>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.
Intense sexism? Sure there was of that, but the 60s also saw a great upsurge in feminism, and the beginning of huge changes in sex and sexuality and relations between the sexes.
And the 60s were also about questioning authority. Some of that was self-centered, but not all of it. Disobeying orders in the military would have been unimaginable in the 1940s and 1950s, but it became quite thinkable in the 1960s because of the changed social environment. And yes, pot and rock and roll had something to do with it. "I smoke marijuana/and I can't get behind your laws," as the guy crooned.
If the 60s were "immensely varied," how can you identify a "chief characteristic of the so-called 'counter-culture'"? I.e., how can you identify a single counterculture, or a single chief characteristic.
Yeah a lot of hippiedom was consonant with American individualism, but then again American individualism isn't entirely a bad thing. It has a lot to do with the emancipatory elements of American culture that Zizek wrote about the other day - and which the Bushies would love to shut down. The American right has never stopped fighting the 1960s.
Doug