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too heavy a historical burden. With the advantage of hindsight it is
always easy to notice inevitability, yet in this instance a good case for
inevitability can be made. Not only was the movement's social base–
educated labor - a new phenomenon, giving rise to surprise and confu–
sion that the movement should exist at all, but the movement was in
many ways marginal to potential power and desperate to compensate for
marginality with political hubris.
It
had all the intellectual pathologies
and, because of its ambitions, few of the advantages.
But also a large part of the trouble was that, in a sense, the move–
ment was forced to give birth to itself. Throughout the sixties, the
Marxist-Leninist remnants offered analyses of imperialism, but were
largely discredited by Stalinism ; the social democrats offered a verbal
insistence on democracy, until the Mississippi blacks pleaded for it in
1964 ; the honorable pacifists offered at least an insistence on direct ac–
tion ; but none of them offered any clear understanding of the structure
and texture and flow of contemporary American society, and none of
them stood for a live movement. So the movement was forced to patch
together a worldview with scraps of leftover theory and intuition, sewed
together with moralism and a faith in youth and our own experi–
ence. Youth was overvalued because there were few elders to emulate,
and moralism had to substitute for ideas left unrepresented by credible
advocates, or even unavailable. This fragile patchwork was left virtually
alone to combat the most powerful and arrogant empire in the history
of the world. No wonder the seams could not hold.
It
is remarkable
that the movement survived as long as it did, spread as many waves,
met as many responsibilities, engendered as much fresh analysis, ex–
pressed as much energy.
The movement choked on its own myths, but myths like cowards
die many times and still clutch life. Some radicals heralded the counter–
culture as a here-and-now embodiment of liberation; but the myth of
the Age of Aquarius went down in anomie and blood at Altamont, in
the bodies of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, in smack and speed, in
John Lennon's "the dream is over." Some held to the myth of the move–
ment itself as the new society aborning; that myth died again and again
and finally in the SDS debacle. Some believed in salvation in follow–
ing the most oppressed and therefore presumably more clear-sighted
blacks ; that myth fell with the fratricide in the Black Panther Party.
And some believed that the revolutionary climax was imminent, a kind
of projection of the internal clock which for years has been stuck at a
minute to midnight; that myth died in a Greenwich Village townhouse.
Each myth displaced clarity and each persists. Yet a movement of the
