Sunday, May 11, 2008
The legendary year 1968 stills hold the baby-boom generation in thrall -- but it was actually the pinnacle of anti-democratic narcissism.
Aug 31, 1998 | Nostalgia is in the air. A generation of balding boomers is busy remembering the 30th anniversary of the year 1968. It is a time in their imaginations of lost innocence, a moment when impossible dreams were brutally cut short by assassinations and repressions that have left them stranded ever since on the shores of a conservative landscape. A summary expression of such utopian regrets appeared recently in Salon by Stephen Talbot, who is also the producer of the recent PBS documentary "1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation." The narrative line of this film was shaped by radicals of the era like Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden. This choice of authorities was predictable for the veteran of a movement that promotes itself as an avatar of "participatory democracy" but also closes off debate within its ranks with a regularity worthy of the Communist regimes it once admired. Thus Talbot excludes from his cinematic paean to his revolutionary youth any dissenters from inside the ranks of those who were there. Me, for instance. For I am one of those who does not share Talbot's enthusiasm for 1968, nor his view of it as a fable of Innocents at Home. One explanation may be the fact that I am 10 years older than Talbot, and therefore know first-hand the state of our "innocence" then. Yet Gitlin and Hayden are also pre-boomers. An age gap cannot really explain the different views we have of what took place. Oh sure, like Gitlin and Hayden I would prefer to recall the glory days of my youth in a golden light, but for me the era has been irreparably tarnished by actions and attitudes I vividly remember, while they prefer to forget. The myth of innocence begins with President Lyndon Johnson's announcement in March 1968 that he would not run for reelection. Talbot was 19 years old and draft-eligible: "We were all like Yossarian in Catch-22," he recalls. "We took this very personally. They were trying to kill us. But now Johnson had abdicated. We were free. It felt, quite simply, like a miracle." The miracle, of course, was the democratic system that we had declared war on. Contrary to what Hayden, Gitlin, Talbot and all the rest of us were saying at the time, the system worked -- and we should have defended it instead of trying to tear it down. Talbot does not notice or reflect on this contradiction. And of course "they" were not trying to kill "us." (Even in retrospect, the narcissism of the boomer generation is still wondrous to behold.) The attention of Johnson (and Nixon after him) was actually on the fate of Indochina, where they were committing American forces to prevent the blood bath and oppression that (we now know) were in store for the Vietnamese should the Communists win the war. Subsequently, more people -- more poor Indo-Chinese peasants -- were killed by the Marxist victors in the first three years of the Communist peace than had been killed on all sides in the 13 years of the anti-Communist war. This is a fact that has caused many veterans of those years to reconsider our "innocence" then. But not Talbot, or the other nostalgists he cites. For them, our innocence (in the moral sense of culpability for what happened) remains intact to this day. In their memory, our innocence (in the sense of idealistic possibility) was brutally ambushed in 1968, when forces inherent in the System we hated conspired to murder the agents of our hope: Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. "I experienced King's assassination as the murder of hope," writes Talbot, speaking for them all. Gitlin, whose history of the '60s first announced this theme, remembers his thoughts at the time: "America tried to redeem itself and now they've killed the man who was taking us to the mountaintop." There is something extremely distasteful in this false memory of Gitlin's. For, as Gitlin well knows, in 1968 neither he nor Hayden nor Talbot nor any serious New Left radicals were following King. Here's one indicator: Not a single white student activist leader or anti-war spokesman was in Memphis demonstrating alongside King at the time that he was killed. In fact, no one in the New Left (at least no one who mattered) was following King at all when he was killed. Two years earlier, while King was still very much alive, he had been unceremoniously toppled from the leadership of the civil rights struggle by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee radicals, led by Stokeley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, whose slogans of black power, and whose agendas of racial separatism and violent struggle, had replaced King's nonviolent integrationism in the political imaginations of the left. Gitlin was far from the idealistic liberal he portrays himself in his book or in Talbot's film. Like everyone else in Students for a Democratic Society, he had stopped voting in national elections as early as 1964 because, as the SDS slogan put it, "The revolution is in the streets." The two parties were the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the corporate ruling class. Activists who saw themselves as revolutionaries against a "sham" democracy, dominated by multinational corporations, were not going to invest hope in a man whose political agenda was integration into the System, and who refused to join their war on the Johnson administration and its cooptive "tokenism." Hayden's attempt to formulate a doctrine of original innocence involves fewer flat untruths than Gitlin's. He relies more on the manipulations of truth that were for him a kind of political signature: "At that point," Hayden says of the King assassination, "I had been so knocked out of my middle-class assumptions that I didn't know what would happen. Perhaps the country could be reformed and Robert Kennedy elected president. Perhaps we would be plunged into a civil war and I'd be imprisoned or killed." The reality is that any "middle-class assumptions" held by Hayden -- or other SDS activists -- had already been chucked in the garbage bin years before. Three out of four drafters of the 1962 SDS charter, the Port Huron Statement, were red-diaper babies (the offspring of Communist Party members) and Marxists. The fourth was Hayden himself, who by his own account had learned his politics in Berkeley in 1960 at the feet of "red-diaper babies and Marxists" (he names Michael Tigar in particular). By 1965, Carl Oglesby was proclaiming publicly, in a famous speech, that it was time to "name the System" that we all wanted to destroy. The name of the System was, of course, "corporate capitalism," analyzed in pretty much the same terms as in the party texts read by the Communist cadres in Moscow, Havana and Hanoi. Hayden was already calling the Black Panthers "America's Vietcong," and planning the riot he was going to stage at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August. (This is described conveniently, but unhistorically, as a "police riot" in Talbot's film, Gitlin's book and Hayden's own disingenuous memoir of the events.) Civil war in America was not something that might be imposed on the SDS revolutionaries from the outside or above, as Hayden insinuates. Civil war was something that they were trying to launch themselves. Talbot's mythology continues: "Out of the ashes of the riots in the wake of King's murder, new hope came in the form of Bobby Kennedy, who [in less than four years, and after reading Camus] had undergone a profound transformation from Vietnam hawk and aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy to dove and spokesman for the dispossessed." Sure, and President Clinton is a virgin.
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