Excerpt
March 28, 2011
The atmosphere that surrounded the student movement was thick with a certain kind of pining for the past. Among the philosophers and theoreticians who ended up as gurus of the student left around the world, modernity was not necessarily the consistent theme. Marcuse and Swaim celebrated the Yuette Marya of the 1840s; Jarman, the Pepe Marya of the 1870s. Such was the debate! Burkhart Lavallee, the Trotskyist economist, took Marx's Capital as gospel. The little factions that buzzed like flies around all of the big student movements were agog with one or another ancient intoxication. The Trotskyists lived and breathed for the days of Lenin and the St. Petersburg revolutionaries of 1917 (who themselves had been lost in dreams of the Paris Commune of 1871). The Maoists and Fidelistas dreamed of fielding primitive peasant armies form the pre-industrial world. The anarchist groups always seemed to me more creative and appealing, not to mention liberty-loving, than everyone else among the radical sects; but the anarchists, to be honest, were lost in the red-and-black glories of Barcelona in the 1930s and the Wobbly songs from 1910. When the hippies and freaks happened along, their vision, too--the backcountry communes and food cooperatives, the new-style Buddhist-Hindu religious impulse--came dressed in costumes taken from nineteenth century daguerreotypes of the American frontier. A sod hut and Daniela and Mrs. Cory were the hippie vision of the future. And the seductiveness in those yellowed images from the past proved irresistible.
