Salon | Letters to the editor

_______________WERE THE '60S A FRAUD? BY GARY KAMIYA (12/22/97)

I can't resist raising a few points (and doubtless a few hackles) over Gary Kamiya's review of "Commodify Your Dissent" and "The Conquest of Cool."
The first is a broader observation about how both books are being reviewed, in every outlet from the New York Times to In These Times: Anxious boomers admire the incendiary spirit of the Baffler crowd, but grimly chide them over their failure to be properly reverent to the sainted '60s. Basically, this leitmotif (quite striking if you look over the reviews) boils down to the complaint that the '60s were, too, political. The most heroic version of this refrain was the review in the New York Times, which tried to argue that American consumer culture, authentically hip or otherwise, was what caused the '89 revolutions in the Eastern bloc, and by extension, the collapse of communism.
Leave aside for the moment the surface fallacies of this staggeringly delusional stab at historical explanation and ponder for a moment the blinding generational hubris involved in such claims. It's a hubris that our culture has been creaking under for the 30 years since the '60s lumbered to their inglorious halt, and can be imbibed anywhere in our literary and putatively political cultures, from the self-mythologizing twaddle of a Paul Berman to the complacent PBS gurglings of Roger Rosenblatt to the strident outbursts of a Katha Pollitt -- and now, I regret to note, in Salon.
The obvious observation to make here is that you all protest too much. If we accept your claim that the '60s were so dizzyingly political and liberating, it's only fair (among other things) to ask, where are those politics, and that liberationism, today? While I agree that the Baffler can at times giddily conflate the broadcasted world with the actual one, I'd nevertheless maintain that the extent to which the counterculture of the '60s has been appropriated by business culture has been overwhelming, and I believe unprecedented, when you look at other bohemian-cum-political revolts in the American past.
So why has it happened? Tom Frank's point is that it was more or less designed to happened: that '60s rebellion was commodified on arrival. This, by the way, is a fundamentally different argument than the Marcusean "repressive tolerance" line. Marcuse claimed that all dissent would eventually be domesticated and co-opted by the hegemons of capitalism; Frank denies that any co-optation took place at all, since the counterculture was eagerly embraced, and in important ways, created, by the culture of business. You can (and should) quarrel with him about the extent to which business presided over the counterculture's creation, but it seems worse than idle to deny that it took an extremely active hand in the propagation of the counterculture's sensibilities. (For an allied, less polemical account of how all this took place in the cherished realm of pop music, see Fred Goodman's fine book, "The Mansion on the Hill.") I just don't see how you can account for the sheer volume and tumult of present-day liberation marketing -- and however much we all strive to mute it and/or deny it, the nexus of lifestyle liberation is this fundamental point.
But for the sake of argument, leave aside the question of origins, and return to the authentic politics you say made the '60s so worth revering and preserving. First of all, it's a tremendous fallacy to regard that decade as a time of ascendant leftism: The youth vote in 1968 went, in significant numbers, to Nixon and Wallace. Some civil rights activists pushed Wallace out of classroom doors -- though those who did were generally older and less, shall we say, pallid than the connoisseurs of counterculture revolt -- but many more American youth of the '60s eagerly welcomed his entry into the presidential arena.
The reasons for this are complex, and steeped in the rather myopic strategies of the antiwar movement, but it remains a stubborn fact hardly ever acknowledged in all the reverent backward glances your generation takes at the '60s. And speaking of political strategies, another stubborn fact is that Young Americans for Freedom (the Buckleyite youth wing of the Goldwater movement) crafted a much more effective and influential legacy in electoral and ideological politics than SDS ever did. For all the blows dealt in Chicago, the SDS's chief achievements were a fatal repudiation of the liberal wing of the Democratic party at a time when the frail liberal-labor-civil rights coalition could ill afford such spasmodic, divisive gestures. (Todd Gitlin's book on the '60s spells this out in painstaking, tragic detail.) Nixon had already attracted an impressive plurality of young voters in the '68 campaign; the political wing of the counterculture nicely nullified any impact that the left youth movement -- and its many liberal sympathizers -- might have had on the decade's most important election.
