What happened?

[pasithea]

First thing is first. Please note that this post is from a white americentric point of view and might make some bad assumptions for other groups.


cargoweasel linked to a clip from a 70's film "Free to Be You and Me" in his journal. I'd seen it before, of course. I lived on this stuff when I was a child. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I still like it now.

Sorta started me thinking though... What happened to us? Prior to the late 80s, you look at almost any other time in american history and it seems like there was a kind of optimism there that went missing. Even during the depression era of the 30s, there was an undercurrent of optimism. Science fiction was blooming. Faster and faster cars and planes were evolving. Stuff was happening.

During WWII, there was a 'can do' spirit thing going on. Perhaps some of that optimism was propaganda, but it was still there. Even in the 50s when we suddenly had the threat of nuclear power, there was still this belief that we could do anything, that we were going to go up and up and up and reach out and touch the stars.

The sixties brought us love and peace and all that jazz and that persisted into the 70s. All this awesome stuff was happening with integration and equality. We'd landed men on the moon and the next stop was Mars.

And then.... What happened? The 80s started off pretty well, I mean. Lots of campy movies. Goonies, Indiana Jones, sequels to Star Wars, ET, and all that sort of stuff, but something somewhere was going rotten. Things were becoming darker and more cynical. A lot of music took on my violent and hateful sounds. Television, movies, and humor as a whole turned more and more cynical and jaded. It became routine to tear down idols.

Hunter S. Thompson saw it coming. As he put it:

“ Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

So what happened? Televangelists? Reagan? Gas crisis? Recession? Challenger? AIDs? The rise of obesity?

Maybe it's all just backlash. A bunch of ignorant conservatives who couldn't handle the idea of treating blacks, women, gays, and the environment with respect. The petulant wrath of millions of poor little suburbanite white boys who suddenly had to face the realization that they weren't God's gift to the universe.

Or, worst of all... What if it's just me? What if most people in the US still have that cheerful optimism and are happily oblivious to all the dark words I've heard? Or what if this is the way most adults view the world and always have and I was only naive to it because I viewed the world through the eyes of a child?

But... I don't think so. I see other things around the edges, like the tide is beginning to turn. I think perhaps the collective unconscious is sick of hate and cynicism and we're all now surging back towards the beach.

Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

I think it's not a change in level of optimism, just where it was directed;

In the 1930s, things were obviously falling apart. Pessimism was everywhere and justifiable. People don't like being pessimistic, so when there was hope they leapt towards it. Some small cultural differences in what public attitudes you were societally expected to maintain, and some technological differences which led to a real blitz of New Deal enthusiasm, meant that all the weird sour elements were still there - but you could also see all the optimism.

Then in the 1950s and 1960s, we were still shakey - but there was optimism as part of that shakiness. Prosperity really breeds optimism, so you had all these people who were well off and life hadn't really crapped on them, so they felt they could push forwards - and you combine that with the people who were really desperate, the guys King was trying to help, and a little bit of optimism there and you have people who feel like they can pull it off. Go to the moon? Get people to start treating Black people as equals?

There was a lot of upset to the 1970s. But by the 1980s, I feel like the optimism had gotten re-routed into these weird dreams of prosperity. The reccessions and labor unrest and Reaganite stuff only tamped that down; optimism for the 1980s and 1990s wasn't about rebuilding the country, or getting into space, or getting equal rights, it was about carving out a nice little patch of whatever for yourself.

And then as you know the real reccession hit. The big one. Things may even get worse, if you believe in a strict 80 year macroeconomic cycle. Combine that with a government apparently careening 'way out of control and fellow citizens who seem eager to support the most vicious and eventually self-destructive BS, and that kills a lot of dreams. Optimism can't be about carving a nice little patch of whatever for most people - despite the media still trying to act as though it's still 2002.

I think what you're seeing as optimism here is the sort of optimism that was there in the 1930s, once more. We know we're never going to be rich, but maybe we can still hope for health care, more environmentally sound policy, and moments of joy at festivals. I think technology plays into that. The internet has broken through a lot of the isolationism that really influenced the 1950s-1980s.

[read-alicia.livejournal.com]

Just have a look at the sort of songs that were becoming popular in the 30's. When's Clearchannel going to play the latest rendition of "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?"

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

I started reading this, and was going to quote HST at you. Just the last two paragraphs of what you turned out to quote, but still, it was an interesting bit of coincidence.

