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Citation: The Progressive March 1999, v.63, 3, 46(1)
Author: Ivins, Molly
Title: A Toast to the Sixties.(Brief Article)(Column) by Molly
Ivins
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COPYRIGHT 1999 Progressive Inc.
In the end, our long national nightmare took on an eerie resemblance to
Groundhog Day--we had to listen while they kept repeating and repeating the
Tale of the Ten Blow Jobs.
You must admit, this has been the most curious political phenomenon of our
lifetimes. After five years of investigation by Kenneth Starr, one solid year
of media frenzy, and three months of impeachment proceedings, Bill Clinton's
job approval rating rose to 72 percent and Republicans now rank below Larry
Flynt in the public esteem. Their response to all this was, "More! More!"
Kind of hard to know what to say to them. And here I was agreeing with Pat
Robertson: Please, stop!
The latest wrinkle in rightwing spin is to claim this is not a political
phenom at all, but is the final battle in some culture war I didn't know was
going on. I have my doubts about this culture war: Can you be in one and not
know it? Did our side actually vote for Larry Flynt as our standard bearer?
What is our side?
My last effort to grasp what the right wing is on about here was to read
Robert Bork's latest book, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, an experience so
horrifying I have not yet recovered and cannot bear to read any more in the
genre. I give thanks daily the man is not on the Supreme Court. I would not
subject anyone to that book, but take my word for it--Mr. Bork does not have
judicial temperament.
If Bork was the beginning of the culture war, as is sometimes claimed
("payback for Bork" being an occasionally heard battle cry), all I can say is,
I didn't know it was war at the time, but I'm sure glad I was on the right
side.
An alternative theory is that the culture war dates back to the 1960s, and
this is where I get totally lost reading rightwing cultural interpretations.
The old joke is that the sixties were about sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll and
that if you can remember it, you weren't there. (I think that's a P.J.
O'Rourke line.) I was there, and I can remember it.
I remember the decade as being about the Peace Corps, the civil rights
movement, and the anti-war movement. As Margot Adler writes in her memoir of
the period, Heretic's Heart, it was quite possible to be an activist in the
sixties and miss sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll in their entirety. "We Shall
Overcome" remains the song of the decade for many.
That is, until 1968, the year of assassinations, when it all turned very,
very dark.
I could be wrong, but I still think the berserker element of the 1960s was
largely the consequence of Vietnam--the drugs, the craziness, the feeling that
the world made no sense because, Lord knows, that war made no sense. And that
war was not the fault of those who fought it or opposed it. Your famous World
War II generation presented that little gift to us: Eisenhower, Kennedy,
Johnson, and Nixon. Long time passing.
Another rightwing interpretation of the sixties is the bizarre notion that
black rage was fomented by white liberal social programs. Bill Kristol has
been alone among rightwing intellectuals, I believe, in consistently and
gracefully conceding that liberals were right about civil rights and
conservatives (a word often synonymous with "racist" in those years) were
wrong. That's most generous of him, but I think it leaves a wrong impression,
a bit like that odd film Mississippi Burning, that somehow white people were
the key players in the civil rights movement.
It was a movement of, by, and for black Americans: Those few whites who took
part--and there were damn few of us here in the South--were just bit players.
As Taylor Branch's wonderful King biography--among many other books--makes
clear, the whites in power, whether they reacted for good or ill at the time,
were just reacting. Reacting to one of the most astonishing, beautiful, and
spontaneous uprisings for justice the world has ever seen.
The movement split in '64, when Stokely Carmichael's "Burn, baby, burn"
stood in contrast to "We Shall Overcome." But to blame that on anything white
liberals did is ludicrous. Race riots had been part of American history for
100 years. They were not unusual before the civil rights movement, and the
roots of the rage underlying them are obvious.
These silly books blaming the sixties for various social evils are so
pathetically truncated in their viewpoint.
Were there symptoms of decline in black family structure? According to
anthropologists, the black family is one of the most durable social structures
in history: It survived both slavery and Jim Crow, and finally was visibly
damaged only by the Depression. Incidentally, the Depression had the same
effect on white families--those who yearn for hard times to bring us together
might keep that in mind.
Was there an increase in sexual activity outside marriage in the sixties? If
so, don't you think it had more to do with the invention of the birth control
pill than with some "permissive attitudes" upon the part of Larry Flynt or
anyone else?
Did the women's movement lead to an increase in the divorce rates? As
Barbara Ehrenreich has ably demonstrated, actually, the reverse seems to have
been true: If you look at divorce rates in the fifties, you can conclude that
the women's movement was in large part a response to the phenomenon of
successful men dumping their long-time spouses for someone younger.
So you want to talk about the culture wars? Don't get me stahted.
Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star Telegram.
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