Whatever. My retort was no more nonsensical than your “Another eighteenth century country heard from.” If you’re going to be sarcastic and nasty, don’t be surprised when your traget gets sarcastic and nasty right back.
ROTFLMAO!!!
Well, that would be an extremely stupid thing to do, as you’d still be far better off than 98% of the human race has been throughout history. Really, honestly, America in the 50s didn’t come anywhere close to being the moral equivalent of Stalinist Russia. That’s just a lot of overblown rhetroric from progressive ninnies.
Oh, please. Knock off the adolescent melodrama. The hip fascism of the SDS and their ilk is what’s disgusting and vile. It’s not right-wingers who are shouting down speakers at universities and trying to get people fired from their jobs having the wrong political views.
Nobody is saying that modern day lefties are hippies. Hippiedom was the catalyst. (And it grew, incidentally, from the philosophies, drug use, styles of dress and behavior ‘promoted’ by that days’ music and musicians. If you don’t believe that I’d love to hear your take on what caused the switch in youthful American style and behavior from that personified by Ricky Nelson and the Beach Boys to that of Led Zeppelin and Iron Butterfly…and in only four or five years at that.)
Thus revealing your own ignorance of events of that time and the consequences therefrom.
No, it stems from having swallowed hook-line-and-sinker leftie revisionist history that claims it’s impossible to be polite, well-dressed and well-mannered and not be an ‘ist’ (or ‘phobe’) of some sort. :rolleyes:
Once again, THE TWO HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER! They existed simultaneously but not co-dependently. They were not created by each other and they did not depend upon each other for their existence.
What surprises me is that someone as clearly intelligent as you is apparently incabable of seeing that the societal change that took place starting in the late sixties had absolutely nothing to do with race, homosexuality, or diversity. It was about drugs, the Vietnam war, long hair, psychedelic music, and the freedom to dress, act and talk like stoned dipshits free from societal repercussions. It was hard to be nicely dressed and mindful of manners and polite societal interaction when you’re a stoned idiot putting flowers in soldiers’ rifle barrels and running around naked and fucking in the mud at music festivals and other ‘happenings’ of the day, and so existing societal mores had to go.
Again, the changes of that time had nothing to do with homosexual rights or racism. Anybody who truly believes they did is grossly ignorant of the realities of that time.
SA, just to clarify, as I said above, I do know that your position and Lonesome Polecat’s are different. You haven’t, to my knowledge, evinced explicitly racist attitudes. So, while I do think your position is kind of silly, I don’t despise it as much as I do LP’s.
I do, in fact, know that the hippy movement was basically misogynistic (or, at least, as patriarchal as the overall society at the time) and homophobic. They certainly didn’t move much past their parents on that count, and I don’t consider that movement to have been a positive force toward reducing the effect of those attitudes. As I posted, I really don’t credit it with much other than a good catalog of music. You think that’s a naive attitude, but I don’t see it. Drug culture was around long before the hippies. The beatniks of the previous generation were deep into it. The jazz musicians of the generation or two previous to THAT were deep into it. The hippies only drew it up from the underground.
I don’t like drugs. I don’t take drugs (other than tobacco and caffeine). I wish there weren’t a drug problem in the world, let alone the US. But I don’t think the Flower Children are the Great Evil behind our current drug abuse problems. And frankly, that drugs are a problem may be the only area of overlap I have with you.
I find the idea that someone actually mourns the passing of men attending baseball games in the summer in suits to be hilarious. I find the idea that courtesy is dead to be off the mark. I was raised right by my mother and say please and thank you and hold doors for men OR women. So do the vast majority of people I interact with in a given day. I don’t see the death of courtesy.
And frankly, I think you’d feel much better if you’d stop fighting the ghosts of the hippies. This paragraph:
makes me think you’re still licking a wound that should have long since healed up. I don’t know what the hippies did to you, personally, in the late 60s, but you gotta let go. And if you aren’t even old enough for them to have done anything to you (or to have even actually KNOWN any), there are worse problems afoot with that much bitterness and anger after 40-odd years.
Edited: You know, maybe I DO see that a societal change took place in the late 60s. I just don’t CARE, because it was 40-some years ago and normal people realize that we’ve gone past that now. Railing against the Flower Children isn’t going to change anything. Period. Your fight here is the classic definition of “quixotic”.
As you might imagine, there are several things you said that I have a different take on, but I have to leave now and will be busy the rest of the afternoon and maybe evening, so I’ll try to answer in more detail later. I would say however, that to take a drug problem that was underground and affected maybe .001% of the population and through permissive philosophies turn it into an above ground problem whose misery, crime and death rate has affected probably 90% or more of the population in at least some way, is not a throwaway but a very serious condemnation of the type of thinking that has allowed it to flourish.
And on preview, I’m not Quixotically railing against hippies. I’m railing at the culture that has grown up in it’s wake.
Seriously, I rarely mention hippies until someone…and there are tons of them here and in the country at large…claims that the changes in society that were effected by the hippie era and the crass, rude, vulgar and classless society that has grown up in its wake were necessary in order to effect racial and homosexual rights. To me, as long as this meme is allowed to flourish it will only lead to more of the same and we’ll eventually ‘progress’ all the way back to behaving like cavemen. (Not really but you know what I mean.)
BTW, the same can be said about many a gangsta rap.
Speaking of the Beach Boys, I believe Dennis Wilson drowned when he was shitfaced.
Oh, and you ARE aware that behind the facade, Ricky Nelson’s personal life was definitely NOTOzzie and Harriet?
For godsakes, look at ELVIS!
And what’s wrong with Led Zeppelin? I LIKE Zeppelin.
