Blowin' in the Wind

When I sniff the wind these days, I smell flowers. And maybe that other smell is incense, maybe not. It seems to me I am living in the Sixties reloaded, and it’s not just the old problem of the flashbacks.

Let me explain. The parallels seem spooky and improbable, like those old ones we grew up with about Kennedy and Lincoln: but hear me out, and you decide.

The perfect image of it all perhaps, was the tableau of Iraq’s Information Minister, Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, now immortalized as “Comical Ali,” in that press conference atop a high rise, insisting the Americans were nowhere near Baghdad. It was an “illusion”; they were “sick in their minds.” All the while behind him the fighting in the streets.

In that vista, postmodernism deconstructed. News flash: reality is not a construct. It exists independent of our wishes or beliefs.

The Iraq War, like the Vietnam War, showed the conventional wisdom was wrong; from this has evolved a general questioning of authority. Vietnam shattered the illusion that America was always right and always won. Iraq shattered the illusion that America was always wrong and always lost.

Remember too, in the Sixties that sense that a new age was dawning. The astrological “Age of Aquarius” conveniently meshed with important numbers on the Western calendar: the second millennium was ending.

In this sense, the New Age has now dawned, since the year 2000.

Surprise: the rough beast that slouches in from the wilderness turns out to be neo-conservatism. The actual event is the psychological reverse of the Sixties: the Sixties were the drunken party ringing out the old. The two thousand oughts ring in the new. It is morning in America.

Beyond the calendar, and beyond the Bush family, there is a genuine generational change happening, comparable to that in the Sixties, but in reverse. In the Sixties, a bulging youth demographic shifted power to a new generation. Today that demographic is retiring, and in the same epochal numbers.

Bush is Kennedy; but more significant, if only because he has escaped assassination. A relatively young man, he gives a sense of new beginnings. FDR’s New Deal, a new doctrine for the left, reached establishment status under Kennedy and Johnson. Reagan’s “supply side” tax-cutting, a new doctrine for the right (“voodoo economics,” to George Bush Sr.), reaches establishment status under Bush 43. US federal election results since 1980 eerily echo those in the US from 1930 on; but with parties switched. Leaving aside presidential elections, most easily distorted by the quality of individual candidates, there has been a steady growth of the Republican Party vote between Reagan and Bush Jr., as there was a steady growth of the Democratic vote from FDR to Kennedy. The vast middle class has moved.

The Kennedy assassination was a starting gun for change: it moved a lot of people, with the feeling something was wrong.

Nine-eleven has done the same thing. “Where were you on 9/11”? is on a par with “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?”

Once the group in power is caught out, the collapse can be rapid, just as was the collapse of the Iraqi regime. A lot of dominos may fall in coming years. I doubt it will be as chaotic as the Sixties, because this time it’s about a new world order, not chaos. But in five years from now, much of what was commonly believed up to yesterday may be dismissed as nonsense.

As it is.

Hang on tight. It could be a wild ride.