|
|
They used AP photos without permission. Anyway, any comments on the riots? People are saying it's like Altamont. Bullshit. Pepsi already owns the rights to the fucking thing. Shit, the Stones made a fucking fortune off of that "free concert", and it was commercialized, but not like this. Woodstock 99 was never, to any but the most clueless stoned suburban teenybopper, anything but another tired "retro" marketing ploy. |
|
i wonder how many women were raped back then. |
However, I will respond anyway. My point was that Altamont, in a lot of ways, and to a lot of people, was the end of something that a lot of people believed in....not something perfect, but something that meant something to a lot of people. But nobody believed that Woodstock '99 would ever change anything but Pepsico's profit margin. It was merely a remark on the fact that there is no idealism in today's youth for this event to destroy. |
i was just wagging my tongue to express my skepticism in regard to the whole 60's love, peace, and happiness fad. |
There was a lot of political activism that went on, a hell of a lot more than does now, and sure, a lot of the kids were just there because it was a social event, but they were there. And it was the *only* time an entire generation of youth took an interest in their government, and tried to make a change. Which is more than can be said of the new generation, most of whom don't even bother to vote (and no, there isn't much of a choice, but, maybe if people voted, there would be one). Damnit, a flawed ideal is better than the cult of apathy... the entire message that kids today is "the world is a miserable place, and I'm not going to make a difference, so I'll just be a mindless consumer, but it'll be rebellious, since it's out of cynicism." End result: a whole generation of fucking sheep...internally cynical sheep, but cynicism is nothing but a pose if it has absolutely no impact on your actions. |
I have had a great deal of fun voting for the Natural Law party. If we had the Screaming Lunatic party here, I 'd vote for them too. |
it's kinda bullshit to try and compare the political awareness of a generation that came of age in a time when the country was literally on the verge of self-destruction with the politcal awareness of today's generation. <<"the world is a miserable place, and I'm not going to make a difference, so I'll just be a mindless consumer, but it'll be rebellious, since it's out of cynicism.">> is that what a whole generation is saying? "mindless sheep?" so you're saying they're just like their parents? |
One of the sets of equivalent terms: Screaming Lord Sutch -------- H. Ross Perot And it's the "Monster Raving Loony Party" I found their page: http://www.surfbaud.co.uk/loony/ Swine: I would say that yes, the draft was a catalyst for the peace movement, but that doesn't make the movement less useful. U.S. foreign policy is still a major issue. We do all sorts of covert ops all over South and Central America, crushing democracy wherever we find it. And domestic policy, what the fuck do you think the "War on Drugs" is? We have had a U.S. citizen killed by U.S. troops on U.S. soil for the first time in decades. And cops are shooting people in the streets. I've had a gun pointed at my head by a cop who had already searched me and knew I was unarmed (and had nothing on me but paraphernalia), and was told that he'd shoot me in the face just for the hell of it. How about you? And what about the rider they stuck on the antiterrorist bill that makes a joke out of the fourth amendment? And murder rates. And the fact that CIA drug trafficking is entirely an open secret. I would say we have plenty to be angry about these days. Maybe people in the 60's weren't all true individualists, but they stood up and resisted and made a difference. Maybe people today all believe in individualism and have all the right principles, but they're not doing squat to change things, even though they know more about what our government is doing that's evil, they just don't care. I would say that actions speak louder than some nebulous concept of purity of ideal. |
go here if you give a rats ass http://www.degeneratepress.com/earplugs/earplugs.html we are accustat, at the top of the list HA! |
elected another: Jello Biafra unelected yet another: None Of The Above barred from running |
|
|
What exactly is your thesis? |
|
let's do it one mo' time. <<when you see cities burning to the ground on tv, the army/police forces drawing weapons on the citizens they are supposed to protect, and the government randomly picking people around you and sending them over to vietnam to kill and die for dubious reasons, you don't really have any other option but to take an interest.>> none of the fucked up things that are wrong with this country that you've mentioned will ever mobilize people on a national level the way that a direct, visible, personal threat will. especially not in an economically prosperous climate. when you keep calling this generation a bunch of apathetic mindless sheep, you sound like you're trying to say that the widespread activism in the 60's had less to do with the socio-politcal climate and more to do with people who were out to "change the world." i personally think they were reacting to what was going on around them and trying to save their own collective asses. this is a good thing. and i wouldn't ever try to suggest that activism in the 60's was useless. what i was originally suggesting was that a lot of that "peace, love, and happiness" mentality was mostly bullshit escapism and essentially apathetic in itself. i don't see the point in trying to "expand your mind" with psychotropics while the police are beating your people in the streets. as far as i'm concerned the two best things that came out of the 60's were the civil rights/black power movements. but of course i am biased. and hypocritical, since i've done my fair share of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. or whatever the hell that slogan was. (i thought "eat glass" was in there somewhere...) anyway, when i think of the 60's, i remember images i've seen of police beating black people down in the streets, cities on fire, chicago '68, vietnam... i've heard far too many white kids vicariously reminiscing of free love, free drugs, and great music. not that there's anything wrong with any of that, but they look at me funny when i look at them funny after they say shit like, "man! wouldn't it have been so much FUN to have been there!" one of those comments (made by a friend of a friend) was what prompted my original post. that and a conversation about how woodstock '99 has soiled the purity of woodstock '69, but i don't even want to get into that. anyway, i bet if you take the socio-political climate of the '60's and apply it to the 90's, you'll get similar results. i guess that's my "thesis." i'm sick of typing. . |
