VDH:
The Left’s 1960s dream is America’s 2021 nightmare:
“Censorship” was a dirty word. It purportedly involved the religious bigots and medieval minds that in vain had tried to cancel ideological and cultural mavericks and geniuses from Lenny Bruce to Dalton Trumbo. “Banned in Boston” was a sign of cretinism. Only drunken “paranoids” like Joe McCarthy resorted to “blacklists.” We were reminded that the inferior nuts tried to cancel the brilliant careers of their betters whom they disliked, or feared.
The Right supposedly had sunk into fluoride and “precious bodily fluid” paranoias, and “Who lost China?” conspiracy theories. Conservatives, the radicals lectured us, masked the poverty of their thinking by “red-baiting.” They talked as if “commies” and “insurrectionists” were around every corner—in hopes of militarizing the country, and using police and troops to intimidate the “people.”
Snooping, surveillance, wiretaps—all that and more was awful—the purported work of nutty J. Edgar Hoover. His flat-topped, wing-tipped “G-men” usually outnumbered Black Panthers, Weathermen, and SDS members at secret strategy sessions.
Hollywood went wild in the 1960s and 1970s by warning us about “them.” Endless movies detailed the solo efforts of heroes, who were watched and threatened by the “government,” working hand in glove, of course, with either corporations or the “rich.” In films like “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Conversation,” or “Blowup,” we were warned of the nefarious powers of surveillance.
Fearing Russia was the mark of a conspiracist nut. In films like “The Russians are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” we were reminded that the paranoia about the Soviets was as deadly as the Soviets themselves, who were pleasant enough, not much different from us.
Students in the 1960s high schools were spoon-fed Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Brave New World, and other dystopian novels. Orwell and Huxley warned them of the dangers of a super-spy apparat, a one-party state that reorders a docile subservient population, and the combination of “science” with thought control—the sort of stuff that Nixon or Goldwater was no doubt plotting.
So better to be an individualist, the Left preached, a rebel at war with all orthodoxy and conformity, a “Rebel Without a Cause,” Holden Caulfield, or one of the good renegades in “The Wild Ones.” We were to worship James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Steve McQueen because they were “free,” “didn’t give a s—t,” and demolished “the Man’s” silly imposed “rules and regulations.” “Easy Rider” was the 1960’s bible.
Read the whole thing. Exit quote: “The revolutionary animals are now running the farm in a way that would be nightmarish even to Farmer Jones. They won. They are now one with—but also far, far worse than—what they rebelled against.”
J
No comments:
Post a Comment