Every generation blames the one before, and all of their frustrations come beating on your door…or so the song goes. Every age has its –isms, whether as heirlooms, or by choice. And as every age comes to pass, so the songs of praise (ideals) of the generation that defined it desperately try to echo into the next. But, given the nature of unchanging change in a world not of our bidding, a new age always plays its own tunes.
The age of Western supremacy is over, and the ideals that led to its ascendancy are finding it increasingly difficult to assert themselves in a world in which our modern feel-good self-centeredness (existential-humanism), greed (unbridled capitalism) and scientific knowledge (e.g. the A-bomb) have been globalized. To therefore persist in insisting on having others play second fiddle is rather unrealistic, something the Woodstock generation stubbornly refuses to accept. But then, who can blame them? They have, for the past 40 years, had their way when it comes to exploiting the unique opportunities afforded by being the lead singers in an age of the West fortunate enough to have dominated the world stage. It has been a forty-year festival, in which the banal realities of ignoble existence in Darwin's Zoo have taken back stage to Lullaby songs of Heaven.
And what a party it has been! Being heir to an age bereft of the 'repressive' existence of the God of Abraham (who 'died' in Auswitsch), the newly-liberated (by their WWII parents) immediately hijacked the idea of Universal Love (as anchored in the Christian faith) and inferred that its 'actuality' was the fons et origo binding/bonding all of humanity. In other words, just like the 'dead' God loved us eternally, so we love each other…for all eternity.
But that was not enough; earthly gods had to be found to preach the way to Happy-Ever-After Land. So forth were sent the disciples of Freud and Marx to convert the latest Infidels. Straddling both the Old and New World, these missionaries of modernity have been the song writers of all the Lullabies of terrestrial Heaven sung by our honoured Baby Boomers. 'Make lave not war' was the credo of the Freudo-Marxists (e.g. Reich and Marcuse) who mesmerized the American youth with Lullabies of eternal brotherly love. Across the ocean, die-hard Marxists, disillusioned by Stalin's authoritarian horrors, convinced student and unionists to stick it to 'the Man', so that worker-driven socialism (via industrialization) could herald in eternal bliss. And so the party started, with the 69ers in America and the 68ters in Europe…till 9/11.
It certainly was a grand start to a great party. But seeing that all songs fade, the applause soon died out. And so started the blame game. We are not eternally happy (in love), so who struck the wrong cord? In America the anti-psychiatry movement 'transported' Freud's 'cure' to society in general and proudly proclaimed to have found a way to fly over the cuckoo's nest. In other words, if the 'culprit' is not 'inside' then he must be 'outside'. Being the poor sod unfortunate enough to have dominated the globe at that stage of history, the pale male became the heretic of the witch-hunt that was to follow via the idea of 'innocence stolen', (global pedophilia). To paraphrase Orwell; we are all innocent, but some are more innocent than others.
Cowed into moral submission, pale males immediately turned on their own (via, e.g., the compensation industry) and legislated themselves out of any meaningful contribution to the future, while going on their knees to blow the trumpet of the 'Other' (e.g. radical feminists, homosexuals, the Noble Savage, etc.). Penance had to be paid, but where to do so? In public, of course. And thus the old Roman Catholic confessional ended up on Oprah's couch, where the fickle norm has become the Ten Commandments in a world in which morality has been democratized. A confessional of the plebiscite where man can be 'de-traumatized' from the 'unfairness' life has foisted on his/her supposed innate innocence.
Across the ocean, over-industrialization caused ex-Marxists to, rather predictably, change their tune as well…to point accusing fingers at the capitalist sons-of-swines (pale males, of course) who over-exploited the natural environment. Green became the new working-class white of the Free Willy crowd. And, as an edifice to their hubris, they convinced their cousins in the USA to erect the Biospheres (modern-day Towers of Babel) – a symbol of man's newly-discovered 'independence'.
But that song wasn't the curtain call of all human discontent as well. An excess of carbon forced the bionauts of the Ecospheres to abandon that Utopian narrative as well. And all that is left is the disgusting incivility of Simon Cowell's Reality TV and Al Gore's scare-mongering 'An Inconvenient (blame it on carbon) Truth'.
And so the children of Woodstock keep humming to the tunes they know best. Blame, blame, blame. But all hats off to Flower Power; it even succeeded in convincing Ban Ki-moon, the newly-appointed Secretary General of the United Nations, that the current genocide in Darfur is the result of too much carbon.
How do they do it? Well, it's all got to do with the moralization of all human activity through the idea of eternal neighbourly-love….still denied. And this is where the ultimate Lullaby jukebox starts rocking. You choose your sweet delusion, and pays your monies. Attention-seeking pubescent adults, who actually do the same 'job' kids do for fun (make-believe), are enlisted in Hollywood to scare the living guano out of the gullible in Oprahverse, thereby ensuring incessantly sweet encores.
An uncannily successful strategy one has to admit but, unfortunately, their age has come to pass. For example, China needs 44 million tones of oil to match America's annual consumption, but current world production only amounts to 40 million tones per annum. Something has got to give, sometime in the near future. And no amount of Leonardo di Caprio (The 11th Hour) moralization, via toeing the politically-correct line, will succeed in convincing a 5000-year old civilization to abandon its quest to have exactly that which the Woodstock generation arrogantly believed was their birthright.
Come on chaps, stops singing please – the party is over! Making love was marvelous…..but war made the bed. We are truly grateful for the amusement offered by Paris Hilton, Barbara Streisand, Bill Clinton, Joschka Fischer, Elton John, Robert Mugabe, Bono….and the like. But we are back in Darwin's Zoo again where, unfortunately, love has to play second fiddle in the grand orchestra we have never actually been the true directors of. To paraphrase; every age blames the one before, for all the dire warnings left unheeded at future's door….
