At Least He Looked Really Good When He Said It

The USAToday, yesterday:

For the record and as points of reference: Obama is 46, and had just turned 8-years-old when Woodstock was held. Clinton is 60, and would have been 21 when Max Yasgur's farm was used for that festival.

I refute it thus! The Great Ridgepole of Recognition for The Sixties™ isn't the Kennedy assassination, the other Kennedy assassination, the King assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Freedom Rides, Selma, the great marches against racism or the war, Berkley, Kent State, Jackson State, Chicago '68, Malcom X; not even the Beatles on Sullivan or Dylan at Newport. Woodstock! Far out, man. You kids seem to know as much about your history as, well, Barack Obama.

I remember the year I went to camp
Heard about some lady named Selma and some blacks
Somebody put their fingers in the President's ears
And it wasn't too much later they came out with Johnson's Wax.

Where was Hillary when Andy Warhol was shot? And how old was Obama when she killed Vince Foster?

We've spoken before about this line of reasoning from Senator Obama, and I guess we'll be speaking about it again. But first, for fuck's sake! Is there any fucking evidence of Hillary Rodham, Wellesley '69, Political Science honors student, attendee of the 1968 Republican National Convention, who spent the summer between college graduation and Yale Law entry working in Alaska (and shutting down a cannery by blowing a whistle on its unsanitary conditions), not making macramé bong cozies, spending her free weekends as a hashish-and-patchouli-scented backup singer for Sly Stone?

As for Senator Without The Sixties Your Parents Would Have To Have Gone Farther Away Than Halfway Across The Pacific To Get Married, let us first reply (again) that the answer is easy: go ahead and bring us all together for this important business of yours. Who's stopping ya?

As we've noted many a time here, when people say The Sixties™ these days what they really mean, politically, is The Fifties, that time of imagined unification across the entire spectrum of Caucasian skin tones, that time when the movement which would finally kill Jim Crow arrived, when modern feminism started to take shape, when Ban the Bomb and environmentalism began. Silent Spring was published in 1962, and The Feminine Mystique a year later; in 1962 the Court struck down "non-denominational" prayer in public schools. For the record and as a point of reference, this was before you could buy Beatle Boots. Hillary Clinton was fourteen. These issues all have roots in the ostensibly conservative 50s; of all matters of contention supposedly kept alive by hidebound Boomers only Gay and Lesbian rights, and the battle over the Vietnam War (but not our involvement in it), trace directly to the Groovy Acid Decade.

Let's be fair all around. The junior Senator from the Land of Lincoln has a point, certainly, but it requires explaining, not just complaining. Who compromises what for your vision, Senator? From my own perspective it's the Right which has kept the cultural battles of The Sixties™ alive; Reagan was canonized for rolling them back, two decades later, when Hillary was thirty-four. It's the Right which uses pornography, Darwinism, multiculturalism, and abortion rights, to name but a few, as cudgels on the skull of the body politic. Do they stop now by your fiat? And they insist that the magic dust of The Sixties™ led to a mind-blowing detour from constant American principles, to the Personal, from the Property-Owning. That they are historically full of shit--this country was contentious at its founding, over the same philosophic issue, and the compromise of counting the ancestors of nearly every African-American in this country as 3/5 human is, I'm thinking, not the example Senator Obama would like me to use--is beside the point. You try explaining it to them. For the record and as a point of reference, I've been trying since before you were at madrassa. I know you never were at madrassa, but I've decided to give this compromise business a whirl. How'm I doin' so far?

Who compromises? I have. I voted for Jimmy Carter in '76 and Bill Clinton twice. Any vote I cast in 2008 will be a compromise, too. I share the country with racists, rapacious capitalists, Dominionists, resource-wasters, gun-toters, neo-colonialists, hate-spewing corrupters of the public airwaves, liars for profit, and people who can't get enough Brittany Spears news. I've haven't shot a one of them, fired and missed, or even tried to restrict their right to free speech, aside from that public ownership of the airwaves business. I've paid my taxes every year, including those that go to pay public servants who refuse to stop the part that goes to a war nobody wants and that seek to balance those books by cutting services to people like me. Just tell me what I'm supposed to give up now, Senator, in exchange for the joys of seeing your smiling visage in the Oval Office. Give me the specifics.

Oh, and do it someplace other than FAUX News, 'kay? That's where you should be telling them what they're giving up.