T A B L E+T A L K Were you a fan or a friend of recently deceased writer Kathy Acker? Remember her in the Books section of Table Talk R E V I E W S Truman Capote By William Georgiades (12/22/97) R E C E N T L Y Save these books! By Dwight Garner (12/04/97) The art of life By Jay Parini (11/19/97) The Gospel according to Paul By Mark Hertsgaard (11/12/97) The Salon interview: Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) The man who took sex out of the closet By Scott McLemee (11/05/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the BOOKS ARCHIVE The Conquest of Cool Commodify your dissent		Were the '60s a fraud? page 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Was this what happened in the '60s -- a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, a tale told by a million idiots who were absorbed by the smiling maw of the System? If you look at it from a purely structural-economic perspective, yes. The '60s counterculture was a bunch of stoned, bourgeois kids who never made common cause with the workers, not only failed to end capitalism but may have actually increased its dominion and dutifully took their place as consumers once they grew up. Confronted with this outcome, if one rejects the entire economic premises of American society, there's no recourse but the one Frank chooses: pure negation, impotent rage. Marxist dialecticians like Theodor Adorno and Marcuse notwithstanding, pure negation is pure sterility: Nothing will come of nothing. (Actually, the Bafflers know this: Their desperate defense of the cultural importance of certain bands, silly as it may appear and contradictory to their putatively nihilistic credo as it is, is at bottom life-affirming and hopeful.) Even if one accepts the validity of negation, however, Frank's assessment of the '60s is stunningly ahistorical. There were plenty of people back then who bought Frank's negation line -- and paid for it, too, which I suspect that few of the Bafflers, despite the contumely they pour upon "middle-class kids" and "white suburban children" from their turrets in the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, have had to, at least not in the same bitter coin. For the record, in case the Bafflers or their fellow revisionists have forgotten or never knew it: In the '60s, that "sweet shriek of outrage" led a lot of people to kill people, and get killed, and go to jail, and flee the country for years, and get shot in the eyes with birdshot in Berkeley, and get smashed in the kidneys by police with riot sticks in Chicago, and be blasted off the Birmingham streets by fire hoses. A few of these people, the most radical of them, the hard-core revolutionaries, may have been acting out of pure negation, total rejection of capitalism, the corporate state, anything and everything American. But very few. Most of us were fighting for something -- whether it was civil rights or an end to the war or the righteous right of our hormones to vent constantly. It wasn't always clear if we knew exactly what it was -- Buffalo Springfield's mordant line about protesters "singing songs and carrying signs/mostly say hurray for our side" is irrefutable, a great thumbnail sketch of Burkean skepticism about revolutionary fervor. But all those stumbling people, led on by narcissism and idealism, by people pushing behind them and something unknown glimpsed up ahead, did achieve something. The war ended; the George Wallaces of the world were forced out of the schoolroom doors. Frank takes the word "countercultural" too literally; he assumes that a counterculture must stand in direct opposition to the dominant culture. But in fact the relationship between the two is far more complicated. The '60s counterculture was at times oppositional, an iron wall -- but it was also a plant growing in a vacant lot, a dream drifting against a sunset, a baby beaming at the mad perfection of a pea. Unstable and erratic metaphors, but the time itself was. To reduce its meaning to politics, or even worse to economic politics, is to shrink not just one era, but the world itself. For if Frank and his colleagues slight the political dimension of the '60s, they utterly ignore its personal, existential dimension -- the great revolution within that was as important, perhaps more, than the revolution without. So where, the revisionists sneer, are the results of that revolution? "Crazy Horse," a white man once mocked the vanquished Sioux leader, "you once said your lands ran as far as the buffalo, as far as the birds could fly, as far as the horizon. Where are your lands now, Crazy Horse?" Crazy Horse pointed across the plains and said, "My lands are where my dead lie buried." That's one answer, the dark one -- a tribute to those who flew too close to the sun, or got trapped forever in a maze with monsters of their own imagining, in those days when we were crazy enough to think our own minds were a landscape we could change. But not everything that came up within us then died. Some of it lived on, and if it's invisible, it's because it's inside us. It's who we are. "The revolution," Leonard Cohen once said, "has to take place in every room." It didn't, of course, and even in the rooms where some kind of psychic insurrection did take place, time and rust have corroded the swords, collapsed the ramparts. Most of us who were around back then are running on memories of memories of memories. Still, inner soil was turned, and things grew, for good and ill. To reduce that secret history to the sterile dirge of Economic Man is an intellectual and historical obscenity worthy of a Stalinist hack. Anyone who was touched by the ferment of the '60s has to like the Bafflers, their energy and idealism. Even their dogmatic irritation is infinitely preferable to the "hip" business triumphalism and strident libertarianism of the Wired crowd. It's understandable and healthy that a new generation should want to throw off the stifling mantle of old mythology. Our mechanically nostalgic culture does market the '60s Greatest Hits endlessly, and being forced to listen to "Mellow Yellow" or even "White Rabbit" endlessly must be exquisite torture for a generation that cut its teeth on the Sex Pistols, not the Beatles. Nor is the condescending, more-revolutionary-than-thou attitude of many '60s veterans conducive to a proper passing of the torch. But understandable as their impatience with '60s mythology may be, the Bafflers are too resentful. At a certain point, their denunciations begin to seem like a rejection of effervescence itself. There is a croaking negativity, an ahistorical narrowness, to their revisionism. And, in a supreme irony, for all the attention they pay to ersatz "hip" messages, the Bafflers end up themselves deluded by them. Unable to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic hipness, they exemplify the very cultural myopia they denounce when they rage against Official Culture for championing Pearl Jam over the Galaxy of Mailbox Whores. A small but telling example: Frank's lumping together of Iron Butterfly and the Doors as "astoundingly pretentious" -- mentioning in the same sentence a ridiculous group that everybody back then knew to be a joke with a truly original band. (Sure, the Doors were pretentious -- what an unusual trait for a rock group! -- but they usually pulled it off.) As for Frank's facile dismissal of Dylan, one of the great pop artists of the last 50 years, for his "embarrassingly faked Woody Guthrie accents," it exemplifies the pious fetishization of class that prevents him from understanding that great artists can transcend not just their affectations, but their models: Dylan surpassed Woody Guthrie. The Bafflers protest too much: They themselves are victims of the very image-saturated culture they decry. Everything they say about corporate culture flattening everything out and destroying cultural distinctions applies to their own monolithic historical analysis. They trash the au courant academic field of cultural studies, but they themselves commit the "semiotic fallacy" that is endemic to the field: They are unable to distinguish between the thing itself and the film of it at 11. As the Last Poets sang, the revolution was not televised. But the Bafflers, who only saw it on TV, are smugly convinced that the TV version was all there was: They get "Dragnet's" "The LSD Story" confused with the real LSD story. These cats trash hipness, but they could use a few Style Lessons themselves. So is a counterculture possible today? Maybe not, but a countercultural life is always possible. The world feels dull and contained to the Bafflers -- so what? It was ever thus. The lesson of the '60s -- which very few of us have ever really learned -- is not just to try to change what's wrong with the world, but to change your own life, to make it as big and strange and free as in rare unguarded moments we know it is. Instead of whining about the corporate walls that surround us, the Bafflers should take a tip from the astoundingly pretentious Jim Morrison, and break on through to the other side. SALON | Dec. 22, 1997