The Oozing Oil Spill of That Moment

Here is a bit from an interesting and eloquent reminiscence by Tom Engelhardt of they heyday of the 1960s generation. This was my generation, so it resonates with me. But he points out that times have changed...

I graduated in 1966 on a gloriously sunny day; then again, it was a sunnier moment in this country. We were, after all, still surfing the crest of post-World War II American wealth and productivity. The first oil crisis of 1973 wasn’t even on the horizon. I never gave a thought to the gas I put in the tank of the used Volkswagen "bug" I bought with a friend my last year in college. In those days, the oil for that gas had probably been pumped out of an American well on land (and not dumped in the Gulf of Mexico). Gas, in any case, was dirt cheap. No one thought about it -- or Saudi Arabia (unless they were working for an oil company or the State Department).

Think of it this way: in 1966, the United States was, in your terms, China, while China was just a giant, poor country, a land of -- as the American media liked to write back then -- “blue ants.” Seventeen years earlier, it had, in the words of its leader Mao Ze-dong, “stood up” and declared itself a revolutionary people’s republic; but just a couple of years before I graduated, that country went nuts in something called the Cultural Revolution.

Back in 1966, the world was in debt to us. We were the high-tech brand you wanted to own -- unless, of course, you were a guerrilla in the jungles of Southeast Asia who held some quaint notion about having a nation of your own.

Here’s what I didn’t doubt then: that I would get a job. I didn’t spend much time thinking about my working future, because American affluence and the global dominance that went with it left me unshakably confident that, when I was ready, I would land somewhere effortlessly. The road trips of that era, the fabled counterculture, so much of daily life would be predicated on, and tied to, the country’s economic power, cheap oil, staggering productivity, and an ability to act imperially on a global stage without seeming (to us Americans at least) like an imperial entity.

I was living in denial then about the nature of our government, our military, and our country, but it was an understandable state. After all, we -- the “sixties generation” -- grew up so much closer to a tale of American democracy and responsive government. We had faith, however unexamined, that an American government should and would hear us, that if we raised our voices loudly enough, our leaders would listen. We had, in other words, a powerful, deeply ingrained sense of agency, now absent in this country.

That, I suspect, is why we took to the streets in protest -- not just because we despaired of American war policy, which we did, but because under that despair we still held on tightly to a hope, which the next decades would strip from our world and your generation. And we had hopeful models as well. Remember, the great Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was still a force to be reckoned with -- and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, the riots of 1968, the burning ghettoes, the shock of American troops occupying American inner cities, as yet had no reality for us.

Even in protest, there was a sense of... well, the only word I can think of is “abundance.” At the time, everything seemed abundant.

President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program was expansively underway in the midst of war -- and even guns and butter seemed (for a while) a plausible enough combination for a country like ours. The Peace Corps, that creation of the Kennedy presidency -- which my future wife joined in 1964 -- was still new and it, too, encapsulated that sense of American abundance and the hubris that went with it. It was based, after all, on the idea that you could take a bunch of American kids like you, just out of college, with no particular skills, and ship them off with minimal training to needy nations around the world to improve life, all as part of a great Cold War publicity face-off with the Soviet Union.

And those kids, who turned out in droves to experience something bigger and better than themselves, did often enough find ingenious ways to offer limited amounts of help. The Peace Corps was but one small measure of a pervasive sense -- about to be shattered -- of our country’s status as the globe’s preeminent can-do nation. There was nothing we couldn’t do. (Hadn’t we, after all, singlehandedly rebuilt devastated Europe and Japan after World War II?)

Then, of course, there was “the war.” Vietnam, that is. It was the oozing oil spill of that moment, regularly referred to as “an American tragedy” (never a Vietnamese one). The tragic aspect of it, above all, seemed to be that victory would not come; that, as Henry Kissinger would later put it, speaking of communist North Vietnam, “I can’t believe a fourth-rate power doesn’t have a breaking point.”

