaes. Excellent treatment of the ’60s. I saw the student riots, being a student at UC Berkeley in 1969, but was not at all enthusiastic about People’s Park, etc.
Intolerable paywall.
No Epoch Times.
Never.
Jahaziel Maqqebet: I get it.
However, may I recommend the Evernote Web Clipper which is available as a plugin for most browsers (except Bravo, grr…).
Its main use is to boil down web pages to pure text and straight images, which you can read and save. It also functions as a handy ad blocker. Plus it will cut through many, though not all, paywalls. Hee-hee.
Evernote is my secret web weapon and it works on Epoch Times.
One happy discovery as I’ve aged is that I don’t get nostalgic much anymore. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I could practically weep with nostalgia for my life five years before. (Are there any good studies on nostalgia?)
I still have fond feelings for the good things of the sixties and seventies, which I can separate from the era’s mistakes. Given that no era is perfect, that seems a healthy response.
In 2015 “The Federalist” published a brilliant article by Hans Fiene, “Gay Marriage Isn’t About Justice, It’s About Selma Envy,” which I thought hit the nail square on the head.
_________________________________________________
The saintly song of the civil-rights movement grew even more rapturous as we grew old enough for our American history teachers to pop a tape in the VCR and show us the gruesome images of the era. Look, children! Look at this sneering face of Southern hatred! Look at these enemies of progress holding the firehoses! These were not human beings corrupted by their circumstances and giving in to the vilest impulses that lurk in the hearts of all men. No, these were demons, evil embodied in human flesh. Look again, children! Look at the faces of these saints who used non-violent protests to fight for equality and change legislation. These are the faces of the morally superior, the holy ones who marched on Selma, those who were more enlightened, more compassionate, more loving than anyone else who had ever lived because they defended the mistreated and defeated discrimination when no one else would.
More than we wanted to find the perfect prom date, we wanted to find our own bigotry to eradicate. After years of hearing those saints sing “We Shall Overcome,” we were overcome with jealousy. We coveted Selma. We envied that march. We looked at that footage and hungered for our own cause to devour.
https://thefederalist.com/2015/03/31/gay-marriage-isnt-about-justice-its-about-selma-envy/
Roger Simon and neo may disagree, but I think the word they are looking for, instead of nostalgia, is envy.
The Civil Rights movement, and its climactic moments at Selma or the March on Washington 1963, was a national peak experience, when the people on the “right side of history” were indisputably right. I was eleven years old when I first heard Peter, Paul and Mary sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and I knew Something Important Had Happened.
But after you’ve had a peak experience — it’s so good — the classic mistake is to want to get back there. Maybe even if you didn’t have it, but just read about it or watched a film or documentary, you want to get that again.
The story of the Left and much of America since 1963 IMO is “Selma Envy.” Envy because most of us, even in the 60s, weren’t there, but we wanted to be.
During the early ’50s, my future brother-in-law and two of his friends were given the choice of jail or the Marine Corps. They took the Corps. His buddies apparently weren’t too bright and ended up getting themselves a stay of hard time while they were in. My b-i-l was a bit smarter and came out with a clean record and a lot more maturity.
A stint in the service used to be a rite of passage. People were forgiving of a guy’s juvenile hijinks because the service “made a man of him.”
Roger Simon quote:
Another example of Black Panther malfeasance is the death of Betty Van Patter. David Horowitz hired her to do bookkeeping for the Black Panthers. She discovered some irregularities in their books, and asked to talk to some Black Panther honchos. Soon after, Betty Van Patter disappeared, and a month later her mutilated body is discovered in the East Bay. No one has ever been charged for the murder, but investigations and logic point the fingers at the Panthers.
David Horowitz and Betty Van Patter’s daughter certainly consider the Panthers responsible. The murder of Betty Van Patter prompted David Horowitz to leave the left.
60s nostalgia… the SDS honcho, in a conversation on the campus quad, said that Lenin should be a required part of the college curriculum. The manner in which she gushed “Lenin” indicated that she placed Lenin on a par with Shakespeare or Plato. Fortunately, she never took the Weatherperson route. She has been a tax-and-spend Democrat state legislator for 2 decades.
One can be nostalgic for the time in which one was young and not be nostalgic for everything or even most things that were happening at the time. My parents’ generation often sounded nostalgic for the ’30s, but that didn’t mean they were nostalgic for the Depression.
“Selma Envy” is indeed a remarkably accurate and concise description and explanation of the forces at work in left/liberal politics, pretty much since the original event. Those, like our possible/probable next president, who insist that “trans” rights are the civil rights issue of our time have no idea of how absurd, even insane, they look to those who lived in the world to which the Selma march was a challenge, and who have kept their feet on the ground since then.
huxley on June 10, 2020 at 11:00 pm said:
In 2015 “The Federalist” published a brilliant article by Hans Fiene, “Gay Marriage Isn’t About Justice, It’s About Selma Envy,” which I thought hit the nail square on the head.
* * *
I remember reading that and nodding my head.
BLM and Antifa are coming from a different direction, but I don’t doubt that a lot of their fellow travelers, especially those of more pallid hue, are hoping to recapitulate the Civil Rights triumphs — but their efforts, if not farcical, also don’t even rhyme (h/t Mark Twain).