Stand by for a year of nostalgia for 1968
Rod Liddle braces himself for a celebration of the events of 40 years ago — a time of leftist ferment and revolution, the dreary consequences of which we are still trying to shake off Uh oh — 2008. Coming to a TV or radio studio near you, for the entirety of the year, is Daniel Cohn-Bendit. And probably Jürgen Habermas. And perhaps Joe Cocker. We are ‘celebrating’ the 40th anniversary of 1968 — a year dear to the hearts of many in the media and especially, I would reckon, the BBC. If we can get past the merry merry month of May having avoided multiple interviews with people who took part in the University of Nanterre sit-in happening type thing, or who spat at a pig outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, but are now international arms dealers, or run the Vietnam kiddie franchise for BAT, then we will be lucky people.
For documentary film-makers, this will be a year of copious pining: where has all that fervour gone? Where is the idealism? Who now would waste a second of their lives reading anything Habermas has to say, or any of the rest of the Frankfurt School (who are remembered chiefly for having wedded Marxism to Freudianism, which is a bit like being remembered for having combined the theory that the sun revolves around the earth with the theory that the earth is flat). There will be wistful programmes about the vibrant culture of the time and interviews with former situationists for whom there have long been no situations vacant. Even the Lettrists may get a nod; they were a bit like the situationists (lots of wizard antiestablishment pranks), but fell out with them after a bit. Danny Cohn-Bendit is certain to get wheeled out; his March 22 Group instigated the later sit-in at Nanterre. He was a cultural icon of his time, afforded the sort of coverage we now give to our most gilded footballers. Bendit like Beckham, then. Ha, sorry.
Danny now runs the Greens in the European Parliament, one of the few to have survived that tumultuous year with even a vestige of the old ideology intact (although he ditched Marxism pretty quickly). Him and Joschka Fischer. They are both fauxapologetic about 1968; offering up a Blair sort of apology if you ask them about it — gee, y’know, I did what I thought was right. Maybe we were a bit naive and excessive from time to time. You would hear much the same from their immediate ideological descendants, Ulrike Meinhof, Donald DeFreeze, Eldridge Cleaver, Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Frome, Leila Khaled etc., those people who made the 1970s such an entertaining place to be, with their bombs, guns and ludicrous liberationist ideologies.
I wonder if the media — our unelected, collective memory — will be so indulgent about the year in question. If they were truly even-handed they would use 1967, the summer of love, as the year to epitomise the good stuff about all that 1960s business and 1968 — the summer of hate — to epitomise the bad. It was the year that all those pleasantly pacifistic sentiments spilled over into radically stupid politics and, God help us, direct action — and threatened at least one Western government (France) in so doing. In retrospect it proved to be the last time anyone in power anywhere took the slightest notice of what teenagers had to say about anything — although at the time it seemed that teenagers were about to inherit the world.
Even in terms of the art-form of choice at the time, rock music, 1967 seemed a time of endless promise, while 1968 saw the ghastly blind alleys of prog and heavy metal peering over the parapet: 1967 gave us Woodstock, which even the most steely-hearted of you must accept had a certain joie de vivre about it; the following year we had the National Jazz Festival in Britain with the dismal maunderings of Jethro Tull, Jeff Beck, the Incredible String Band and so on. Meanwhile, the hippy communes at HaightAshbury in San Francisco deliquesced into a pool of acrimony, loathing and hard drugs.
Only one novel from 1968 truly punches its weight as a document of the time — John Updike’s Couples, perhaps his finest hour, a wonderful exposition of the post-pill paradise and that new social motor, unconfined sexual intercourse — with political violence and anarchy lurking in the background. In film, you might have enjoyed the similarly libidinous The Graduate and Sidney Poitier’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner — but you would surely have preferred the previous year’s In The Heat of the Night.
Still, all this meant nothing to me at the time, as I suspect it meant nothing to most people. I vaguely remember my father being angry at the black power salute given by those piqued athletes at the Mexico Olympics and everyone getting very worked up about the Tet Offensive but, like most of the 1960s, cultural change passed us by. It was the year I moved from Bexleyheath in Kent, where in cultural terms the year was 1959, to Middlesbrough, where it was about 1937. I did as I was told and if I failed to do so I was hit. But out of my window I could see a new school being built, a state school which I would later attend and which had abolished the concept of lessons, classrooms, learning, discipline. What a year I had, doing nothing but playing football and the piano.
We are fighting to rid ourselves even now of most of the cultural nonsense imposed upon us by 1968 and those years immediately prior to it. The bizarre excesses of multiculturalism, founded in a belief that the white establishment orthodoxy was an imperialistic construct, corrupt and useless, is only now being kicked into touch. Children are still taught too little in our schools and instead encouraged to interpret, a legacy of Lady Plowden and, of course, Shirley Williams. When the children are naughty they must never be struck; indeed they must hardly be gainsaid, still less chastised.
Radical feminism — which in 1968 reached its apogee with Valerie Solanas’s shooting of Andy Warhol — has won every battle it set out to fight. That wonderful new sexual liberation has left us with a country full of single mothers on benefit, the Child Support Agency, millions of divorcees and some very rich lawyers. The over-throwing of the art establishment has given us a Turner Prize winner in a bear suit and a soiled mattress or a stuffed shark sold for tens of thousands of pounds. Rock music, in its most hideous and bovine incarnation, has become the perpetual backdrop to our daily lives, a fugue of blandness and stupidity assaulting us from every car window, shop doorway, pub, hotel, TV programme. Anti-Americanism remained the defining ideology of the European Left for 40 years — while Vietnam is still an inefficient, incompetent police state, lagging miles behind those south-east Asian countries which, unfashionably, chose to embrace free-market capitalism.
The one real hero of 1968, Alexander Dubcek — a hero, remember, who was given little succour from the West — is dead, having spent the greater part of his life after the Prague Spring of 1968 and the subsequent, unchallenged, Soviet invasion, working for the Forestry Commission — but he would have revelled in the irony of it all. Eventually, the USSR collapsed under the weight of its own economic contradictions, and his country was at last free. And yet in the West, the last tendrils of Marxism have a grip around the neck of every facet of our lives except, perhaps, for the economic sphere. So much, then, for Karl’s idea of the base determining the superstructure. In the West, the superstructure is still in the hands of the radical Left. Even the judiciary. How the hell did that happen?
I have a horrible feeling that we will be sent back, by the BBC and others, not just to 1968 but to an earlier time of leftist ferment and revolution. This year is also of course the 160th anniversary of 1848, a time when, as de Tocqueville put it, those who had nothing united in common envy and those who had something united in common terror. The year in which the Communist Manifesto was published. Luckily, all those revolutionaries are dead, so they won’t be on Jonathan Ross explaining how they meant for the best but things, later on, didn’t turn out that way.
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