The very idea of defeat -- hardly mentionable in those years but ever-present -- was corrosive to what, in a book of mine, I once called America’s “victory culture.” Because the Vietnamese refused to give way in that “meat grinder” of a war in which millions of Vietnamese (and tens of thousands of American soldiers) would die, doubt, like that oil seeping into the Louisiana marshes today, oozed into the crevices of American life, and began to eat away at confidence.

Even the nightmare of war, however, had a positive side -- and you can thank the draft for that. The U.S. then had a civilian, rather than a professional (verging on mercenary) army. It was, in a sense, still faintly in the tradition of the “people’s armies” that began with the French Revolution’s levée en masse. For young men nationwide and those who knew them, the draft -- the possibility that you, or your son, husband, lover, friend, might actually end up fighting America’s misbegotten war in Southeast Asia -- ensured, strangely enough, a deeper connection both to war and country, something now absent in most of your lives.

With rare exceptions, you, the class of 2010, live unconnected to the wars America has been fighting these last nine-plus years. As a result, you also live in avoidance not of a draft, but of the damage our country is doing to itself and others in distant lands. That kind of denial is a luxury in a country now far less well known for its affluence and still squandering what wealth it has on wars and armaments. Today, it’s guns, not butter, and that fateful choice, regularly renewed, seems totally divorced from your lives (though you will, in the end, pay a price for it).

There is much, much more in his post. Go read Tom's full article.

Here's the killer comment on the current state of the US in Tom Engelhardt's eloquent piece:

In recent years, we’ve had two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who could not be mistaken for one another. In most obvious ways -- style, thinking, personality, politics, sensibility, impulses -- they couldn’t be more different, as have been the ways they have approached problems. One was a true believer in the glories of American military and executive power, the other is a manager of a declining power and what passes for a political “pragmatist” in our world. Yet, more times than is faintly comfortable, the two of them have ended up in approximately the same policy places -- whether on the abridgement of liberties, the expansion of the secret activities of military special operations forces across the Greater Middle East, the CIA drone war in the Pakistani borderlands and elsewhere, the treatment of prisoners, our expanding wars, Pentagon budgets, offshore oil drilling and nuclear power, or other topics which matter in our lives.

This should be more startling than it evidently is for most Americans. If the policies of these two disparate figures often have a tweedledum-and-tweedledee-ish look to them, then what we face is not specific party politics or individual style, but a system with its own steamroller force, and its own set of narrow, repetitive “solutions” to our problems. We also face an increasingly militarized, privatized government, its wheels greased by the funds of giant corporations, that now regularly seems to go about the business of creating new Katrinas.

He has the same profound unhappiness as I have with Obama. The miraculous winner of the 2008 election seemed to offer a new path forward for the US but has ended up taking half-steps and -- as Engelhardt points out -- retraces the Bush steps. It is a like a slow-moving nightmare to see the American giant caught in a trap of its own making. Unable to free itself of 50 years of bad policies and wrong-headed "engagement" with the world. His answer is that the country is in thrall to big corporations. Sure. But it has to be more than that. The people have fallen asleep to their own future.

He is more pessimistic than I am. I do believe that people still have a hand in their own future. Sure, many populist revolts will fail. If you look at history it is littered with failures. But from time to time people do throw off their lethargy and take control of their future. I believe it is still possible. He looks at the long march of history and is pessimistic. I view the same stretch and see the bright points and the fact that over very long stretches things do improve. It is a question of scale. Up close, it looks hopeless. But when you step back from years and decades and look at centuries and millennia, it does look hopeful.

The odd thing is that Engelhardt ends on a "call to arms" to go and conquer a better future. But he has preceded this with a long litany of why America is broken and why nothing can be done to fix it. It clangs on my ear. If you have no hope, why sally forth to grasp a new future?

Unlike Engelhardt, I think history teaches the lesson that hope is always out there. Sure there are lots of dashed hopes, but if you don't try nothing will be gained. So optimism is essential. You can't look at the past of your country and see only failures. You have to recognize that the US has slowly improved politically, culturally, and economically. It is one big pothole right now, but that's the very task that the 2010 generation has to take on: throw off the past 50 years of misguided government and once again call on the ideals of the Enlightenment that helped found the country to set it back on the right course.