THE WINGNUTS AND THE 60s

Matt Stoller pointed out that Rick Perlstein had a great op-ed in the WaPo on how we aren't going to get past the Dirty Fuckin' Hippies (©Atrios). I've listened to Slots Bennett and other gasbags make jokes about the 60s so I now that the neo-cons and the movement conservatives are still scared of the DFH.

I appreciate Perlstein's mention of the divisions back then that I barely remember. Although I was born in 1952 and I did inhale, some of the worst parts of the 60s I relegated to footnotes. I remember Barry Goldwater but until I read Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics, I didn't realize how many right-wing extremists there were in America. I had the good fortune to listen to a speaker from the John Birch Society when I was a senior in highschool but I didn't grasp how large that movement was because I thought the speaker was so foolish I couldn't beleive that many people would swallow the Bircher line. I was wrong again.

I do remember Kent State but I didn't recall this:

Plenty of pictures of the riots at Kent State that ended with four students shot dead by National Guardsmen. None I could find, however, of the counter-demonstrations by Kent, Ohio, townies -- and even Kent State parents. Flashing four fingers and chanting "The score is four/And next time more," they argued that the kids had it coming.

This kind of hatred & fear is still with us and it won't go away, even with the passing of the Boomers because the issues won't go away. As Isaiah Berlin wisely wrote:

The need to choose, to sacrifice some ultimate values to others, turns out to be a permanent characteristic of the human predicament.