I won't bore you by going on to rehearse the counterculture left's other, extremely destructive, legacy of political style: a runaway politics of personal authenticity that, as you and I both know, devolved into the dismal spectacle of identity politics.
Another, smaller, historical quibble on this score: Kamiya conflates the early civil rights movement -- the folks who pushed Wallace aside -- with the antiwar and countercultural wings of the '60s youth movement. The civil rights struggle was a very different animal, growing out of what amounts to a religious revival in the black churches of the South. Indeed, one can argue that when it got a hearty whiff of the lifestyle revolt -- during the infamous black power factional split within SNCC -- the civil rights movement fatally embarked on the self-as-street-theater brand of political discourse that has given us such engaging spectacles as the Brawley trial, parts I and II.
Now, I'm not out to demonize the '60s for its own sake (that's David Horowitz's job), and as an eminence still griser than M. Frank, I acknowledge that there were useful political discussions that emerged out of the decade's sound and fury. I like Bob Dylan and Moonpies. But I confess to a deep puzzlement over the ongoing appeal exerted by what Murray Kempton would call the "social myth" of the '60s. I know, of course, that boomers preside over most of the cultural gatekeeping of our age. But I can't help but think there's a much deeper apparatus of denial involved in present-day special pleading for the '60s. As far as I can tell, you want to have it both ways: to affirm that there was important political content in the lifestyle revolt; but to deny (or gracefully gloss) the genuinely baleful political consequences of the New Left's explicitly political endeavors.
As a 'tweener -- neither boomer nor Gen Xer -- I'm left with the odd political project of trying to explain how Newt Gingrich (let alone Louis Rosetto) postures as a "revolutionary," how the characteristic idiom of today's ambiguously rebelling youth is crudely libertarian and how the market has become the most unassailable social force on the planet. If, as you claim, the '60s changed the world in important ways, then can't you acknowledge that the coordinates of the decade's political world were, to put it mildly, eminently adaptable to the less peace-and-love-happy world we have today?
-- Chris Lehmann
In his excellent piece on the 1960s, Gary Kamiya writes that "It would appear that soon the only defenders of the '60s faith will be a handful of graybeards with old Captain Beefheart albums in their closets."
I write to Salon as a 23-year old defender of the '60s who has neither a Captain Beefheart album nor a closet. I would like very much to have a Captain Beefheart record because my rock heroine, P.J. Harvey, is a Beefheart fan; but right now I have to worry about paying the rent and buying food. Although I'm one who lives for art, I'm not willing to starve to death for it!
Anyway, the reason I now write to Salon in defense of the '60s is that I recently came to see how important it is to study what was going on in popular culture at the time. I'm not so much into the politics of the period.
I'm sure that readers of Salon have heard of the controversy surrounding the song "Smack My Bitch Up." The video for it premiered on MTV a few weeks ago and I stayed up late to watch it. I wasn't excited by it (as a lifetime reader of Vogue, I've seen all kinds of sexual imagery, so nothing shocks my eye anymore); but after watching it I did have an uncomfortable feeling, difficult to explain.
Then, right before going to bed, I switched over to VH1, where a documentary on Jim Croce was being shown. One of the most moving things I've ever seen. Although Croce's success arrived in the early '70s it's fair to say that he's really a '60s person. People who knew him said that one saw wisdom when looking into his eyes. I agree. But he was wise and also innocent.
By the end of the documentary I was bawling like a big baby. It so happens that Croce died right before I was born. His song "Time in a Bottle" (written, apparently, for his young son) was a constant throughout my early years and I believe that the '60s turned into the '70s at the moment Croce's plane crashed to earth.
