Chuck, I agree pretty completely with your overall argument, but your
arithmetic is a little off here. I met very few people my own age (I was
born in 1930) in movement activity. Most were younger, and quite a few
were older, but few from among those who came of age 1945-1955. The gap
were those conditioned by the beginnings of the Cold War, and very few
of my "generation" escaped that conditioning. I was still pretty
anti-communist as late as 1966 -- I was more or less anti-war, but my
"arguments," such as they were, included contrasting the Vietnam War
with the Korean War, which at that time I still regarded as legitimate.
:-< On the other hand, my father never did really fall for the anti-red
hysteria, and had he not been in a TB san for most of the '30s might
well have become a red himself. Carrol Cox
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I won't argue dates. I was tempted to use 1935-45, but this idea that a generation is ten years is also a kind of mass cultural artifact, since people can not reproduce themselves or their societies in ten years. This is more of a mass production product cycle period than anything from a biological or social realm.
I think it was Ortega y Gassett who used the idea that a generation was a kind of historical entity and tried to create a kind of organic sense of historical time with it. I can't remember what actual measure he used, maybe twenty years? If I were going to create such a periodic measure I would be tempted to use something on the order of forty or fifty years, since that is about how long it takes to reproduce a new generation into adulthood and transfer just about everything to it.
This mention of commies is interesting. I think Red was the word I remember, as in Red Chinese. I remember a comic book from the Korean War with yellow chinese looking faces, big teeth, glasses, insane expressions of hatred and vengeance, red stars on their hats, raised arms, looking a lot like the same sort of cartoons as the WWII depictions of Japanese. In fact I thought they were the same, but my little racist buddies set me straight. What I remember most is a ridiculous kid conversation at lunch. It was a debate over whether everything would disappear if an A or an H bomb was dropped on the playground. I completely dis-believed this hyperbole. Nothing disappears, just like that. Of course I was wrong, but that doesn't matter much. What I refused to believe at eight was the idea that it would happen or could happen as a reasonable possibility. My fellow third graders were animate. Yes, dummy, it can happen. No it can't. Yes it can...
And then there was my friend Danny who lived across Hoover St in a laundry with his dad. They were Chinese and of course didn't look at all like the comics. I do remember wondering if they were Communists, but decided that it didn't make any sense or any difference. The most stunning feature about Danny was the way he argued with his father, which I thought was extremely rare. He just refused to speak to him or anyone if he was mad. One day his father, Henry took me aside and told me to try to get Danny to talk. I played around and tried, but Danny didn't budge. It was a great act. Very hard to carry off. So we just sat putting these little cardboard rollers in wire clothes hangers with a paper cover together in silence until the whole box was finished, and I went home. This was our usual after school chore for the laundry. Very weird to do in silence.
Probably the most memorable experience I ever had with Danny and his father was going fishing in the middle of the night. Henry and his buddies loaded us up in pick-up trucks and drove for miles somewhere in the mountains, got out, lit kerosene lanterns and went fishing in the streams for frogs and crawdads. All these people chattering away in Cantonese in the middle of the night in the fog with lanterns going after frogs and crawfish. I kept asking Danny what were they saying, but he just shrugged his shoulders---he didn't know either. It was surreal.
I realize now this was at the height of the cold war propaganda campaigns in LA, 1950-1. Communism was Uncle Joe (as my stepfather sarcastically called him) and like God and the Easter Bunny, it was something I was supposed to learn about and then get over. What was the most difficult for me was separating out the authoritarian and police state cast that the Russians had given to it. Here I think it was the Cuban Revolution and the late high school, early college debates that changed me the most (1959-62)
We lived in Mexico for a brief period right after Hoover St in LA (1951-2) and so I knew what third world poverty was from seeing it. By coincidence Jorge, the father of the family downstairs from us in Guadalajara worked in a sugar refinery. I think he was a foreman or part of management. He took his kids and me on a tour to show us how sugar was made. I almost puked from the smell, but so did Dolores and Maya (his girls my age). After touring the inside and seeing these huge vats with different colored liquids in them, I couldn't force myself to even suck on a fresh cut piece of raw cane. I sort of mouthed it a little and threw it away.
Thinking back on it now, I think Jorge was doing his fatherly duty to try and keep his kids from eating too many sweets. Mexican sweets are a whole different level of intensity than anything in US markets. In any event that tour stayed with me, and so I had a tangible image of what Castro was doing when he expropriated the cane plantations and refineries and at least theoretically tried to shift the cuban economy off its one crop dependence.
So these experiences compose a kind of sensibility that has very little to do with mass culture, and acts as a kind vaccine against believing too much of that stuff. Everybody has something in their life that forms an inoculation against trivia and a basis for forming their own sense of history---that is what is effaced by these media images. So, part of the intellectual battle is seeing the material of your own history and then giving to it the aesthetic, political, and social qualities that match its meaning to you.
In terms of being raised by Dr. Spock, I think I was raised by his radical mother---moms was a bit loose as they used to say. However, me and the ex sure went looking for Spock when our kid was about to arrive---and hung on every word. The real problem with Spock is he finished off as I remember sometime between six and eight or so. I had a hard time finding something useful for those years between five and ten. In fact I didn't find anything like Spock. Most of the material was too saturated with moralisms of various sorts from sex to lying---none of which I liked. What I was looking for basically didn't exist or I couldn't find it, so I made it up. The center of it was a kind of acceptance and reading of bodies (much of which I picked up from disabled friends), as affection, solace, joy (in other words, love) as a core to morality and sociability.
I didn't realize it very explicitly at the time, but this track had a strange consequence which was expressed as a profoundly anti-Christian, and more broadly anti-religious sentiment---pretty odd, since I thought I was passing on the best of these, without their obnoxious and punitive metaphysics. This worried me for awhile, since the kid was far more anti-religious than I was, and I worried that anything that strongly held had the potential to flip sides without moderation. But it passed, like so many other sources of parental worry. The truth was, I think he was responding to the media portrayal of the Christian right at the time---Eighties, Reagan, etc.
One thing I never understood was why the various religious communities didn't denounce their rightwing, fanatical, fundamentalist breathern as monstrosities. The people who actually believe in these various systems were the ones most damaged by these waves of fundamentalism.
Chuck Grimes