I walked into Whole Food today to get some fake cheese–dairy gives me issues–and I was looking at the folks there. There is a vibe. It feels, not quite like hostile territory, but almost like a foreign land. Every face I see seems to have a history of one neurosis or another. It feels prickly to me, in ways I can’t quite define, although the food selection is amazing.
And it hit me: the reason the Left is so angry is because THE COUNTER CULTURE FAILED.
This is it. I am sure of it. All the old hippies have to unite them are memories, and all the aspiring hippies have is slogans which made sense 50 years ago, but whose relevance disappeared a very, very long time ago. They are stuck in this time warp of a failed experiment.
It is, in a very real sense, like a revolution happened within our culture, with some people choosing sides, and many more or less bystanding, and taking bits from both, swaying back and forth.
The 1960’s was supposed to be the New Age, the dawning of Aquarius. They were supposed to LEAD the way, and everyone else was supposed to FOLLOW. But this didn’t happen. They made a lot of fire and smoke, noise, hustle, bustle, shouting, and great posters and t-shirts. But there they went. There they stood. There they waited. Then there they realized the grass was growing, and there they largely integrated, desultorily, peavishly, rancorously. They REMEMBERED what it was like, what it felt like, the great ecstasies of mass movements, of “a thousand people in the street, singing songs, and carrying signs.”
And kids now, trying to “inherit” this movement, JUMPED at the chance for street protests. Antifa, so called, is an effort to recreate something which happened spontaneously back then. They had real causes. MLK, Jr., Bobbie Kennedy, and Malcolm X were all shot down. Hundreds of young men were dying weekly in Vietnam, and as far as the media was willing to tell us–and to be fair, POSSIBLY as far as they knew–there was no military solution in sight.
Part of the anger motivating Antifa is the knowledge they have, at some level, that they, and their movement, are bullshit. None of them will admit this to themselves, much less others, but this is the truth.
I would use two analogies. One, the bike race. In a classic cycling road race, you will sometimes have break-aways. Sometimes they can sustain it, and reach the finish line first. Often they get caught. But in this analogy, the breakaway pack–the counterculture–simply veered off course and declared themselves the victors. They disengaged with the culture at large. This is why they can shout at us as if we were from some other country, as if at least our grandparents shared nothing in common. This is why the gap is so vast, the silence so strong, the cessation of productive and sincere dialogue so total.
The other analogy comes from “Forged in Fire”, which is a Red State show if there ever was one. I enjoy this show, although I do wonder about the psychology of men obsessed with cutting things. On one I think they sliced open pigs. This one they hacked at thick bones, presumably from cows or something like that. Something not right about that. But the process of making knives I find very interesting, as well as the creative problem solving under pressure.
Be that as it may, one guy last night had to forge together two lawnmower blades. He didn’t heat them enough, and could never get them to fuse. But he pounded the shit out of them for a long time before giving up, cutting his third blade in half, making a knife out of that, then getting booted because it was too thin.
Now, the psychopath George Bernard Shaw proposed pounding as a metaphor for the Fabians over 100 years ago, in the Fabian Window. You can see it here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page19.html
I used it as an entry into what is also a treatment of the Vietnam War, but more broadly a critique of Leftism generally.
It says “Pray devoutly, hammer stoutly”, and “Remould it nearer to the hearts desire.” Two men stand under a sign indicating duplicity (the wolf in a sheeps clothing; presumably Churchill was referring to this, and his connection to the Fabians, when he called Clement Attlee a “sheep in sheep’s clothing”, which remains one of my favorite things he ever said), while both pound the Earth with hammers. I believe Shaw is the one on the right.
It is not hard to take from this both an intent to deceive, and an actual thirst for abusive force, both of which are Communist hallmarks. I will note that the London School of Economics was founded by the Fabians, and this window is on display there at this very moment, to the extent of my knowledge. Tony Blair paid it public homage.
Returning to my analogy, the INTENT was to use political methods to fuse traditional American culture with the counterculture, particularly that aspect of it fully informed by Communist propaganda. This was the whole job of Obama, to shame, silence, cajole and threaten all non-conformists into the mould (sic) closer to the desire of these people.
It failed. The American people weren’t ready, not least because they were asked to accept dishonest politicians, pervasive corruption, public shame for things they had not done, incompetent economic policy, and ideas which were at odds with every last bit of their acculturation, if they were brought up anything close to traditionally, and had not had something close to the entirety of their given personalities washed out of them in the university factories.
So you have two parallel societies, one wondering what the fuck is wrong with the other, and the other continuing to wonder how they can conquer us, shut us up, silence us, marginalize us, and thus declare something at least plausibly resembling victory.
I saw all this at Whole Foods. And I got my fake cheese. I do thank the hippies for that.