Until I saw the documentary I would have placed the end of the '60s at 1969, when SO much happened. But no, it was in 1973. The innocence. The honesty. The realness of Jim Croce. Gone. In its place we have music like "Smack My Bitch Up" or, at the opposite end, pathetic weaklings like James Taylor (who only knows to do bad imitations of the authentic master).
I don't want to end on a negative note; I won't dwell on death but celebrate that I have been able to enjoy the musicians of the '60s because of the technology of today. Time may not be in a bottle, but it's on CD. Croce, Hendrix, Joplin -- gone, but now more powerful than ever because of their absence.
-- Damion Doohan
Thank you for putting into words exactly what I've been thinking ever since I picked up a copy of "Commodify Your Dissent." I'm 27 years old, routinely appalled by the state of our culture, and not particularly fond of the pompous, self-absorbed condescension of many baby boomers -- but those guys at the Baffler are completely out of their trees.
As Gary Kamiya so eloquently pointed out, they not only appear to lack any sense of historical perspective (when WAS popular culture anything other than superficial tripe?), but they never bother to leaven their endless, snotty complaints with anything like a suggestion for improving our degraded culture.
What I love about H.L. Mencken -- whom the Baffler's editors claim to admire but never bother to emulate -- is that he was able to be brutally scathing without sounding self-righteous. Mencken also stood for something. Granted, the beliefs he stood for were frequently racist, elitist and otherwise repugnant to the modern reader -- but at least he brought something to the table other than unadulterated whining. The folks at the Baffler, on the other hand, seem to stand for absolutely nothing -- unless you count a handful of bands that none of us have ever heard of.
Judging by its output to date, the Baffler is an elitist clique of overeducated, emotionally stunted alcoholics whose members joined together to reassure themselves that 1.) everyone else is much more superficial than they are; and 2.) their taste in music is soooo much cooler than yours and mine that you might as well not even try to understand it.
Anyway, thanks again for giving a rude shake to the enormous stick lodged in their collective butt.
-- Geoff Rodkey
SALON | Dec. 23, 1997

R E C E N T L Y+| GLUB GLUB GLUB: A REVIEW OF "TITANIC" BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

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_______________WERE THE '60S A FRAUD? BY GARY KAMIYA (12/22/97)
	I can't resist raising a few points (and doubtless a few hackles) over Gary Kamiya's review of "Commodify Your Dissent" and "The Conquest of Cool." The first is a broader observation about how both books are being reviewed, in every outlet from the New York Times to In These Times: Anxious boomers admire the incendiary spirit of the Baffler crowd, but grimly chide them over their failure to be properly reverent to the sainted '60s. Basically, this leitmotif (quite striking if you look over the reviews) boils down to the complaint that the '60s were, too, political. The most heroic version of this refrain was the review in the New York Times, which tried to argue that American consumer culture, authentically hip or otherwise, was what caused the '89 revolutions in the Eastern bloc, and by extension, the collapse of communism. Leave aside for the moment the surface fallacies of this staggeringly delusional stab at historical explanation and ponder for a moment the blinding generational hubris involved in such claims. It's a hubris that our culture has been creaking under for the 30 years since the '60s lumbered to their inglorious halt, and can be imbibed anywhere in our literary and putatively political cultures, from the self-mythologizing twaddle of a Paul Berman to the complacent PBS gurglings of Roger Rosenblatt to the strident outbursts of a Katha Pollitt -- and now, I regret to note, in Salon. The obvious observation to make here is that you all protest too much. If we accept your claim that the '60s were so dizzyingly political and liberating, it's only fair (among other things) to ask, where are those politics, and that liberationism, today? While I agree that the Baffler can at times giddily conflate the broadcasted world with the actual one, I'd nevertheless maintain that the extent to which the counterculture of the '60s has been appropriated by business culture has been overwhelming, and I believe unprecedented, when you look at other bohemian-cum-political revolts in the American past. So why has it happened? Tom Frank's point is that it was more or less designed to happened: