Everybody Knows the Good Guys Lost:
Reading The Sixties
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2009_09_015103.php
September 2009
Elizabeth Bachner
Of course I missed the '60s. I was here for the late '70s (scary
mustachioed men, long cars, autoharps coming out for uneven
renditions of "Motorcycle Mama" or "Kumbaya"), the whole '80s (Brett
Easton Ellis, Haagen-Daz, Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, fashion
atrocities that would have been unimaginable in another era,
nervous-nerd electronica, more than one TV show about white people
adopting black midgets, the feeling of being trapped forever in the
beach scene on a laminated restaurant placemat), the '90s (wearing
pajamas to school for a year, troubled boys with skateboards or
guitars who cut themselves and tripped too much and then got famous
after the century turned again, a wrong move to Seattle, a right move
to the Baltics), and the early 2000s.
Of course there's the sense of being alive after history has already
ended. We are sharing the world with too many people. The last of the
wild Caspian tigers and Cape lions have been killed off. The beloved
troupe of baboons in Robert Sapolsky's brilliant A Primate's Memoir
was lost to tuberculosis-infected meat from the local tourist lodge
with no consequence to the meat inspector -- one baboon, Menasseh,
died with a crowd of lodge staffers gathered around him, laughing at
his writhing movements. Patty Hearst, liberated from her role as the
punch-line of the joke of the Symbionese Liberation Army, begat Lydia
Hearst-Shaw. A couple of years ago on one of the bridges in New York
City, a suicidal woman was stopping up traffic, and people were
rolling open their windows and yelling to her to just jump already.
She did jump.
Humans in every recorded era seem to have had that after-the-end
feeling. Some of them had special words for it. And at any given
moment, there's usually at least one group of radical utopianists who
believe we can turn the world into something beautiful, and a group
of fascists who want to cleanse it, and a group of leftists who want
an underclass uprising, and a zillion groups of religious fanatics
who create weird rituals around food and sex and money and prayer.
Yet, it seems like pretty much every time, the bland, unattractive
centrists triumph -- the ones who are willing to say, "I don't make
the rules" about the murderous companies they work for. The ones who
don't mind eating vegetables that no longer have a vegetable flavor.
The ones buying property in Connecticut, who turn to each other and
wrinkle their Maybelline-coated noses in amused disgust as they step
over a sick, shaking human being who is trying to sleep on the
sidewalk. The ones who honestly think that "health care" is
synonymous with "health insurance."
Occasionally, one of these people becomes a sociologist and declares
(accurately) that every bohemian experiment has been funded by
bourgeois money, and everybody -- Leonard Cohen's everybody -- keeps
missing the point. There's a widespread, yet illogical belief that
just because every alternative has failed, it's not okay to criticize
the Kafkaesque systems to which the middle and upper classes devote
their lives. And there's a widespread disdain towards people who get
all nostalgic about portentous moments in history, utopian
experiments, explosive arts movements, and circles of glamorous
intellectuals who went AWOL from mainstream society and had briefly
successful and exciting stints of rethinking economics and dabbling
in free love. The disdain grows when the nostalgic people weren't
even there to see what it was really like -- how it was mostly all
about rapes and murders, war and colonialism, settling for
disappointment, ridiculing each other's suffering, and failing to
live in a meaningful way. Just like it is now.
Jenny Diski was a teenager in London during the 1960s. She wore black
crepe Biba minidresses, protested the War, experimented with drugs,
got expelled, got put in mental institutions, had casual sex (some of
which she can't quite remember), read mind-blowing books, listened to
incredible music, had friends who also believed that it was possible
to reshape the world, and, over one weekend, started an alternative school.
