<underfire> chaos, illusions & the 60's

[Michael H Goldhaber]

Allan Siegel has his  facts wrong. Michael Moore never worked on  
Ramparts. He was much too young. He was hired about 1990 by Mother  
Jones to be editor, and then quickly sacked.

I agree that in the Viet-Nam era, the mainstream media were not soon  
anti-establishment on the whole. Still, as early as 1963, photos of  
Buddhist monks immolating themselves to oppose the Ngo Dinh Diem  
regime in South VN made their mark, and after that, many mainstream  
reporters did not toe the official US government line. I think Allan  
exaggerates the importance of alternative media in increasing  
opposition. TV reported on big demonstrations, from the 1964 Free  
Speech movement in Berkeley on, and those images did excite a massive  
youth generation.

Now a comparison to today: In the US the level of opposition to the  
Iraq war has risen much more swiftly than a comparable movement did   
30 years ago, although the form of opposition is very different.  
Polls already show a majority quite opposed to the Iraq war, even  
without the draft, without a major youth movement, with one-twentieth  
the number of US deaths. Why? I think largely through the much vaster  
cavalcade of images from all sides that are seen from the Internet  
and other sources.

Anyway, understanding the difference is important, and blanket  
ideological assumptions of underlying causes or assumptions of  
intrinsic sameness won't help much.

Allan speaks of theorization as if that has some great importance in  
lending opposition to violence. Much as I like theory, the  
relationship is nonsense.




Best,
Michael

On Nov 1, 2006, at 2:01 PM, Allan Siegel wrote:

> It is useful to make comparisons between the political activism of  
> the 60’s and the present. And, I am not just talking about the in  
> the U.S. but throughout Western Europe, the Third World and Asia.  
> For better or worse the gulf between theorizing and action – a  
> political praxis – was less ‘way-back-than’ than it is today. In  
> the 60’s in the U.S. the theorizing was mostly shallow and  
> simplistic and reflected the rampant anti-intellectualism in  
> American society. Marcuse’s notion of ‘repressive tolerance’ seems  
> to be quite accurate in describing how many left and counter- 
> cultural ideas oozed their way into the mainstream. I thought I  
> once heard Richard Nixon use the phrase “Power to the People.” Oh,  
> well. In Europe theory had more traction. In the Third World there  
> were some notable successes and some implosions.
>
> However, Loretta’s idea that:
> The media played a major role in promoting the 1960s generation  
> revolution and in exposing the faults of the establishment. One  
> could say that the mainstream media was antiestablishment. Who can  
> forget Dan Rather standing in the Viet Nam jungle accusing the US  
> army to use napalm against the viet cong?
>
> This statement is patently false. The 60’s and 70’s mainstream  
> media tried to catch a wave that was already cresting. They were  
> little better than the media today. They soaked up Pentagon numbers  
> and lies just as they are doing today. It is only when the war was  
> collapsing that they jumped on the anti-war bandwagon. The 60’s  
> revolution – it sounded good at the time – was fueled by its own  
> media with alternative papers in virtually every major city and an  
> alternative news service. This correlation was critical. (And, even  
> Mr. Michael Moore once worked on a San Francisco magazine called  
> Ramparts before he was sacked or quit or some combination of the two).
>
> The point is that today there is a disparity, rather an abyss,  
> between theoretical discourses entrenched within academic circles  
> and the more popular dialogues that shape public opinion. No matter  
> how prescient the discourse or the information it has little affect  
> on the neo-liberal corporate trajectory. One, because there are few  
> if any political institutions capable of altering the course of  
> events and utilizing, absorbing this analysis.. And, two,  
> particularly in U.S., this extremely knowledgeable academic elite  
> has either become part of the spectacle (Chomsky is a good example)  
> or neutralized in some think tank.
>
> Please excuse the rather terse nature of the above…
>
> a.s.
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