June 26, 2005

Culture Media and Miasmas

Victor Serge, the Russian anarchist-turned Bolshevik-turned Trostkyist, lived in Paris before World War I.

In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary he describes the milieu in which the anarchists and socialist of the day survived. Then, as now, it was full of a surprisingly similar potpourri of freakiness--vegetarians and dabblers in Eastern religion rubben elbows with down-at-heel avant-garde artists of one sort or another, along with social dissidents of every stripe, and no doubt experimenters with unconventional sexual practices.

John Reed, who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, a naive but lively paean to the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, emerged from a similar milieu in Greenwich Village.

Kennneth Rexroth, a smart guy who was never taken in by authoritarian socialism, describes some of the salons of post World War I Chicago in a not-dissimilar fashion.

In the Sixties, things were similar. The rebellious milieu combined sexual experimentation, various forms of mysticism (some drug-induced), leftism, avant garde artiness, astrology, and in that medium cults like LaRouche's arose, too.

It is a curious fact that amidst the often-voluntary poverty of that world, there are always the sons, daughters, and sometimes the adult parents of the very wealthy.

Some would-be leaders on the left who adhere to the orthodox Marxist view that there is something inherent about the place of the working class in society that will (or at least should) make it the engine of a revolution (even if that revolution is to be led, as Lenin had it, by intellectuals), with all the seriousness of Hamas sheikhs recruiting suicide bombers, to "industrialize," that is, voluntarily to become members of the working class, so they can create revolutionary nuclei in that factories, warehouses and freight terminals.

This effort is about as successful as the Maharishi would be in trying to have his flock travel to Mars by levitating.

What is interesting is the survival for over a century of a certain milieu, a mêlange of crackpots of every description, who have in common a hatred of everything normal and "square, including
  • Traditional religion, especially Christianity

  • Marriage and family life of any traditional sort, and with them sexual restraint

  • Business of any specific kind and capitalism in general

  • Disciplined science of any kind

At the same time, this milieu included people who cultivated

  • Politically revolutionary theory

  • Avant-guardism in art, music and literature

  • Mystical cultism especially if non-Western and non-scientific (the I Ching, Amerindian mysticism, neo-Hindu offshots)

  • Unconventional sexual behavior

For sure, there's more. But any R. Crumb cartoon of the period will give the flavor and appearance of this sort of milieu. Just listen to a Pacifica radio station and you'll get the anti-capitalist and anti-American rants, and in the low-ratings hours, the astrologers, vegans, the heirs of the anti-fluoridation movement, the gays, "folk" music three generations out of Appalachia or the Delta, and the weirdest possible iteration of black nationalism.

What is interesting is that the distance between the universities, once havens of upper-class boorishness and gentleman's C's among the students and a refined but conventional pretense on the faculty, have increasingly lost their separateness from this Bohemian milieu. The distance between what goes on on Telegraph Avenue and what goes on on the Berkeley campus has never been shorter, and Berkeley is no longer the exception in once was.

There is probably no way, short of police methods inadmissible under our traditions and Constitution, to drain this swamp, but swamp it is, and its miasmas periodically blow through the culture, over the universities, the theatres, and the media.

Among the effluvia is a mortal hatred of the "straight" and the "square." Bush and the social conservatives are perceived as such. The hostility to them gains much of its energy not from a rational analysis of political controversies, but from a long-standing elitist contempt of Bohemia, with its odd combination of wealth, voluntary poverty, and intellectual elitism, for everything conventional and normal.

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