Joe,
A couple of quick thoughts regarding the Sixties and, what seems to be more important, nostalgia for the Sixties. I was a little young for the “Summer of Love” that folks like Paul Krassner are celebrating the 40th anniversary of. I observed it from the soporific vantage point of lily-white Upper Arlington, Ohio. But I have been around for a while, and will likely always be a true believer in peace, love, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
Speaking, however, as the Joe Bageant School of Hard Knocks Chair in Peak Oil Studies, or whatever the hell I am, I think that a lot of what went on then was an outgrowth of our country's bountiful status as an energy exporter. We were literally awash in cheap oil, something that the hippies, the Freedom Riders, and everybody else took completely for granted. And when societies have a surplus of energy, specifically oil, it makes for cheap food, cheap housing, lots of jobs, and a perceived economic surplus that can be used for such niceties as social justice. Guns and butter; Vietnam and the Great Society, and all that.
The first hint that all was not well on that front came in 1973, the time of the peak in US oil production and the coming of OPEC, and it continues with a vengeance today, at world Peak Oil. The last 30 years have seen a retreat from the Great Society, the cutting of social-justice programs, entitlements, etc., corresponding to, and as a direct result of our country's transition from the world's leading oil producer to world's leading oil importer and debtor. We're oil junkies, and our War Department is the worst one in the world, and that demonic pursuit of the next fix explains … well, damn near everything. Our soul-mates, the Nazis, in their quest for liebensraum/cheap Caucasus oil, took to offing the anarchists, homosexuals, artists, liberals and, of course, the Jews, and we seem to be skipping merrily down that well-worn path.
At the same time, we are propagandized with the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia for That 70s Show, the Beatles, bell-bottoms et al., the much oversimplified result being a brainwashed culture of intellectual zombies who don't have a clue what's going on, much less how to begin to think about it.
Those who are exceptions to this dismal scenario are people who have managed to Kill Their TVs, pick up a book, learn something about reality, and begin to act on it. It is with them that hope lies, at least before the SS packs as many as necessary off to Guantanamo or wherever Bechtel/Halliburton is building the taxpayer-funded concentration camps.
As for the purpose of government, it is to perpetuate itself, pure and simple. If less population control is the most effective tactic, great; if more, that's OK, too.
In art and labor,
Rick
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Well Rick,
Yes and no.
For example, when I lived in the West during that era there were thousands upon thousands of young people, hippies if you will, living off the grid in teepees and deserted miners' cabins, back to the land communes and numerous other low energy, easy on the planet scenarios. No car, no electricity, no phones. Harvesting logging slash piles for wood heat so as not to waste the cast-off tops and branches. Studying the vegetarian diets of Asia because they understood how cattle and meat production wasted valuable food grains energy in its production. And they were doing that because of a gut understanding, an instinctive rejection of the ever expanding grid. They grew vast gardens using human labor and established communities on land commonly held in trust.
There was no way at all back then to understand such a thing as peak oil because there was absolutely no information available in the way that it is today. But they nevertheless managed to pioneer the non-petro based organic health food industry we have today (remember Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution?) and a dozen other naturally based movements, many of which remain and even flourish in one form or another. For instance ride sharing and other cooperative transport, communal day care for single mothers, pioneering work in solar energy, tilth restoration of soils, replanting ruined forests (for instance, the Hoedads) recycling durable goods and clothing first like the Diggers, and later the first true recycling as we now know it (which they did absolutely free of charge and without pay as they struggled at day labor jobs to pay the costs of collection). They were the first tree huggers and the first demonstrators and the first to be jailed on behalf of the earth. The list goes on.
Don't let the neo-con rewrite and the silly media presentations of the Sixties fool you. Observing it all from a distance wasn't the same as having five cops at your front door as you ran out the back to help smuggle draft resisters and political anti-war fugitives toward the Canadian border on a sub-zero night with a six mile walk before you.
Believe me when I say, you had to be there. ;-)
In art and Labor,
Joe
