The Year of Dreaming Dangerously....The Pivot Year '68

[KoKo]

In '68 the Mexican students sang Beatles songs as they took to the streets. Bernadette Devlin and the civil rights marchers in Northern Ireland echoed, "We Shall Overcome." In one of my favorite stories, recounted by Paul Berman in his book "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968," the young playwright Vaclav Havel visited New York in the spring of '68, went up to Columbia to observe the student strike and purchased Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground albums to take back to Prague, where they inspired a dissident band, the Plastic People, and other cultural rebels.

For Havel and his comrades in the Prague Spring -- who finally succeeded 20 years later in their Velvet Revolution -- Frank Zappa and Lou Reed are heroes of the anti-authoritarian spirit that helped end Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. (It's a concept, incidentally, that Judge Bork just can't grasp. When I told him about the Havel-Zappa connection, he just shook his head. Bork still wants to censor Zappa.)

And what of the relevance of all this, 30 years later? If nothing else, knowing what transpired in '68 is a way to understand our generation, the '60s generation. My father's generation endured the Depression and fought World War II. But '68 was our crucible. It was the year a generation raised in the optimism of the New Frontier and the Beatles lost its innocence.

1968 remains a fault line in American politics: What side were you on? As Pat Buchanan, who was a Nixon speechwriter in '68, told me, "I think there's an amount of bitterness and animosity that our generation is going to carry to its grave. These wounds aren't going to heal."

This is one of the reasons Bill and Hillary Clinton are the objects of such venom. Clinton may not have been much of a street-fightin' man, but he was of that time, and hey, he dodged the draft, didn't he?

Much more perspective....here:



http://www.salon.com/news/1998/07/22news2.html

OR:

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:rEOrxMralPoJ:www.salon.com/news/1998/07/22news2.html+Night+of+Sorrow,+Mexico,+1968&hl=en

[Eric J in MN]

1. shorter link

http://www.salon.com/news/1998/07/22news2.html

[KoKo]

2. thanks much...I edited.

:-)'s

[KoKo]

3. Kick...good article, worth the read since '68 is so relevant to now...

:kick: Maybe print it out for weekend reading.

[alcibiades_mystery]

4. Not to even mention the goings-on in France and Italy

The May 68 movement in France still stands as the high-water mark of anti-authoritarian social movement (anti-right as much as anti-left authoritarianism, when the intellectuals and students finally told the Communist Party hacks to beat sand). Some of the great French intellectuals of the 20th century - Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and countless others - will always be associated with the student strikes and political rumblings in France. The same can be said of Italy, where the 68 movements birthed the Autonomia and the Movement of 77 - Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, etc., etc.