Comments on: Remember when?

By: Mamie

Mamie — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 04:31:57 +0000

Gee, one of my siblings was a bona fide hippie–and now a very right-wing, Ron Paul enthusiast.

I do blame her for everything.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:41:10 +0000

Maybe the Rainbow Family could stage an intervention in the thread below this one.

By: truffula

truffula — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:37:14 +0000

They blame everything on “hippies,”

My partner was just at a family wedding in Texas and apparently some young’un in the clan asked if my partner was, you know, one of those hippies he’s heard about. Sorry kid, nope, can’t check that off your life list yet.

I do know some bona fide hippies, Rainbow-Family-of-Light hippies and while I love them immensely and think they have a solid set of family values, they are not necessarily the first folks to call when the interhemispheric council starts writing the constitution of the United Bolivarian States of the Americas. They won’t sign anything. They are good at non violence principles and de-escalation though. That would be handy.

By: joellecid

joellecid — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:22:23 +0000

I agree with the notion that this is all just myth-making, and especially ugly given that the rhetoric has moved ever more rightward, and the image of a radical left has become ever more vilified and ever more inclusive of anyone who sits even in a very moderate middle.

What does strike me in my own experience teaching in a very conservative classroom is just how much my students are still living in the political myth-landscape of the 1960s. They blame everything on “hippies,” assuming that all left-leaning people are hippies today (if “hippiedom” could even truly be classified as leftist). They also blame women’s libbers and any left stereotype from the 60s for any political move they disagree with. Sometimes I feel like I’m teaching in in 1967 rather than 2012. Sigh.

By: LadyProf

LadyProf — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 01:27:13 +0000

Argh, I remember that June 2008 speech. Smarmy, sickening, dishonest. This blog post is the first criticism of it that I know of.

I have declined to read Obama’s multiple memoirs but from the reviews I gather they prescribed post-partisanship as the cure for what ails the USA. What we voters saw was what we got. Ironic that the maligned Hillary Clinton (and to a lesser extent Bill) has actually been effective in reaching across the aisle to get work done.

By: koshembos

koshembos — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 01:19:03 +0000

Obama’s 2008 campaign was ran as a non violent fascistic movement organized by veterans of the 60′s wars. That summarizes the crap we were getting then and now. Sadly, way too many went for it; probably some of the above commenters above as well.

The belief that postpolitics exist is moronic. The idea that we labor in the 60′s misses the point that the Republican are still fighting the Civil War.

I live in a very Democratic state; I will not vote Obama.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:52:18 +0000

Second/third/fourth Truffula, Susan, and Historiann. Pretty simplistic binary categorizations and caricature in Obama’s declamation. Where do we put liberal Democratic hawks, of which there were many, or one-percenter Patricia Hearst as Tania, holding the machine gun for Cinque on the 1974/5 bank job and stock broker progeny making bombs in Manhattan? Or the evolutions that almost everyone went through during that or any era? Granted, as Truffula notes, it’s a speech, and not a double-blind peer-reviewed review essay. But the hardest history to ingest and metabolize may be the years that transpired when you were 0-10, hence my aversion to the 1950s as a “historical” subject. In any case, I’m still trying to figure out whether we are *really* “all Federalists and all Republicans.”

By: Historiann

Historiann — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:33:14 +0000

Susan and truffula make great points. It’s the whole myth of spitting on returning Vets all over again. But you have to invoke a *fake* offense from the Left in order to make it appear that Right-wingers were equally wronged in all of that “divisiveness.” (Obama might have correctly evoked the Weathermen as left-wingers who were willing to engage in violence against their political opponents, but this was amist the brouhaha over Bill Ayers.)

But there really is no equivalent to the violence conservatives were willing to engage in, especially with respect to the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement. None at all.

Transvaginal probes for the lot of right-wingers still prosecuting the kulturkampfen, I say.

By: Susan

Susan — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:23:52 +0000

Well, my take is that most people did get over the 1960s, it’s just that there is a very vocal group that is still fighting the battles of that day and age. And that is running the GOP primary.

The worst part of the Obama speech is the reference to the supposed insults to returning vets in Vietnam — there are great deconstructions of that story. Also, I think he forgets that the end of hostilities — just like the end of partisanship — has to be agreed to by all parties. Alas, the republicans decided that they had more to gain by NOT ending partisanship than by actually trying to do things.

By: Z

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:05:44 +0000

“Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views – these caricatures of left and right. . . . ”

Actually, these caricatures were quite successfully marketed, and most Americans I meet do “buy into” them.