that '60s rebellion was commodified on arrival. This, by the way, is a fundamentally different argument than the Marcusean "repressive tolerance" line. Marcuse claimed that all dissent would eventually be domesticated and co-opted by the hegemons of capitalism; Frank denies that any co-optation took place at all, since the counterculture was eagerly embraced, and in important ways, created, by the culture of business. You can (and should) quarrel with him about the extent to which business presided over the counterculture's creation, but it seems worse than idle to deny that it took an extremely active hand in the propagation of the counterculture's sensibilities. (For an allied, less polemical account of how all this took place in the cherished realm of pop music, see Fred Goodman's fine book, "The Mansion on the Hill.") I just don't see how you can account for the sheer volume and tumult of present-day liberation marketing -- and however much we all strive to mute it and/or deny it, the nexus of lifestyle liberation is this fundamental point. But for the sake of argument, leave aside the question of origins, and return to the authentic politics you say made the '60s so worth revering and preserving. First of all, it's a tremendous fallacy to regard that decade as a time of ascendant leftism: The youth vote in 1968 went, in significant numbers, to Nixon and Wallace. Some civil rights activists pushed Wallace out of classroom doors -- though those who did were generally older and less, shall we say, pallid than the connoisseurs of counterculture revolt -- but many more American youth of the '60s eagerly welcomed his entry into the presidential arena. The reasons for this are complex, and steeped in the rather myopic strategies of the antiwar movement, but it remains a stubborn fact hardly ever acknowledged in all the reverent backward glances your generation takes at the '60s. And speaking of political strategies, another stubborn fact is that Young Americans for Freedom (the Buckleyite youth wing of the Goldwater movement) crafted a much more effective and influential legacy in electoral and ideological politics than SDS ever did. For all the blows dealt in Chicago, the SDS's chief achievements were a fatal repudiation of the liberal wing of the Democratic party at a time when the frail liberal-labor-civil rights coalition could ill afford such spasmodic, divisive gestures. (Todd Gitlin's book on the '60s spells this out in painstaking, tragic detail.) Nixon had already attracted an impressive plurality of young voters in the '68 campaign; the political wing of the counterculture nicely nullified any impact that the left youth movement -- and its many liberal sympathizers -- might have had on the decade's most important election. I won't bore you by going on to rehearse the counterculture left's other, extremely destructive, legacy of political style: a runaway politics of personal authenticity that, as you and I both know, devolved into the dismal spectacle of identity politics. Another, smaller, historical quibble on this score: Kamiya conflates the early civil rights movement -- the folks who pushed Wallace aside -- with the antiwar and countercultural wings of the '60s youth movement. The civil rights struggle was a very different animal, growing out of what amounts to a religious revival in the black churches of the South. Indeed, one can argue that when it got a hearty whiff of the lifestyle revolt -- during the infamous black power factional split within SNCC -- the civil rights movement fatally embarked on the self-as-street-theater brand of political discourse that has given us such engaging spectacles as the Brawley trial, parts I and II. Now, I'm not out to demonize the '60s for its own sake (that's David Horowitz's job), and as an eminence still griser than M. Frank, I acknowledge that there were useful political discussions that emerged out of the decade's sound and fury. I like Bob Dylan and Moonpies. But I confess to a deep puzzlement over the ongoing appeal exerted by what Murray Kempton would call the "social myth" of the '60s. I know, of course, that boomers preside over most of the cultural gatekeeping of our age. But I can't help but think there's a much deeper apparatus of denial involved in present-day special pleading for the '60s. As far as I can tell, you want to have it both ways: to affirm that there was important political content in the lifestyle revolt; but to deny (or gracefully gloss) the genuinely baleful political consequences of the New Left's explicitly political endeavors. As a 'tweener -- neither boomer nor Gen Xer -- I'm left with the odd political project of trying to explain how Newt Gingrich (let alone Louis Rosetto) postures