Monday, December 26, 2005
This Ain't the Summer of Love
This ain't the garden of eden
There ain't no angels above
And things ain't what they used to be
And this ain't the summer of love
- Blue Oyster Cult, Agents of Fortune
“Hippies rejected many of the assumptions that are the foundation of Western materialistic society. They believed that working hard in an unfulfilling job to acquire enough money to live in a culture that values conformity over creativity and individuality was not a well-spent life. They believed that the competitive capitalist paradigm was outmoded and noxious, destined to be replaced by cooperative community. Further, they believed that the widespread expansion of consciousness through drugs or other means- meditation, yoga, music, art of any kind – was the only way the Earth was going to survive what appeared to be a certain apocalypse, caused either by war or by the destruction of the planet’s natural resources. There had never been such a public flaunting of out-and-out lawlessness and morally seditious behavior in this country before. And that scared the hell out of people.”
- referring to the emergence of the San Francisco counterculture around 1967 – Blair Jackson, Garcia: An American Life.
“[T]he elites were badly frightened by the 1960’s upsurge and were asking basic questions such as, Is democracy really the way to go? As one troubled CEO in a meeting of tycoons put it, ‘One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II….
The early Seventies found a substantial section of America’s corporate, political and academic elites profoundly alarmed by the seeming collapse of normal controlling mechanisms and values. Vietnam externally, and Watergate internally, symbolized the crisis.
To business, the press was the enemy, indecently reveling in corporate malfeasance during the Watergate affair, poisoned by the radicalism of the 1960’s.
In 1974 and 1975, the Conference Board arranged a series of meetings of top corporate officials who brooded jointly about the future for business. The assembled CEO’s believed that it was crucial to win over the press….
Behind the media’s violent swing was an expensive, carefully planned corporate campaign to recapture the culture….Profit margins were down; corporate debt was up. The rules of the game needed to change in favor of business. Business Week put the matter squarely in a mid-1970’s issue: ‘It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow – the idea of doing with less so that business can have more….Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality….’
Today, the final vestiges of critical thought in the press have been all but extinguished, and mainstream journalists are as much a part of the ruling class as the political and business elite….”
- Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein, Washington Babylon.
There ain't no angels above
And things ain't what they used to be
And this ain't the summer of love
- Blue Oyster Cult, Agents of Fortune
“Hippies rejected many of the assumptions that are the foundation of Western materialistic society. They believed that working hard in an unfulfilling job to acquire enough money to live in a culture that values conformity over creativity and individuality was not a well-spent life. They believed that the competitive capitalist paradigm was outmoded and noxious, destined to be replaced by cooperative community. Further, they believed that the widespread expansion of consciousness through drugs or other means- meditation, yoga, music, art of any kind – was the only way the Earth was going to survive what appeared to be a certain apocalypse, caused either by war or by the destruction of the planet’s natural resources. There had never been such a public flaunting of out-and-out lawlessness and morally seditious behavior in this country before. And that scared the hell out of people.”
- referring to the emergence of the San Francisco counterculture around 1967 – Blair Jackson, Garcia: An American Life.
“[T]he elites were badly frightened by the 1960’s upsurge and were asking basic questions such as, Is democracy really the way to go? As one troubled CEO in a meeting of tycoons put it, ‘One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II….
The early Seventies found a substantial section of America’s corporate, political and academic elites profoundly alarmed by the seeming collapse of normal controlling mechanisms and values. Vietnam externally, and Watergate internally, symbolized the crisis.
To business, the press was the enemy, indecently reveling in corporate malfeasance during the Watergate affair, poisoned by the radicalism of the 1960’s.
In 1974 and 1975, the Conference Board arranged a series of meetings of top corporate officials who brooded jointly about the future for business. The assembled CEO’s believed that it was crucial to win over the press….
Behind the media’s violent swing was an expensive, carefully planned corporate campaign to recapture the culture….Profit margins were down; corporate debt was up. The rules of the game needed to change in favor of business. Business Week put the matter squarely in a mid-1970’s issue: ‘It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow – the idea of doing with less so that business can have more….Nothing that this nation, or any other nation, has done in modern economic history compares in difficulty with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept the new reality….’
Today, the final vestiges of critical thought in the press have been all but extinguished, and mainstream journalists are as much a part of the ruling class as the political and business elite….”
- Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein, Washington Babylon.
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