COLUMN FIFTY-FOUR, DECEMBER 1, 2000
(Copyright İ 2000 Al Aronowitz)
MY LONDON, MY L.A.
[Lionel
Rolfe is the author of DEATH AND REDEMPTION IN LONDON & L.A. from which this
is excerpted. He also wrote FAT MAN ON THE LEFT: Four Decades inthe
Underground, IN SEARCH OF LITERARY L.A. and coauthor of BREAD ANDHYACINTHS:
The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles.DEATH AND REDEMPTIONIN
LONDON & L.A
can be obtained from deadendstreet.com.]
A
number of people in Los Angeles have offered suggestions as to what Iso
liked about London.
“Theyıre
thirty years behind us. They’re still in the ‘60s,” said one.
“In
what way?” I responded.
“Itıs
still slow.Slow like it was 30 years
ago.”
I
donıt think that is really so. London has changed a lot since I first was there in the
early ‘70s. My impression on the street was Londonershad more cell phones than the
denizens of Los Angeles. Everyone was on computers and the Internet. I saw ads all over
the Underground for net services.
But
in case my critics are right, I contemplated what it was about the ‘60s I might be
still been attracted to.
Although
we knew a lot was wrong with the world in the ‘60s, we had something major that
folks at the end of this particularly brutal century do not have anymore: a sense of
hope.
Much
of what happened in the '60s was simply an explosion out of the dull rigidity and
repression of the Eisenhower ‘50s and the McCarthy Era.
But
there was an economic rationale, a base which supported what was happening too.Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, a guy with a
regular job in a factory could work and pay the rent and all the bills without his wife having to go out to work. You didn't need two salaries.And, in fact, a lot of women didnıt work.Partly
because women werenıt encouraged to work, but also because they didnıt have to.
A
lot more people then had union jobs, where decent pay, decent hours and security were
what they expected, and got.This was the
country's legacy after coming out of the Great Depression of the ‘30s during which
its enormous organizing drives garneredsocial
justice, which the post-war-against-fascism ‘40s era solidified.
Back
then only one spouse had to hold down a stupid, boring job---not both, as is the case
nowadays. Women are now allowed to do the same stupid meaningless work and
paper-shuffling men are allowed to do.Wow!Hooray!
Now
women are empowered; they can be sharks and corporate executives just like men.Hooray.
His pay was $85 a week,
his rent
was $65 a week
So
the good economic times rolled into the ‘60s.In
1961 I went to work as a reporter on the Pismo Beach Times, making $85 a week. It
wasnıt much then---but funny thing.My
rent for a nice place with two bedrooms a quarter of a block from the beach was $65 a
week. These days I have a typical journalist salary, and I sure as hell canıt pay my
rent with any money left over from a weekıs salary.
There
was a lot of social repression in the generation preceding the ‘60s.Jack Kerouacıs On the Road reflects that.
McCarthyism reflected that.
And the late ‘50s and early ‘60s broke
down those barriers.We stormed out of our
hothouses, the coffeehouses where jazz was played, and new kinds of poetry and prose
were written and read--where blacks and whites hung out together. A lot of the fight
for black peopleıs equality began in the coffeehouses.Certainly the plight of the blacks has always been the country's greatest
inequity.So, symbolically, the culture's
liberation had to begin there.
The
civil rights movement in the early ‘60s was beginning. From the Xanadu, the
coffeehouse I went to near Los Angeles City College, people headed directly to the Deep
South to assist in voter registration drives.
We
marched on picket lines to end segregation.Some
of the social bullshit seemed to be ending and we still could make a living. Hope was
stirring.
We
attacked the social repression of the ‘50s which was a backlash and antidote to the
spirit of social justice fostered by the Depression and the War against fascism.Another important trend was happening.Big technological changes were occurring, from
printing to cybernetics.Camelot started
us going to outer space.By the early
‘50s, a guy named Norbert Weiner, an MIT mathematician, had already coined the
word, ‘cybernetics, which was all about automation and machines making machines.
The
Los Angeles Free Press, the first of the Underground newspapers spreading across
the country, began in the early ‘60s at the Xanadu.Art Kunkin, the papers founder and a Xanadu regular, soon was selling 100,000
copies a week---for 25 cents, at a time when the Times had recently raised its
price from a nickel to a dime.Opposition to
the war in Vietnam was part of the reason. But none of it could have happened had there
not been a major technological breakthrough in printing. Hot type was giving way to
cold type and offset printing. This meant you didnıt have to be a millionaire to start
a newspaper. A varitype was a lot cheaper than a hot-lead linotype. And the whole
underground press movement took off.And
mightily affected the overground press. The Counterculture could not have been born
without a change in the way printing presses worked.
