Still a Soixante-Huitard

City Journal ^ | May 2008 | Christopher Hitchens

[Lorianne]

The lowest form of solidarity, I remember reading somewhere, is generational. What do you have to do, after all, to qualify as a “baby boomer”? Membership in that vast sodality means that you were in your late teens or early twenties during the sixties: an underwhelming achievement that required no more than being able to say “present.” As someone born in 1949, I prefer to consider myself not a mere sixties person but a soixante-huitard. If there didn’t happen to be French argot for this, I would still want to answer to the name “sixty-eighter.”

For me, this date-stamped association of memories and ideas and bygone struggles has almost nothing to do with the checklist recently evoked onscreen by Tom Brokaw, which ran the gamut from the Tet Offensive and the murder of Martin Luther King to the images of Haight-Ashbury and the mystic lyrics of Buffalo Springfield. That year was for me a rite of passage, a sort of ordeal, as well as a kind of joy and liberation.

[marron]

Its hard to look back at the brightest days of your youth only to realize you were aligned with the most brutal regimes in the world. And that the forces you hated were in fact the most liberal and free countries the world has ever seen. And that the forces you supported, when they won, in almost every case ushered in a New Dark Age, at least until they too were overthrown.

He almost gets it. He can’t help yearning for the glory days of his youth, but he nevertheless almost gets it.

[Billthedrill]

At the time, I thought 1968 was the beginning of something. Later, I understood that I had instead been part of the end of something: the last gasp of red-flag socialism...

I would be the last to attempt to dismiss a nascent political awakening in this intensely political gentleman, but in fact 1968 was a year of l'entusiasme but precious little meaningful action. In that it is not, I'm afraid, comparable to 1848, which gave us a handful of real revolutions (not to mention the industrial one) and the Communist Manifesto, nor of 1917, wherein four empires (Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman) came crashing down, nor even of 1905, wherein the Romanov teetered. If it bore resemblances in terms of l'entusiasme to, say the mid-1780's in France its upshot was not the guillotine, a national reawakening, and Napoleon Bonaparte, but tear gas and skinned knees in Chicago, some terrific rock 'n' roll, and Richard Nixon. It's fine, but hardly the same thing.

It is, as Hitchens rightly estimates, the antiauthoritarian aspect of that cultural explosion that appealed so to youth and continues to. One rebels unthinkingly against the nearest authority and if that happens to be the United States government (an authority noted for not shooting the demonstrators) then an awful lot of political decisions may be made by default and going along with the passion of the moment. That gets more difficult when at last one realizes that with age one has become that despised authority. It is more difficult still when one realizes that not giving decent consideration to the matter can place one in a position of acting entirely against principle by clinging unthinkingly to the old antiauthoritarian reflexes. It is that that has kiddies in Che t-shirts rooting for the thugs and the suicide bombers. Their parents and professors ought to know better, but sadly, many don't.

And that's the dichotomy Hitchens is still struggling a little with. If at some point one finds out that one's antiauthoritarian sentiments lead one to curse the tanks in Prague and one's lifetime of action has led one to support them, then something has to change. For a lot of 68'ers denial is easier than choice.

[AZLiberty]

Next on the same page is another article, "Sex and its Discontents", which ends:

...

Well, that didn’t happen. Nor, with all its permutations—lesbian feminism, difference feminism, lipstick feminism, what have you—did the movement for women’s rights ever come to a mature accounting of the sexual revolution’s drawbacks, which continue to perplex the lives of young women today. Social life on campus is still a man’s game, as described most recently by the young sociologist Kathleen Bogle: women face enormous pressure to “hook up” in casual encounters that they find dispiriting and unfair.

They can thank their parents for that.