"1968"

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 13, 2008


“In 1968, the world stood on its metaphorical head and wondered why it couldn’t get anywhere.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Author’s Forward, Green Island In A Black Sea – novel-in-progress

* * * * * *

Lance Morrow of “Time” magazine (January 11, 1988) wrote, “1968 is like a knife blade that severed the past from the future.”

1968 was the year young people broke with the past. Called freaks, members of the counterculture, flower children or hippies, they were transforming the West, as it was known. They introduced spiritual freedom disassociated from the Church, hope disassociated from the straight world, and happiness without familial or sexual constraints. Hippies were bent on social justice and Cultural Revolution for no other reason than because they could.

1968 was twenty years after the establishment of the United Nations, and the State of Israel. It was also twenty years after the Afrikaner Government came to power in South Africa.

GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA is a story told through the experience of Seamus “Dirk” Devlin, 30, on the fringe of this generation, but who couldn’t be more conventional, uptight or more a prisoner of the past. As he assumes his new assignment in South Africa in 1968, he encounters its policy of apartheid, a country without television, indeed, a country without the deviations of a counterculture at all, but a country author Allen Drury describes as a very strange society for its parallax view of the world.

1968 marked the departure of young people from the stultifying boredom of a consumer society, a society that lived in identical suburbs, slept in twin beds, drove identical cars, watched mind-numbing sitcoms on television, and went to church satisfied that they were the moral guardians of the world.

1968 was the year young people looked around and saw old people, who had not left the celebratory spirit of 1945 and World War Two, controlled everything. They created separation with rock ‘n’ roll music, drugs, free love, dress and appearance, while displaying a distaste for war, violence and rules. When the FBI and CIA, and other agencies tried to discredit them, they launched a counterculture with a vengeance. This included the idea of destroying the college to get an education. They were defined by virtually everything that conventional society was not, and the more they were taken as an oddity the more their presence was felt by that society.

These seemingly unrelated fragments find the world today, more than forty years later, turned upside down, and inside out, running on empty, still wishing 1945 could somehow return.

1968 was the year Devlin walked out of this upside down world into the right side up world of the Afrikaner Government, which had no intentions of changing. He would soon discover whether it was a nightmare or a dream.

END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

1968 was the year the “American Century” ended, thirty-two years early.

1968 was the year America’s self-confidence ran amuck. Nothing and no one was in control. Corporate America was 20 or 30 divisions in search of a corporation. Japan, Inc. was eating America’s lunch. Quietly, Japan was taking away the U.S. competitive advantage. Left behind were hollow U.S. factories in the automotive, appliance, lighting, and finance industries. Japan bombed Hawaii in 1941; in 1968 it was buying Hawaii with real estate purchases.

1968 was the year leaders became caricatures of themselves. Education became a factory with no room for thinking.

1968 was the year the Church became lost in cultural relativism no longer certain the meaning of truth.

END OF CONTROL FROM THE TOP

1968 was the year politicians ignored the seismic cultural shift and became irrelevant. They were still lock stepping to the cadence of 1945, while ignoring the counterculture paradigm shift.

1968 was the year young people let their presence be known. There were revolts and rebellions of university students from Prague to Peru.

1968 was the year the Czech Communist leader Alexander Dubcek attempted to give socialism a human face in the “Spring of Freedom.” He failed as the movement died as 650,000 Warsaw Pact troops and tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union crushed the rebellion but lost the hearts and minds of the people.

1968 was the year of the riots in the streets of Paris with 30,000 university students battling 50,000 policemen. These students brought President Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic to its knees. Many observers thought it marked the end of civilization.

1968 was the year the police slaughtered peaceful marchers in Mexico City with estimates of student murders by police from 30 to as high as 300.

1968 was the year rioting turned British and West German universities into student occupying communes. Student riots also caused the premiers of Italy and Belgium to be toppled.

1968 was the year students of Columbia University shut down the campus and occupied the university’s administrative buildings.

1968 was the year 10,000 students descended on the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago led by the “Youth International Party” (Yippies) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). These students disrupted proceedings decrying the Vietnam War, racism, and the hypocritical political process, pointing out that 60 percent of the Viet Nam deaths were Negroes when only 12 percent of the population. Frightened voters, reacting to melee aired on nightly television news for days, narrowly elected Richard M. Nixon as president in November over Hubert Humphrey.

1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. Viet Cong lost the battle but gained a psychological victory. The surprise attack brought about a drastic reversal in the U.S. policy in Viet Nam. Of the 206,000 additional troops requested by General Westmoreland, President Johnson authorized only 13,500; relieved the general of his command; and then announced he would not run for reelection.

END OF DUE PROCESS

1968 was the year Viet Nam, a war never declared, spun out of control. Congress was duped into approving the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” (August 7, 1964).

