The Black Book of the American Left by David Horowitz

Author:David Horowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2013-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

But when all the posturing and self-dramatization was over, there was no plan, no idea about how to replace what had been destroyed.

Schizophrenic to its core, the era was never clear whether its primary identity was that of creator or destroyer. Its ambivalence was suggested by the two groups that dominated its popular music—perhaps the only real artistic achievement of the time. Was the inner voice of the Sixties that of the Beatles, innocent minstrels on a “magical mystery tour?” Or that of the Rolling Stones, the vandals presiding at its “beggars’ banquet?”

For a while, these groups reigned jointly over popular culture, expressing the audacious delusion of the Sixties that it was beyond consequences, beyond good and evil, able to have it all. It was possible to assault the cops by word and deed but also be safe on the streets; to reject authority and yet live coherently; to be an outlaw culture and yet a humane and harmoniously ordered one.

Listening to the Beatles and the Stones, Sixties rebels registered these ideas with growing grandiosity, believing they had gone from counterculture to counter-nation once they planted the flag of discovery at Woodstock. A place consecrated by love, holy to the Sixties in the way the Paris commune was to Marxists, Woodstock institutionalized the right to live outside the rules. Unlike the doomed inhabitants of “Amerika,” the citizens of this new nation could have joyous copulation and access to illegal drugs. If the drugs caused bad trips or the sex carried disease, the caring immigrants of Woodstock would be there to care for their own.

But the Woodstock Nation was an illusion as ungrounded in reality as the hallucinations induced by the LSD that was its national chemical. A few months after its founding, the decade began to draw toward its apocalyptic close. As a portent of things to come, the Beatles were breaking up. The title-song of the album Let It Be might be taken as a recognition of the destructiveness of the Sixties crusade against established order. The Rolling Stones answered this act of contrition with the title-song of their album Let It Bleed. Then came Altamont, the Kristallnacht of the Woodstock Nation. At Altamont, the gentle folk of Woodstock met the Hell’s Angels—not only criminals but suppliers of the drugs that were destroying the new nation from within. While the Stones were singing Sympathy for the Devil, a black man lunged near the stage with a knife in his hand and was beaten to death in front of everyone by the Angels. Devils and Angels: it all came together and all came apart.

Appalled at what had happened, Mick Jagger dropped the song from his repertory. He saw that the Sixties were over. It was time to go back to the dressing-room, time to stop posturing as the “satanic majesties” of an era, time to grow up and simply become part of the rock scene again.

The rest of us had to do the same thing: learn to live with adulthood.

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