Cultural revolutions

[wombat_socho]

Maggie's Farm had a couple of posts last night on the "Summer of Love" and Woodstock, keying off this essay by Cinnamon Stillwell, which in turn links to Ted Nugent's look back at the Sixties. As you might expect, the Nuge didn't much care for all that hippie stuff:

While I salute and commend the political and cultural activism of the 1960s that fueled the civil rights movement, other than that, the decade is barren of any positive cultural or social impact. Honest people will remember 1967 for what is truly was.

There is a saying that if you can remember the 1960s, you were not there. I was there and remember the decade in vivid, ugly detail. I remember its toxic underbelly excess because I was caught in the vortex of the music revolution that was sweeping the country...Death due to drugs and the social carnage heaped upon America by hippies is nothing to celebrate.

Sadly, because of all the hype and distortion laid down by the media, some of us who came after the "Woodstock generation" had to learn those lessons the hard way, and the learning is still going on today as the damage persists. I sometimes wonder if the popularity of anime and manga, the product of a far more structured culture than ours, is due at some level to a desire for that structure and a rejection of the hedonism of the Sixties that persists today in so much of our pop culture.

Comments

[materia-indigo.livejournal.com]

Your comment about anime rings very true for me. One of the reasons I enjoy anime and manga is because much of it reflects my values more closely than American entertainment.

For example, I typically don't enjoy American romantic comedies; our culture's approach to relationships is not something I can really identify with.

[materia-indigo.livejournal.com]

Ditto on films/books/shows involving drug-use. I don't (and never did) use drugs, I don't approve of drug-use, and I don't identify with characters who are abusers.

[qob.livejournal.com]

I lived through it and I have to agree with the Nuge. Also I think it is telling that once the draft ended, so did the war protests. I am afraid my generation was partially made up of lying cowards.