Two American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf, which marked the boundary of North Viet Nam, were allegedly attacked without provocation by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The “Pentagon Papers” proved otherwise.

Daniel Ellsbergs, consultant to the State Department, made the papers public in June of 1971. Excerpts were published in The New York Times and The Washington Post. These documents revealed a legacy of blunders and deceit from presidents Eisenhower, through Kennedy to Johnson’s secret war plan.

President Johnson planned to goad the Communists into aggravating hostilities, thereby giving him an excuse to massively retaliate. The war, the Pentagon Papers revealed, was being fought 70 percent “to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat,” the first in American history, and only 10 percent for the sake of the Vietnamese.

1968 was the year of the fiasco of the U.S Pueblo. The Pueblo was an American spy ship in international waters that was boarded and impounded by the North Koreans. Some 83 sailors languished in North Korean prisons for nearly a year, frequently beaten, exacting many confessions of their crimes before television cameras, including the ship’s captain, Commander Lloyd M. Bucher.

YOUNG PEOPLE LOOKING FOR A WAY OUT TO FIND A WAY IN

1968 was the year of New Age spiritualism led by Carlos Castaneda and his “The Teachings of Don Juan.”

1968 was the year of LSD, and the psychedelic acid trips of Harvard professor Timothy Leary.

1968 was the year of novelist Ken Kesey and his “Merry Pranksters.” These hippies zigzagged across the country in a converted school bus painted in psychedelic colors, stayed high, sold drugs, and organized parties of surrealistic joy.

1968 was the year of the “acid rock” music of the Grateful Dead. Amplifiers and microphones were hooked through many speakers to produce a sound like a chemical refinery. Steppenwolf, Country Joe and the Fish, the Jefferson Airplane, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and many others joined the entourage of the Grateful Dead.

1968 was the year young people accepted rock ‘n’ roll music as the new form of communication for their generation. As the sound grew louder, the dancing more frantic, the lights blinking more hypnotically, they fused into a tidal wave of collective hysteria.

These impassioned revelers wake up now, forty years later, to find they have changed history by dropping out to find a way in.

END OF HEROES

1968 was the year that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated (April 4) and Robert F. Kennedy (June 5).

1968 was the year the Summer Olympics in Mexico City became political. Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the “Black Power” salute with their fists raised defiantly in the air from the medals platform after winning the Gold and Bronze medal as the United States National Anthem played.

1968 was the year of the Black Panther Party with the cry, “Black is beautiful and we want power to determine the destiny of our black community.”

1968 was the year professor Timothy Leary of Harvard advocated the “Politics of Ecstasy,” stating, “If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, you must turn on, turn in, and drop out.” As the pope of dope, he led the sexual revolution in psychedelic erotic exhilaration.

END OF THE RATIONAL

1968 was the year that the absurd became legitimate. The mocking writings of Beckett, Sartre and Camus, Nietzsche and Heidegger found a home in a place called “Haight-Asbury,” outside San Francisco.

1968 was the year novelist Ken Kesey insisted people needed to be outlaws for the pleasure of it. They wallowed in hedonistic glee outside the rational ordering society of laws and policemen. Free food was distributed boosted from Safeway trucks. They sashayed about in clothes lifted from assignment shops; walked naked as jay birds through a sea of revelers at open air concerts without raising an eyebrow; bedded down in abandoned buildings paying no rent; made love whenever the mood hit them unconcerned about privacy. These outlaws had no rules, responsibilities or regrets, only the ecstasy of having fun in the moment.

1968 was the year that tens of thousands escaped to Canada to avoid the Selective Service Draft. Those that didn’t declared November 14 “National Turn in Your Draft Card Day.” Still others burned their draft cards in public bonfires in defiance of the law.

1968 was the year Yippy founders, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, announced, “Never trust anyone over thirty.”

1968 was the year longhaired bearded youth looked down at their job holding parents who measured worth by job competence while they measured it in terms of personal truth. .

END OF PARENTING

1968 was the year the nuclear family died. Parents gave up the frustrating attempt to control their children and abdicated the responsibility.

1968 was the year that the fallacy was proven that happiness was a matter of economic security. Parents justified being full-time jobholders by providing what they had not enjoyed as children. These good intentions backfired.

1968 was the year the idea of being teenagers was fully realized along with the discovery that parental guilt could be exploited. Teenagers did as they pleased, stayed out all hours, skipped school when the mood hit them, drank hard liquor, smoked cigarettes, experimented with drugs, and had sexual trysts. They lied, cheated and stole with impunity, but maintained the concession of being available to sit down dinners on holidays.

1968 was the year teachers lost control of the classroom. School became a combat zone. Teachers felt successful if they survived the day without bodily harm. Not only did learning suffer, but competent people avoided the profession.

1968 was the year adults retrogressed into adolescence. The “over thirty” crowd joined the hippie lifestyle. Recreational drugs became fashionable at adult gatherings as society lost its mind as well as its way.