I picked up The Sixties, Diski's contribution to Picador's Big Ideas/
Small Books series with a bit of trepidation. A lot of after-the-fact
'60s books and movies seem to play the same old tune, and it sounds
more like Bryan Adams' Summer of '69 than Talkin' WWII Blues or a
great Hendrix riff: we were very young and full of hope. We wanted to
"change the world." We experimented with free love. Then, we grew up
and got married and read Hearst-published women's magazines and
bought a lot of groceries, and watched Woodstock and marveled at the
floppy-breasted muddiness of our youthful selves. (I am mostly
paraphrasing Martha Tod Dudham's Expecting to Fly: A Sixties
Reckoning here, which is more about boys rejecting her for not being
pretty enough than about communes or the McCarthy campaign.) Some of
the "'60s people" took a weird turn, and you never know when you're
going to come across something embarrassing, like Tom Wolfe's
geriatric musings about "hook-up culture" and teen promiscuity, or
Jerry Rubin's dabblings in Gordon Gekko Reaganomics and EST. Only a
few of the radicals kept on doing their thing, and we've lost many of
them -- Abbie Hoffman ODed on phenobarbitol under dubious
circumstances. Huey Newton got shot in the face in 1989 on a street
corner in the Oakland projects. Shulamith Firestone (still living) is
in and out of mental institutions. Actually, maybe her story, or what
we've heard of it from Airless Spaces and a smattering of articles,
tells us everything we need to know about what happened then, and
what is happening now. By 1970, the same year The Dialectic of Sex
was published, the most radical of the New York Radical Feminists had
pretty much dropped out of politics. Through the '80s and '90s, she
struggled with madness and homelessness, moving in and out of
psychiatric hospitals, mostly forgotten. In the late 1990s, she wrote
Airless Spaces, a keen, wrenching book of autobiographical fiction
based on those experiences -- Eileen Myles called it a "radical
insider's tale... [that] informs us repeatedly like lightly pelting
rain that all of us are vanishing in a century of institutions that
take and take until everyone has gone away and there's no one left to
shut the door." Unfortunately, not many people have read it.
It seems damn near impossible to write a "'60s reckoning" that's both
fresh and comprehensive, all these tired years later. For one thing,
most of what happened during the years loosely associated with this
big phenomenon was revivalist -- when I think of the '60s, I think of
the mystical quest of Maugham's Larry Darrell (circa 1929), and of
Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley's Vedic studies with Swami
Prabhavananda (1940), and of Turgenev's Bazarov, giving his Orthodox
dad the finger with overgrown hair and nihilism (1860ish), and of
revolutions in general, and youth movements in general. There are
some terrific Sixties histories out there (including Gretchen
Lemke-Santangelo's new Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties
Counterculture), and some juicy novels and memoirs, but when it comes
to writing a concise philosophy of the '60s as a "Big Idea", the
topic itself looks a bit stale -- overgrown, rootless, and terminally
misunderstood.
But, yay! Jenny Diski has managed it. At sixty, she's a cool and
loveable narrator -- smart, funny, low-key, gentle, and kind-hearted.
The gentleness is deceptive, because her small book has an almost
frightening impact -- profound and radical. Reading it makes you want
to rethink the way you live, and the way you see the world.
Unbelievably, it's about an even bigger idea than "the '60s." It's
not so much about how we understand and experience history, although
it takes that on. It's more about why we, humans, do and think the
things we do and think at any given moment, and how that changes the
world, or fails to change it.
"The big idea we had --," writes Diski, "though heaven knows it
wasn't new -- was freedom, liberty, permission, a great enlarging of
human possibilities beyond the old politenesses and restrictions. But
it was an idea we failed to think through. It was a failure of
thought essentially, rather than a failure of imagination." It seems
astonishing to her how little has changed, how little, really, '60s
radicalism penetrated into our laws and social structures and into
"the assumptions of the great majority of the human race." The
radical ideas tested out included free love (Diski and
Lemke-Santangelo both point out that this ended up being just as
sexist and crappy for women as the sexual arrangements of the
previous four-hundred years), nudism, educational reform, the idea of
mass enlightenment, the anti-psychiatry movement (pivoting on R.D.
Laing's idea that madness was a relatively rational response to our
sick society), carrying for the needy, living consciously and
conscientiously, working to expand our hearts and minds, and
celebrating creativity. And of course, there was the eye-opener of Vietnam.
"Wherever you look, over the past forty years, nationalism and
capitalism have triumphed… We were guilty, I think, of not imagining
the Eighties… We didn't really believe in the existence of the bad
guys… [Most people] weren't interested in the mental travelers coming
back with remarkable tales to tell; they wanted, as people always
seem to want, to get on, and getting on meant focusing narrowly on
the vital business of getting things (money, success, objects) and
not worrying too much about those who didn't, unless they needed
sequestering. Truth (whatever it may be), art (whatever that may be),
consideration at a cost to yourself, none of these were priorities
compared to a decent standard of living and the promise of ever
better, ever more to come. Whether it was our fault, or the fault of
those other radicals of the Eighties and Nineties, the current
situation seems to be that those who are looking to be in charge of
the world next are actually facing the prospect of not much world at all."
She also describes a feeling, way back during the heady height of New
Left protests, of "astonishment, a complete inability to comprehend
how those in charge of the world could operate as they did. Not just
their building of nuclear weapons, and the creation of fear, but
their acceptance of, let alone their complicity in the interrelated
wickednesses of social and educational inequality, racism, and
poverty. I had the flashing sense that it was kind of a dream world
that I inhabited, that I would wake up and, of course, none of those
unthinkable ills were permitted by rational, educated, responsible people."
