Fifty years later – some music makes me think
Listening to the Chad Mitchell Trio and Ian and Sylvia: some early 60s sentiment. So gentle, so restrained. Handsome Jack was still alive and all was well. Vietnam had not yet begun its malignant fester. The missile crisis ended in victory. No one really doubted it would. Brother Martin was marching and we (we white liberals) were cheering him on. There would be room in the country for everyone, we figured. Someone had just missed the message but would soon get it and all would be set right. American workers were working and living the good life. The pretty little girls in Hyde Park were breaking my heart to the sound of these songs with the regularity of the US mail. The Beatles were a rumor that was soon to become a mighty noise that would push these folk bands back onto the aficionados’ turntables. Topical songs abound, about Ole Miss, Barry Goldwater, The John Birch Society, Billy Sol Estes, Draft Dodger Rag (It is only because we had no draft to dodge that we had Iraq and a supine country’s tacit support; Bush and Cheney both knew this was the key to public support – have a war for all to cheer, but fight it with someone other than yourself. They should know, since that is just how they spent their years of draft eligibility. As the yuppies would say, a Win Win. Now the only draft we dodge is the tornadoes of global warming). The lunatic fringe was merely an amusing joke, comic relief for the important tragedies to come; not the voice of mainstream America, as they are now. Later, the angry raged against an unjust war; now they rage against their neighbors who want to continue to make a living, like they used to be allowed to, and were appreciated for it. No more – now they are ingrates and parasites. The lunatic fringe are now the lunatic mainstream – the darkest, most opaque of black humor, the gallows itself. The punch line has become policy. Franklin Graham pronounces Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich good Christian men and denounces Barack Obama as a danger to the country. The sixties was not a great time – we thought it would be the time to make things better so the future would be just and good for all. We didn’t understand human nature. Listening back, it all seems so childish, so innocent. It never occurred to me that at this point in my life the ugliness we deplored about America would become cherished and labeled “the Real America.”