I
got my start writing for the Los Angeles Times at the very beginning of the '70s.Editors from the paperıs Sunday magazine, West,
picked some of the more talented Los Angeles Free Press scribblers to write for
them.
Two
things ended that heady feeling of hope.Camelot
was brought down by bullets from several assassins.For a while it seemed as if nothing had changed. The ‘60s seemed to last
right into the early ‘70s.But the phony
oil crisis of 1973, when the Seven Sisters showed us who really owned the world, brought
an end to those good times.
I
must admit I wasnıt always enamored by the cultural revolution. A lot of people were
consumed by it. Then came the bad economic times that began in 1973.
I
experienced being mugged by the Seven Sisters directly. I had just received a $10,000
contract in 1972---which would be worth a lot more nowadays---to write The Menuhins
when the Oil Crunch came.Overnight my
money was worth half what it was.
And
throughout society, the notion of a good union job began to disappear, as giant
conglomerates---the oil companies only the first---started moving in to declare an end
to the way things were in America, economically and culturally.
Nowadays
American corporations are extortionists: they tell us they can take their business
anywhere, so weıd better learn to like living as slave labor lives in the Third World.
These big corporations began running roughshod over any efforts to mediate the excesses
of predatory capitalism.
Unions
fell into disrepair. Talking union became anathema to a generation who had no idea why
people had them in the first place. We were told that life should be nothing but work,
work, work---partly because real wages have fallen so much since the ‘60s,
proportionately.
The biggest
achievement of the Reagan years? Shift the tax burden to the little guy
The
biggest achievement of the Reagan years was to shift the tax burden from the
corporations---who used to pay fifty percent of the federal income tax---to the working
middle class.Now corporations pay something
like five percent of the taxes.
In
the ‘60s the big talk was of the imminent Leisure Time Revolution.
The
irony and reality?Nowadays the media
celebrates Supermom, who works, raises children and cooks.
So
who were the heroes and the villains?Will
the ‘60s ever return?
The
hope that people could change things---engendered in the ‘60s with the rise of the
civil rights and the anti-war movements---has not survived well. For a while,
Counterculture newspapers, books, movies and music flourished. The good times, they
never seemed to stop rolling.Camelot,
never claiming revolutionary status, was still part of a continuum engendered by the
Counterculture, and was dead long before John Kennedy Jr. dove his airplane into the
cold, dark ocean off Martha's Vineyard.
Some
Counterculture values have found their way into the mainstream, but not all. In some
ways, racism has been modified, although it is ever present beneath the surface. War
does not seem quite as onerous as the Vietnam adventure was, but this may be due to some
clever disguises.
The
drug component was the most suspicious part of the Counterculture. Pushing it along were
the proponents of a mush-brained philosophy combining revolution and mysticism and a
belief that drugs could liberate.
And
donıt think it was just a bunch of hippies pushing that line.
Henry
Luce in his Time-Life magazines told us how great LSD was. The CIA conducted all
kinds of horrendous experiments on people using mind-altering drugs which were initially
designed to disable and disorient enemy armies.
Many
hippies, who survived these drugs, either died on the streets or expired in nut houses
or became todayıs BMW driving Yuppie scum.
New
Age stuff fits right in with this nationıs historical puritanical social control
mechanisms burdening its populace. On the surface, the bizarre crusade against President
Clinton by his persecutors over sexual matters, which most recognized as so much
hypocritical blather, seemed indicative of a new more insidious kind of McCarthyism in
the making.Hey, if they can do in a
president for an illicit blow job, think what they can do to the rest of us.
Of
course the Monica Lewinsky thing was something deeper and more insidious than a quickie
in the back room.Essentially, it was the
insurance companies trying to pay back the Clintons for trying to institute a national
health plan.The insurance companies like it
the way it is. They have a tremendous stake in collecting premiums from the healthy and
leaving the poorest and the sickest for the taxpayers.
Our
novels, our music, our films, increasingly remind me of Brave New World
and 1984. Is there a hope for a new reawakening, such as occurred in the
early ‘60s, when people began busting out from the years of repression?
We
can always hope that underneath the dreary exterior of the harsh, gray life of the
‘90s, new cultural and social forms are waiting to be born.
Perhaps
the Internet will be the new technology that makes this so.
Then
revolution will again rekindle hope, and the peopleıs rulers will tremble once again.##
sm
