Stop Me Before I Vote Again

(DISCLAIMER: I was born in 1957 -- or, as I like to say, a "Sputnik Spawn". I, too, was concerned about earning a living after finishing college, but did my level best to avoid being sucked into my parents' American Dream™ trap. Looking back, I think I did OK at it.)

Owen Paine sez on 06.08.11 at 18:09:
My putatively anti-material broad-beamed middle merit-class generation, with its premature sanctimonious Woodstock enlightenment, went on to become, with equal farcicality, the apex generation of the utterly crass and craven "American dream".

On a slightly-related non-economic note: My DW was born in 1948 and graduated from college in 1971 with, as she likes to joke, a double major in Political Science and Agitation. She decided to get into environmental policy after -- no shit -- going to the Santana concert at the first Earth Day. After five or six years at enviro nonprofits and think-tanky outfits, she ended up at EPA for thirty years.

So, aaa-aaanyway... by the time my end of the Baby Boom hit college age and started getting involved in leftie activism, we had to pretty much figure it out for ourselves; I like to joke that the post-1956 Boomers got the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll but couldn't grok the politics.

Getting back to Paine's point, and at the risk of oversimplifying, I blame my wife's end of the Baby Boom, for talking a good game about revolution when they were in college but, after graduation, ended up doing what their Moms'n'Dads wanted them to do -- get a haircut and a job. They may have fed themselves a great line about working within the system to bring about change, or some shit, but basically they all ended up getting a haircut and a job.

So, there were my post-1956 buddies and I, all long-haired and crazy and ready to fight for peace, justice, clean energy and legal weed, and there were our pre-1956 fellow Boomers chasing the American Dream™ and trying to keep up with the Joneses™ just like their goddamn' parents' generation did, while they bitched about how us youngsters didn't know how to do activism right.

Hell, my DW still bitches at me about how us Late Boomers -- not to mention the generations who came after, most notably the "Seattle Generation" -- still don't know how to do a revolution right, while sitting around falling asleep watching Rachel Maddow.

Mike,

Last really revolutionary moment ended with the breaking of Haywood, EG Flynn and the One Big Union. It's been academia and parlor talk, leftside, since. Give academics a revolution and they'll turn it into tenure and area studies.

It's no wonder the bulk of them started off parlor Trots and and purchase order dodgers. Fucking boomer clowns.

The Sixties jokers were never revolutionaries, least of all the snappy white kids who could afford to hippie up on daddy's dime.

The real rads - Angela Davis, Shakur, the Panthers, the Weatherclowns, AIM, even the Berrigans - caught the full measure of the federal state's violent disapproval, and in buckets.

Serendipitously, been chatting with Wayne Kasper about the red fighting unions (the ones who weren't sanctioned scabs, like the AFLers) and am inspired to do a piece on Big Bill and the wobs.

Love to see you work up some retrospectives on Haywood, Ettor, Gurley Flynn, Red Emma and the lot.

How does the DW refer to you when chatting with third parties?

---The Sixties jokers were never revolutionaries, least of all the snappy white kids who could afford to hippie up on daddy's dime. ---

Truer words, Mr. Crow....

Very few people ever are revolutionaries, and very few of those who ever are, continue to be so for any length of time. And the late 60s don't bear comparison with 1789 or 1917. But they were the liveliest times in my lifetime. I'm glad I was around for them, and I would claim that we kicked up our heels a lot more than any cohort since. Talkin' 'bout MY generation!

"Last really revolutionary moment ended with the breaking of Haywood, EG Flynn and the One Big Union"

ahh yes fine indeed
the IWW
that semi divine product
of
the continental congress of the working class

revolutionary ?? well the word can take different and yet coherent " rangings"
i guess

not in anyway
trying to one up mr one up hizzself here
but surely
the first ten years or so
of the cio deserve at least notice
reformist as its very genes were
it lifted a pair of generations of a hunk of america's jobbled masses
to more pay and more free time ...no ?

that weighs something i hope in the great world historical scales
up there just a notch or two below
the fragile evansecent pre figurations
of a transcendent tomorrow
the wobblies gave us

flint can stand beside lawrence unashamed

Boink sez on 06.08.11 @ 22:02:
How does the DW refer to you when chatting with third parties?

Oh, she just beams with pride; she describes me as "my husband, who you may have heard of, a radical Leftie cartoonist; he's been written up in the Post and the City Paper."

P'wuh, spit. Everytime I go out to cover a protest or do some flypasting, her only words are to admonish me to "be careful" or to ask if the protest has a permit. Yeah, babe, they've got a permit; it's called the First Fucking Amendment. No "knock 'em dead, kid", no "solidarity forever," just "stay out of trouble". Christ.