That optimism isn't gone. It was alive in the cypherpunks, who changed a world that was hardly aware of them, but not in the way they wanted, and their wave crashed and receded. It was alive in the dotcom boom and the underground raves and the MDMA and "PLUR" and all that bullshit that seems like a dream to me now. The death of that lead to rebirth in the open-web "Web 2.0", the blogosphere... cell phone cameras providing a voice for people who would otherwise be unheard, and photoshop to never know whether what you're seeing is real.

There's a great optimism that fuels the diybio movement -- can I really create a cure for scurvy, or at least a long-term, low-cost treatment, in my kitchen? As far as chemistry or electrical engineering goes, we don't have room in this world for another Shulgin, another Tesla. But we've got a window here where this explosion of optimism can be something, before it is either suppressed, or turns into the Old and Evil itself.

If you weren't a part of what HST is talking about; if you spent the 60s standing on that hill in Las Vegas, would you really feel like there was any optimism at all?

This has always been about fighting the "forces of Old and Evil", and they've always been more entrenched, more powerful. I left the Bay Area, and my country, in search of a new epicenter of change. I'm sure that had I looked hard enough, I'd have found one in San Francisco, but too much there reminded me of 1999.

I'll say this, though. I'd rather be alive today than 1950.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

I was going to basically say this, but you got here first. :) A few other things, though -- it's more than just the cypherpunks and biohacking. Maker culture is alive, well, and growing. Look at the hackerspace movement, look at instructables.com, look at Make and Craft magazines. People aren't happy to just consume, consume, consume anymore -- they want to own the means of production, not by rising up and taking it away from their corporate masters in some horrible parody of the Bolshevik Revolution, but by just buying it, or making it themselves. DIYbio is a part of this movement, but it's much, much bigger: it's the knitters, the hackers, the quilters, the electronics nerds, the artists (especially the ones making their own webcomics and graphic novels), the carpenters, the steampunks. Some of it is just groupies along for the ride and the looks -- a lot of people are just into steampunk for the fashion -- but the productive core is thriving.

The strong maker culture in the bay area was a big part of what was keeping me there, but I'm thrilled to see that it's alive and well in Brussels, in Ghent, in Antwerp, all over this little country.

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

but I'm thrilled to see that it's alive and well in Brussels, in Ghent, in Antwerp, all over this little country.

It never died there, and it's been resisting the American consumerism push for decades. Electronics are what are causing that crack to happen, and it's no surprise the Belgians are setting up hackerspaces.

And yes, my examples were/are but a small part of it; they're the small parts that I'm a direct part of. I knew someone would expand upon them.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

It's not just you. Really, I think the 60s were the leading edge of a cultural convulsion that permanently broke the 'mainstream' consensus culture, which since then has been fighting bitter, destructive rearguard actions. Meanwhile, of course, there was this class war going on.
So the central narrative of the West has basically run out of steam, out of ideas, and also out of resources. And there are all kinds of new ideas waiting in the wings, all kinds of syntheses just waiting for the old system to weaken that last crucial degree, and then all kinds of possibilities will bloom.
Of course, they'll be blooming against a backdrop of terrifying ecological upheaval and economic disruption, but, well, ain't it always so.

What am I talking about, why and how did I write this?

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Maybe I just don't get what you're saying because my awareness that there was a world around me started sometime in the early 90s. You weren't involved in the sixties any more than I was, though, I wonder what you're really feeling nostalgic about. I think San Francisco and surrounding areas might be the most solipsistic place in the world, and why not, if you've got the money to be there it's like heaven on earth. Barring revolutionary upheavals like took place in the sixties, though, I think the optimism is in the places you look for it. I masturbate thinking about loosing my humanity in the technological singularity, or at least being subjugated to a truly superior race that I'll be proud to have had absolutely no hand in creating.

Now is as good a time as any for wondering where American optimism went, I guess, we're in the greatest depression in history, and we've got Iran's new revolution to be really jealous of.

I guess the Regan revolution really killed the legacy of the sixties by creating a new right, surviving the only way it could, by disconnecting their brains entirely from reality and living in a strange superliminal Utopian ideal where frothing rage at the world could insulate them from anything the damned lefties are up to. I guess there's no denying that that's a malevolent force floating around trying to squash optimism, but that force has ebbed to it's lowest point since it's beginning and it really feels like regressive forces are going to have to think of something new. Isn't that an optimistic thought itself? Even if it doesn't mean we win, because the other legitimate power party in America is so corrupted by conservative forces who were intellectual enough to reject the loony right.