My own incomprehension of the "getting on" people is not about their
acquisitiveness. I can understand wanting to have a comfortable place
to live, a safe place to sleep, delicious food. My incomprehension
begins with what the "getting on" people are willing to destroy even
after they have plenty of homes and SUVs and furniture and Lululemon
yoga clothes. Does the pursuit of security and material comfort
really have to involve viral marketing to children, or falsifying
data about psychiatric drugs in order to turn a profit, or polluting
the groundwater? As a kid who saw Bob Dylan for the first time in
London, 1990 (I think those boys slipped something into my 7 Up), as
a victim of lifelong dirty marketing, I don't think the fault lies
with the radicals of the '60s or the "Greed is Good" radicals of the
'80s and '90s. It lies with the "just following orders" types.
Although, what do I know? I keep thinking that we are living in the
dystopia from Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time or Huxley's
Brave New World. I also keep thinking about the ending of A Razor's
Edge -- everyone in the novel, Maugham observes, has gotten exactly
what he or she wanted. Including Isabel, who just wants money and
possessions. Including Sophie, who just wants to die.
Was it Jerry Rubin who said never to trust anyone over thirty? I
guess he was always kind of an ass. But now I'm thirty-five, and I
can't for the life of me understand why "getting on" would appeal to
anybody, of any age, who is not starving in the streets and covered
with bites and wounds, if it means a lack of emphasis on art and
intellectual exploration and mystical transformations and love. The
"getting on" people laugh bitterly when any of those things are
mentioned these days, but the thing that always intrigues me is that
when someone talks about wishing to get filthy rich and buy four
houses (this is something a few of my friends want), the "getting on"
people greet that with the same dull, bitter laughter. There is the
idea that not just radicalism, but passion or consciousness of any
kind, is for the young and stupid, all of whom will be forced to get
old and "settle" for boring, disappointing, and meaningless lives of
lame compromise -- a prospect that fills the "getting on" people with
rare glee.
In her memoir A Freewheelin' Time, Suze Rotolo writes that "The new
generation causing all the fuss was not driven by the market. We had
something to say, not something to sell." Yet somehow, what she
describes as the "inquiry and curiosity and rebelliousness" of that
moment was one of the first things to go. Diski concludes:
What alarms me is how little has actually changed… even in the
developed nations women are still paid considerably less than men for
the same work, millions of people are starving around the world and
most of them are black, the wife of the first minister of Northern
Ireland felt able to call homosexuality 'an abomination' in 2008, the
Market, whether it is up or down, controls the lives of individuals,
and vast corporations have consolidated their power over elected (and
unelected) governments. In addition the planet is frying. Some brave
souls are still battling; most of us who had the good fortune to be
part of the Sixties are just plain discouraged.
Everybody knows this broken feeling -- those of us who missed the
'60s, and those of us who miss the '60s. As Diski is quick to point
out, "the '60s" didn't coincide with the years between 1960 and 1970
-- it was a big idea, and even for those living through it, life was
mostly quotidian, just as it is now. The exciting thing about reading
Diski's book is that it makes you question how and why we are living,
even though it's sure as hell not "the '60s" anymore. Even though
maybe it never was "the '60s." The world Diski inherited seemed
shocking to her, she believes, because she was "somewhat new to it…
Like the young at all times, I imagined that such as us had never
happened before, and that nothing was ever going to be the same again
once the old had passed into their pottering retirement. What the
young don't get is that they are young; the old are right, young is a
phase the old go through. It's just as well, I suppose, that the
young don't see it that clearly. Best to leave the disappointment for
later." That's how it goes.
It is not clear what to do now, with this after-the-end feeling, in a
frying world. Try some new experiment, maybe? Read William James and
go to an ashrama and work in a coal mine and give away all of our
possessions, like Larry Darrell? Meditate with a guru who is a little
bit "too Indian," in between chain-smoking and sex with hot boys,
like Christopher Isherwood? Experiment with entheogens and
psychodysleptics and phantasticants? Turn on, tune in, drop out, get
sick, get well, hang around the inkwell, get dressed, get blessed,
try to be a success? I missed the '60s, but I get 2009, and Jenny
Diski's remarkable book has made me think about what that really
means. It's less a feeling of optimism or defeat than a thrill at the
terrible landscape of glittering chaos, the dangerous jumble of known
and unknown. I could write about it, now, or forty years from now,
but maybe that would be like making a sand mandala and then sweeping it away.
.
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