A lot of that anger in the sixties stemmed from Vietnam, from the Kennedy assasination, the Cold War, race relations, etc. Hippies indeed. (The majority of teenagers weren’t hippies, from what I’ve seen.)
I hate to pull out the “appeal from authority”, but one thing I learned studying history-life has always been this way. Everyone always thinks the next generation is worse. It isn’t – it’s just DIFFERENT.
The old days of the KKK, racist police that could run rough shod over minorities, red-lining, returning black WWII soldiers having to go back to colored-only drinking fountains, sending pregnant girls off to “visit their aunt”, higher murder rates, closeted homosexuals, unoffcial quotas for how many jews would be allowed into elite schools, etc?
Don’t you remember the Dixie Chicks? Millions of people backlashed against them just for sticking their tounges out at the President.
And could you elaborate as to what sort of “wrong political views” are getting people fired? (Bearing in mind that prejudice is not simply a political view. Oh, and bear in mind the US attorneys that got fired for their political views.)
The SDS is still around? I haven’t heard of them being active since the 60s.
Guin, you know perfectly well that I meant that the way young people looked and acted then was more in line with the image portrayed by people such as the Beach Boys and Ricky Nelson. The fact that they may have behaved differently than everyone else in their private life - a private life hugely impacted by their celebrity and its concomitant privileges and irritations - is of no consequence in terms of how people dressed and acted then.
And like I said upthread, my gripe isn’t merely a case of generational resentment. People’s lives and society at large have been hugely impacted in negative ways because of the permissiveness that is part and parcel of liberal ideology. I outlined exactly how upthread so I won’t post it again here, but the point is that what is going on now is a great deal more different and harmful than one generation’s feeling that women’s skirts shouldn’t reveal ankles where another generation thinks that knees are fine.
Damn kids these days with their pointy rocks and their sharpened sticks! Why in my day, we could only eat animals that other animals killed, or small things we could catch with our hands. Kids these days, going all stabby stabby and pounding with the rocks. Breeds disrespect I tells ya.
Yes, it’s so much better now with liberals at the helm, where abortions and STDs proliferate, gangs and thug life are defended and promoted, viscious criminals in their twenties and thirties are walking the streets with multiple convictions on their record, undeserving kids are passed from grade to grade because to fail them would make them ‘feel bad about themselves’, where drugs and its related crime and death affect nearly everyone, where people are crass and vulgar and classless and feel free to act like assholes to everyone else, which leads even more people to act like assholes, which leads to even more anger and aggression, etc., etc., etc.
Yes, it’s a wonderful world you guys have created for us here. So much more safe, civilized and ‘progressive’.
I’d give hearty agreement to most of what you say, but it doesn’t address my point. Of course television is not an accurate representation of reality. That goes without saying. But watching television does give us a picture of what a society values, what it upholds, and what it condemns. Married couples have separate beds in 50’s sitcoms doesn’t tell us anything about what type of beds married couples actually had, but it tells us quite a bit about what that culture classified as acceptable and unacceptable. It tells us that they wanted sex kept out of public view, and sexual feeling bottled up as much as possible.
The media do not exist in a vacuum. Any pressure on the media, whether it comes from outright censorship or market forces, must originate somewhere. And as the United States has never been a dictatorship, in our country it must originate from a fairly widespread base in the population. Of course some will pop up to remind how the media disenfranchised some people, twisted some viewpoints, etc…, but that’s beside the point. The point is that an overall cultural viewpoint exists, and we can study how it’s changed over the years by studying cultural products.
So in that way, we can learn about anger by looking at how the portrayal of anger changed over the years. Some people have complained that I’m only cherry-picking examples rather than providing a serious study, but I have provided a serious study: Peter Wood’s book.
Every generation, every age, has something that is the root of all evil, and it’s all nonsense. I don’t care if it’s jazz, heavy metal, Elvis, ragtime, Ozzie Osbourne, Alice Cooper, Freddy Krueger, Jason, Grand Theft Auto, or AD&D, or anything else. None of that MAKES people go bad. There have always been angry people, crazy people, and bad people. People just use the “current hot thing” as a scapegoat, and every generation has their favorite target.
I’m in my mid fifties, and I think that I’ve been exposed to enough “root of all evils” that I should be a raving loony, if any of it actually worked that way.
Violence depends on tons of things: police tactics, economic conditions, federal subsidies, urban design, etc… etc… Hence crime rates don’t tell us anything about anger rates. But even so, it’s interesting that no has linked to the final and authoritative source on crime rates now vs. then.
In the main, I agree with you when you say it’s impossible to measure anger, because you can’t put numbers on an emotion. What you can do is to be informed about what people wrote, said, and did, and study the changing trends over time.
Well, actually that’s not my contention at all. I never mentioned hippies. That’s merely how certain other parties mischaracterized my point. More importantly I never said there was “very little anger in the fifties” or at any other time. In fact I specifically said otherwise. There has always been anger, what’s changed is the cultural attitude towards anger. Formerly, it was considered a sign of weakness to let anger spill out in public, and a sign of strength to show no reaction in an infuriating situation. Now, it’s exactly the opposite. People celebrate and promote anger as “affirmative”, “enlightening”, “empowering”, and so forth. Those who don’t explode in public are somehow held to be losers. The difference is not merely visible in pop culture, but everywhere. All of the thinkers and works who formed the building blocks of western civilization were aware of the dangers of uncontrolled fury. (After all, the word “fury” comes from a being in Greek mythology who could drive people insane.) Look at Homer or Aristotle or Plato or the Bible or Dante or Shakespeare or Adam Smith or most other major works pre-18th century. But if one has to assign blame for the triumph of anger, it should go not to hippies but to Jean Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher who decided that civilization made us unhappy by imposing polite manners and restrained emotions, and that we instead needed to become “drunk with emotion”.