|
Conisdering I work for a political magazine, we have ahd to alter our contetn to keep people interested. Celebrity covers will outsell a political related cover these days. |
|
|
But hey- we have the society we're apparently willing to tolerate. Media that spins out bullshit, politicians that lie, Presidents that rape, celebrities that get away with murder, juries that LET celebrities get away with murder just to 'send a message to The Man', psycho-babble excuses for any and all aberrant behavior- etc.etc.etc. It's the end of the 20th Century- please don't pretend to be surprised by anything. |
|
"especially not in an economically prosperous climate." Okay, how about the fact that entire companies out here are replacing every job but the executives with temps? The permanent job is already a thing of the past in Northern California. I have no benefits. I can be terminated at any time for my politics (and it's already happened twice). If I visibly organize, I will be blacklisted. How's that for a "personal threat"? As for your second point, I think that the widespread activism of the sixties had everything to do with people who were out to "change the world" *because* of the socio-political climate. As for vicarious reminiscences, yeah, my parents were there... Here's what I heard about: My father taught me about how you really shouldn't wear a helmet to a protest where you expect violence from the cops because then they'll target you more heavily. He said he had a padded jacket and he used to stuff newspapers into it to minimize the broken bones. He told me about getting arrested. He taught me passive resistance. My mother found out about her leftist roots at about the same time as the beatings at the Democratic Convention. She described the difficulty she went through, trying to find the courage to remain active after hearing that her father didn't even have the last name she thought he had. She told me about growing up in hiding and then learning why her childhood seemed so strange. My father taught me about being a radical. My mother taught me effective political action: "Always dress straight if you're doing anything political". (She was, understandably, more cautious) No stories about drugs. My father taught me not to take them. He said it would compromise my value to the revolution. BTW: neither of my folks were much into sixties rock. The closest I heard from them was Holly Near. (Not that the sex and the drugs were necessarily entirely a bad thing. I would say that questioning every aspect of the morality of one's society is always an admirable endeavor.) "anyway, i bet if you take the socio-political climate of the '60's and apply it to the 90's, you'll get similar results." I bet not. Their propaganda machine is way too effective these days. Shit, half the kids today don't remember last week's news. As sorabjites tend to have a slightly longer attention span, I think you will not object to a slightly more difficult question.. Show of hands: How many of you know what the Iran-Contra scandal was about? Okay, without looking it up? Anyway, I pretty much agree on you about the rest of it. |
|
hand high and proud |
about? To Lucy, Sure- I remember what Iran-Contra was about. I remember where I was and what I was doing the night Nixon quit. I watched the Watergate hearings on a tv in the library at my junior high school. I remember the look on my dad's face when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on live tv. I remember the tortuous route we had to drive through Washington D.C. to pick my mother up from work in the wake of the riots following the Martin Luther King assassination. I guess what I'm saying here is only that I'm familiar with events of that era not because I read about them after the fact, but because I was growing up when all that was happening. I guess it's why I shake my head and realize I'm getting old. I mean, there's people posting here that weren't even alive when Nixon was president or the Viet Nam war was on, yet would feel confident about discussing these topics passionately. My fear is that some of these people are graduates of the Oliver Stone Center for Revisionist History. There's too much of that going on these days. I think it's wrong to judge the people and events of the past by today's standards and perceptions. An example is a school district in New Orleans that removed the names of certain Founding Fathers from public schools, because they owned slaves 200 years ago. It makes me shudder... because the former Soviet Union did the same thing. When a Party official fell from favor or was purged, it was common for all traces and references to him to disappear from documents and books and even archival photographs- as though the person never existed. Does the greater New Orleans school district now proclaim that George Washington never existed, never created the first standing army in the United States, never defeated the British army in the field, never became our first president? It disgusts me that people would presume to pass judgement on history and empower themselves to have some sort of final say. History isn't over yet. I would like to know what future generations of scholars will have to say about America at the end of the 20th century. What will they say about a political process driven by money and media spin? A culture that worships celebrities? A society that absolves itself of personal responsibility and calls every personal failing 'a disease'? A legal system that jails shoplifters but lets celebrity killers go free? An electorate so bored and misinformed and unimaginative that they twice elected someone like Bill Clinton to be president? There are no more great causes or great men. I take it back- history IS over. America has peaked. |
|
|