Nurse the Hate: Interesting Times

 

I was taking a glance at the headlines today and couldn’t help but noticing one very graspable fact.  Things are very fucked up right now.  The President is under federal investigation for collaborating with Russia to get elected, and if he gets lucky he will just be indicted for money laundering.  That same President has a side case running where he paid off a porn star he was fucking while his wife was pregnant, which seems sort of quaint compared to the treason thing.  A serial bomber was loose in Texas before blowing himself up.  A self driving car just killed a pedestrian.  There was another school shooting.  The United States had troops killed in Niger, which is interesting because no one has explained why they were even there.  Facebook, always positioned as an “individual rights over the corporations” company, has been revealed to be in the business of selling their user’s minds to the highest bidder in a slightly terrifying Big Brother scenario.  China just officially became a dictatorship again.  Russia poisoned someone in London.  Putin was congratulated by our President for winning a sham election.  Our President wants to execute drug dealers while kids are walking out of schools because the government refuses to protect them.  Anything goes baby!  At any moment a news story that would have seemed impossible a few years ago can break.  Anything can happen at any time.  At long last, anyone that has romanticized the 1960s has a decade worthy of comparison.

The 60s were the greatest decade of the modern era.  If you don’t believe that, just sit for a moment with almost any Baby Boomer that has spent their entire lives romanticizing the era.  No one promotes the 60s like a person that was a young adult in the 1960s.  Hollywood movies show a time of moral certainty where youth culture triumphed over the evil establishment.  Beautiful hippie girls in go-go boots giggled and performed fellatio on any longhair strolling down Haight Asbury on their way to see Jefferson Airplane at The Matrix.  Amazing music blared out of transistor radios at just the perfect moment to provide a sound bed for social change.  Hollywood has taught us that if a group of photogenic teenagers started to paint protest signs, a killer Creedence song would start playing in amazing high fidelity.  They would then all march on a government leader that would then be swayed to the kids’ point of view after seeing the teens’ commitment to their cause.  Maybe he would even use clunky slang.  “You know, you kids are pretty groovy.  Let’s not cut down the trees in the park.” 

What a time to be alive!  If you can remember the 60s, you weren’t there!!!  Straight and narrow boys would routinely meet friendly hippies that would give them LSD where great truths would be revealed on wild yet safe acid trips.  Then in remarkably short time, the same boys would captain VW microbuses to attend Woodstock where they would have perfect vantage points to witness Jimi Hendrix blow their minds.  It was a Utopia I tell you!  Making love in the green grass to gorgeous sexually aggressive blondes while Dylan whizzed by on a motorcycle.  It was magical!!!  You don’t know!!!  You weren’t there!!!

I remember talking to an English teacher of mine when I was a senior in high school.  He showed me a ticket stub he kept in his wallet from a Beatles concert at Shea Stadium.  To an 18 year old it was like viewing a Dead Sea Scroll.  What an artifact!  Soon other boys began to crowd around to look at it.  I remember one of the kids saying “Mr. Layman… It must have been awesome to have been in the 60s.  It’s so much better than now.”  Mr. Layman gave a small frown.  He paused for a second and said, “The 60s were a stupid time.  It wasn’t like it was portrayed.”  He shook his head for a moment, not wanting to get into it and put the ticket stub away.

I always remembered that and kept a critical eye on the 60s.  The 60s were great music and moments of cultural upheaval.  Yet they were also domestic terrorists, race riots, narcs, government surveillance, drug addiction, Vietnam, alienation, generational conflict, and daily uncertainty about what was up and what was down.  There was a culture of “Us” versus “Them” that was clearly unhealthy, and in the end “Them” won as the Establishment always does.  All the iconic 60s rock stars died of overdoses or just settled into cocaine snorting corporate rock careers that punk later reacted to as fuel.  Communes became cults became the Manson Family.  Things got very dark.

The times today seem eerily similar to the 60s with the exception of no good music.  Maybe there will be great nostalgia with Paramore or Beyonce as a backdrop for people staring at their phones.  It doesn’t seem quite as grand as a sweeping shot of protesters filling the National Lawn with Sam Cooke playing in the background, but maybe it’s something Paul Anderson can work with in a pinch.  I will tell you this.  We do have the vibe of the 60s in one sense.  The daily uncertainty and unease of knowing something terrible can and probably will happen at any moment.  Hey man… If you remember the Twenty Teens, you weren’t there man…  (cue song by Pink)