1968 was the year that the counterculture established trends in dress, lifestyle, coiffure, language, diet, music, art, theatre, film, politics, sport, media, entertainment, architecture, literature, journalism, values, interests, and beliefs. It even elevated primitive body painting to an accepted art form.

THE END OF HISTORY

1968 was the year the home was abandoned as refuge from the world at large. The home no longer represented the crucible of leadership, the citadel of learning, the place of stability. Home became synthetic, arbitrary, a second hand experience. The loss of this sanctuary was not simply a dumbing down of society; it was the “end of history.”

1968 was the year science and the struggle for individual recognition now filled this new vacuum. Science opened the door to economic possibility, while the drive for recognition was its motor. Life was all about getting ahead. Greed was good. Everything was measured in terms of economics. Tradition was not only gone, but forgotten. Historical landmarks were razed to make parking, construct fast-food restaurants, or cut a new highway through a community armed with Eminent Domain.

1968 was the year tyranny lost its edge, tyranny of government, employment, institutions or, vested interests? In the absence of tyrannies, everyone was now in charge, which meant no one was. This was the new reality.

1968 was the year man was at the door of the future. Francis Fukuyama has since personified this as the “last man” in history. Soaring man no longer had time to look back to the chaos of history. In any case, facts were seen as fiction, truth was considered relative, and the drive toward capitalistic liberal democracies was deemed the end state of the historical process.

1968 was the year the nonfiction novel of Norman Mailer recorded the people’s march (The Armies of the Night) on Washington, DC.

1968 was the year that Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson created the “New Journalism,” using fictional techniques to dramatize their nonfiction writing. The blur between reality and fantasy spawned by the hippies, given credence by counterculture philosophers, was gaining purchase in popular culture.

1968 was the year of cultural studies as universities abandoned objective truth for relativism. The inherited wisdom of the past was now passé.

1968 was the year symbolic systems emphasized the construction of identities, social institutions, and social relations, and gave birth to feminist studies, African American studies, and other cultural pursuits.

1968 was the year of anti-humanism in the wake of the student radical movement. The movers and shakers were the old New Left crowd of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan. These philosophers were the Continental gurus who took the hippies seriously and shared their contempt for the past.

1968 was the year of “poststructuralism” and “deconstructionists.” The thought police have made a clear break with the past throwing conventional thinking on its head. Anti-humanistic philosophy, as it was called, claimed human reason was impotent and insufficient to make universal moral judgments.

It was the end of history. The past should be interpreted in terms of its own values because knowledge was not certain, but relative; truth was not discernible except contextually, and then totally subject to interpretation; and science was not value-free but quite subject dependent.

1968 was the year science lost its certainty, and in losing it, found its freedom. Nothing was sacred anymore. The charge was that science invented scientific theories rather at the expense of scientific discoveries.

The relevance of several academic disciplines were challenged, especially those in the humanities and social sciences. Major universities no longer taught Shakespeare. Others asked: what did Freud and Jung prove, other than that they were megalomaniacs? Forty years later the controversy remains unresolved.

1968 was the year historical research and the distinction between history and fiction was undermined. Everything was questioned now; nothing was sacred.

1968 was the year a new generation of young people in their flared trousers, hippy beads and tie-dye clothes provided significant energy to stopping the Viet Nam War. They were a recognizable disrupted force to the once-independent institutions of civil society, including education, the Church, the media, the corporation, and trade unions. In doing so, they proved they could no longer be conveniently subsumed as a homogeneous and largely mindless mass beneath this edifice.

ENTER SEAMUS “DIRK” DEVLIN

1968 was the year that he came to South Africa to form a new chemical company for his employer, Polychem International, Inc. A devout man, who didn’t smoke, drink, or swear, he believed in the Holy Roman Catholic Church, the Infallibility of the Pope, the Mystical Body of Christ, the sanctity of marriage, importance of duty. He was on the brink of entering Conrad’s “heart of darkness.”

END OF LIVING WELL LIVING CHEAPLY

1968 was the year in which the average cost of a new house was $14,975; average income was $7,844; a new automobile cost $2,822; average rent was $130; tuition at Harvard University was $2,000; movie ticket was $1.50; gasoline was 34 cents a gallon; a U.S. Postage Stamp was 6 cents; granulated sugar was 60 cents for 5 pounds; ground coffee was 93 cents a pound; Vitamin D Milk was $1,21; bacon was 75 cents per pound; eggs were 38 cents a dozen; fresh ground beef was 50 cents a pound; and a fresh loaf of baked bread was 22 cents.

Devlin at 30 with an education at a land grant institution was making $57,500 including perks and bonuses, and paying no taxes as he was living and working abroad.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Tampa, Florida
June 2008

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This is the author’s Forward to a novel-in-progress, “Green Island in a Black Sea."