Apocalyptic Exegesis

When I was an adolescent I was not "hooked into" the 1960s culture in any deep way, but I was affected vaguely since it was all around on radio & TV. But...

I bought a Jefferson Airplane LP and would play the following piece over and over again on the family console record player lying prone with my head between the stereo speakers to get the full stereophonic effect. I would boost the sound up to ear busting and feast on the sound until my parents showed up from work and would yell at me.

There was a message in this music. I knew it. I didn't really decipher it at the time. (I've always been terrible at understanding lyrics. I just went with the flow.) But looking back I can understand the appeal of song and lyrics. At the time, my world was falling apart. This music captured the zeitgeist. The driving beat and insistent melodic progression keep ratcheting up the tension expressing completely my sense of impending doom.

I had lived my childhood in fear of atomic annihilation. I saw my culture dissolving into an inter-generational turmoil in the latter part of the 1960s. I saw the government as insane and at war with its own youth. I saw a wonderful movement of social justice that had bloomed with the Civil Rights sit-ins and marches turn ugly with KKK cross burnings and thugs beating up Freedom Riders and bombing churches. I saw assassinations: JFK, MLK, RFK and urban centres burning through long hot summers as ghettos exploded in violence. I saw the political leadership lie and drive the country into a meaningless and deadly war in Vietnam. I saw the right wing political party use clever language to paint the optimists and idealist as 'the enemy' with classic terms like 'nattering nabobs of negativism' as these Washington hacks milked the system for their on sinister ends and blind ideology.

The music with its insistent driving beat and eerily irrational/incomprehensible "message" somehow made sense...

Here's my favourite book on the era:

Funny how time washes away all the details. Much like headstones in a cemetery after a few hundred years. The engravings wear away until they are all but indecipherable. Instead, new headstones are brought in and planted. This one is the Gulf War. That one is GWB's Iraq folly. Here are the political scandals. There are the old mesmerizing words of the Right (tax cuts, trickle down economics, deregulation) carved into the hide of a new generation that will scar over and then slowly fade as time washes away pain and effaces the deep cuts and leaves behind only vague memories. But the cycle endures. Those with great wealth and power keep selling the same old snake oil over and over to each new generation. The wheel turns.