Mark Bennett wrote:
>
> Mark Bennett wrote:
>
> >I believe Carrol's analysis is accurate. The soldiers' revolt did much
> >more to end the Vietnam war than the "vocal opposition" of the anti-war
> >movement, which was effective primarily to the extent that it helped
> >radicalize the G.I.s.
>
> Doug wrote:
>
> >How can you separate all these things? The antiwar movement was
> >inseparable from the "counterculture" - which I suppose is suspect by
> >hardcore politicos because it involved what Judith Butler calls the
> >"merely cultural" - and those were inseparable from the GI's
> >rebellion. It was mass social indiscipline and it scared the hell out
> >of conservatives, from Spiro Agnew to Irving Howe.
The problem with the "countercultural" was not that it was "merely cultural," but that it wasn't a culture of any kind. It astounded me at the time to see how many people believed Time magazine more than they believed the evidence of their own experience. Michael Novak (the Catholic philosopher) spoke at ISU in 1967 or so (he was a radical then) and he had bought the whole thing. He compared the hippies to the Franciscans as the "spiritual wing" of the movement.
In so far as there was an imitation counterculture, one can get some sense of it by comparing a parody of "Okee from Muskogee" that appeared in some material mimeographed at a GI coffeehouse in El Paso and a slightly different version that was printed in the Berkeley Barb. From the GI movement, "They send _our kids_ to school, they're just like prisons." The Barb: "They send _us_ off to school, they're just like prisons."
That insufferable self-centredness was _the_ chief characteristic of the so-called "counter-culture."
And I guess I simply do not know what you are talking about when you write: "The antiwar movement was inseparable from the 'counterculture.'" The republican who ran for the senate in illinois in 1968 based his whole campaign on full page ads trying to make that identification, but everyone laughed at the ads. Do you mean that long hair + pot + intense sexism = the anti-war movement? The '60s were immensely varied, but Agnew and Time, and apparently Doug, tried to reduce them to drugs + window smashing.
Carrol