as a "revolutionary," how the characteristic idiom of today's ambiguously rebelling youth is crudely libertarian and how the market has become the most unassailable social force on the planet. If, as you claim, the '60s changed the world in important ways, then can't you acknowledge that the coordinates of the decade's political world were, to put it mildly, eminently adaptable to the less peace-and-love-happy world we have today? -- Chris Lehmann In his excellent piece on the 1960s, Gary Kamiya writes that "It would appear that soon the only defenders of the '60s faith will be a handful of graybeards with old Captain Beefheart albums in their closets." I write to Salon as a 23-year old defender of the '60s who has neither a Captain Beefheart album nor a closet. I would like very much to have a Captain Beefheart record because my rock heroine, P.J. Harvey, is a Beefheart fan; but right now I have to worry about paying the rent and buying food. Although I'm one who lives for art, I'm not willing to starve to death for it! Anyway, the reason I now write to Salon in defense of the '60s is that I recently came to see how important it is to study what was going on in popular culture at the time. I'm not so much into the politics of the period. I'm sure that readers of Salon have heard of the controversy surrounding the song "Smack My Bitch Up." The video for it premiered on MTV a few weeks ago and I stayed up late to watch it. I wasn't excited by it (as a lifetime reader of Vogue, I've seen all kinds of sexual imagery, so nothing shocks my eye anymore); but after watching it I did have an uncomfortable feeling, difficult to explain. Then, right before going to bed, I switched over to VH1, where a documentary on Jim Croce was being shown. One of the most moving things I've ever seen. Although Croce's success arrived in the early '70s it's fair to say that he's really a '60s person. People who knew him said that one saw wisdom when looking into his eyes. I agree. But he was wise and also innocent. By the end of the documentary I was bawling like a big baby. It so happens that Croce died right before I was born. His song "Time in a Bottle" (written, apparently, for his young son) was a constant throughout my early years and I believe that the '60s turned into the '70s at the moment Croce's plane crashed to earth. Until I saw the documentary I would have placed the end of the '60s at 1969, when SO much happened. But no, it was in 1973. The innocence. The honesty. The realness of Jim Croce. Gone. In its place we have music like "Smack My Bitch Up" or, at the opposite end, pathetic weaklings like James Taylor (who only knows to do bad imitations of the authentic master). I don't want to end on a negative note; I won't dwell on death but celebrate that I have been able to enjoy the musicians of the '60s because of the technology of today. Time may not be in a bottle, but it's on CD. Croce, Hendrix, Joplin -- gone, but now more powerful than ever because of their absence. -- Damion Doohan Thank you for putting into words exactly what I've been thinking ever since I picked up a copy of "Commodify Your Dissent." I'm 27 years old, routinely appalled by the state of our culture, and not particularly fond of the pompous, self-absorbed condescension of many baby boomers -- but those guys at the Baffler are completely out of their trees. As Gary Kamiya so eloquently pointed out, they not only appear to lack any sense of historical perspective (when WAS popular culture anything other than superficial tripe?), but they never bother to leaven their endless, snotty complaints with anything like a suggestion for improving our degraded culture. What I love about H.L. Mencken -- whom the Baffler's editors claim to admire but never bother to emulate -- is that he was able to be brutally scathing without sounding self-righteous. Mencken also stood for something. Granted, the beliefs he stood for were frequently racist, elitist and otherwise repugnant to the modern reader -- but at least he brought something to the table other than unadulterated whining. The folks at the Baffler, on the other hand, seem to stand for absolutely nothing -- unless you count a handful of bands that none of us have ever heard of. Judging by its output to date, the Baffler is an elitist clique of overeducated, emotionally stunted alcoholics whose members joined together to reassure themselves that 1.) everyone else is much more superficial than they are; and 2.) their taste in music is soooo much cooler than yours and mine that you might as well not even try to understand it. Anyway, thanks again for giving a rude shake to the enormous stick lodged in their collective butt. -- Geoff Rodkey SALON \| Dec. 23, 1997