Across the Great Divide: Nixon, Clinton, and the War of the Sixties

By Wayne Karol

Praise for Wayne Karol's The Sixties as Science Fiction: An Appreciation of Paul Kantner:
"Easily the best thing I've ever seen written on him and his music and 'what it all means'."
-Jeff Tamarkin, author of Got A Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane
"One of the finest pieces of writing about music and society that it's been my pleasure to read."
-Bill Parry, co-editor, Holding Together

The Sixties were such a long time ago; why can't America seem to stop re-fighting the battles we fought then? Why are we still so bitterly divided? Why does so much of what's happening now seem like weird repetitions of the past, from the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Watergate to Iraq and Vietnam? In Across the Great Divide, Wayne Karol offers an original and insightful perspective on how we ended up in this mess and what we might be able to do about it. It's his duty as a baby boomer to hope that it will change the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 13, 2004
• ISBN: 9780595777686

Wayne Karol

Wayne Karol is the author of The Sixties as Science Fiction: An Appreciation of Paul Kantner. He lives on Long Island.

Book preview

All Rights Reserved © 2004 by Wayne Karol

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Contents

INTRODUCTION:

1

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

2

THE FAILURE OF THE SENSIBLE CENTER

3

THE NEXT BEST THING TO THE REVOLUTION

4

YES, HE REALLY WAS THAT BAD

5

WHAT THEY MEAN BY MORAL CLARITY

6

BUT I’M SUPPOSED TO

BE AGAINST LIES

7

COLLABORATING WITH

THE ENEMY

8

DIVIDED SOULS

9

FAMILY VALUES

10

11

12

13

THE BOOMERS AS CHOSEN PEOPLE

14

THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

15

SOME THOUGHTS ON RACE

16

17

SOME THOUGHTS ON ELITISM

18

A NON-NEGOTIABLE DEMAND ON MORALITY

CAN THIS BOOK REALLY END THE WAR OF THE SIXTIES?

WHO ELSE WOULD A BOOMER GIVE THE LAST WORD TO?

HERE’S MY NOTES

Appropriate thanks and acknowledgment is given for permission to quote from the following copyrighted material (at least, the ones that I’m legally obligated to mention on this page):

Pages 18 and 83: Reprinted with the permission of Simon and Schuster Adult Publishing Group from Why Americans Hate Politics Copyright © 1991 by E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Pages 44, 86, 107, 1087, 109, 110, 115, 117, 118, 119, and 159: Reprinted with the permission of the University of Chicago Press from Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t by George Lakoff. © 1996 by George Lakoff. All Rights Reserved, Published 1996, Printed in the United States of America.

Page 59: Reprinted by permission of the publisher from An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton by Richard A. Posner,

p. 216, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Pages 92, 94, 96, 97, and 201: Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC:

Excerpts from FOR YOUR OWN GOOD by Alice Miller, translated by Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum. Translation copyright © 1983 by Alice Miller. Excerpts from THOU SHALT NOT BE AWARE by Alice Miller, translated by Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum. Translation copyright © 1984 by Alice Miller.

Page 133: From A THEORY OF EVERYTHING by Ken Wilber, © 2000, Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publication, Inc., Boston, www.shambhala.com

Page 137: Imagine

Words and Music by John Lennon

© 1971 (Renewed 1999) LENONO.MUSIC

All Rights Controlled And Administered by EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC.

All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured Used by Permission

Page 145: Excerpt from Our House is a Very Very Very Fine House in Where We Stand, copyright © 2002 by Roger Rosenblatt, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc. Originally published in Time magazine as Who Lives There?.

Pages 189 and 190: From SEX, ECOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY by Ken Wilber, © 1995. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publication, Inc., Boston, www.shambhala.com

Pages 189, 190, and 196: From A BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYTHING by Ken Wilber, © 1996. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publication, Inc., Boston, www.shambhala.com

See Here’s My Notes for other acknowledgments.

You know us baby boomers; we never do outgrow adolescence. Since the path to this book began with two people who ignited my Sixties consciousness way back when I was thirteen, I’d like to dedicate it to them: Jim Bouton, because the attacks on Ball Four taught me that you could get branded a traitor to All Things Good and Decent merely by telling the truth, and Susan Dey, because during the first season they portrayed Laurie as a teenage protestor, and I wanted to be on whatever side she was.

Radicalized by baseball and The Partridge Family. What a time.

"Evil is disintegration, an angry juxtaposition of alienated opposites, with parts always striving to repress other parts. Good is the synthesis and reconciliation of those same pieces."

—Charles Hampden-Turner

INTRODUCTION:

IN LOYALTY TO MY KIND

"We’re sorry if you find all this boring, but it’s not our fault that you were

not fortunate enough to have been born into such an intriguing and impor tant generation."

—Dave Barry

I am a baby boomer, born to arrogance. It is the custom of my people to believe that we’re the ones with all the answers. Our traditions tell us that each of us has been gifted with brilliant and unique insights into the workings of the universe, combined with a sense of entitlement that the world’s supposed to listen to what we have to say. In part, this book is an act of faith in that heritage. I started it having no Official Credentials, no qualifications other than knowing my shit (Language note: I’m a fuckin’ baby boomer, and that’s how we fuckin’ talk), I finished it having taken so long that it’s not even remotely timely, yet I still believe that I’ve discovered important truths about the War of the Sixties and Watergate and the Monica scandal that nobody else has, truths that are so important to the future of America, the world, and Life As We Know It that you all need to PAY ATTENTION TO ME! It’s my birthright, don’t you know.

But what our critics never seem to get about the attitude is that that’s only half the story. It’s supposed to come with a duty to put that entitlement to work in the service of (as Maxwell Smart liked to put it) Goodness and Niceness against Evil and Rottenness. If belief in our generation’s uniqueness is the boomers’ First Article of Faith, the second would have to be the idea that we’re supposed to change the world. The zeitgeist drilled it into our heads so hard during our formative years that it’s something we all have to come to terms with somehow. We can live by the creed, or scorn it, or have mixed feelings about it, but It doesn’t affect me at all is not an option. For many of us, our lives will never feel truly complete if we’re not involved in some sort of Change-the-World project. So whatever else this book may be, it’s also my personal contribution to that generational mission, offered in the hope that it really will make a difference. You see, the self-attitude and the idealism are supposed to work together in a yin-yang harmony; if you’re out to change the world, don’t you have to get the world to listen to you? Narcissism for the sake of narcissism was never the idea. If you understand nothing else about my people, understand that. Otherwise you’ll never be able to (with apologies to Valentine Michael Smith) grok the fullness of what I’m trying to do here.

Those two factors cover the minimum requirements for a boomer’s Personal Statement, but the more tribal traditions you can work in, the better, and I’ve managed to include at least four. First and foremost is the invocation of the Sixties. Don’t we all know that it was the center of the universe, the focal point of human history, a time that makes all other eras before or since seem like the Dark Ages? Few things give our opponents from the War of the Sixties more pleasure than to rake us over the coals for this attitude. We’re so spoiled, so self-centered, so convinced that nothing could be as important as us and our generation. Well, I’ve got news for you: they agree with us. Their worldview revolves around the Sixties at least as much as ours does; the only real difference is that they think it’s the Source of All Evil instead of All Good. No doubt if you pointed that out to them, they’d hit you with a chorus of Oh, But That’s Different. Isn’t it always.

Second, it never hurts to show a little iconoclasm. From Lenny Bruce to Bart Simpson, we’re a generation that loves a good smartass. No doubt it was a reaction against the Leave It to Beaver/Father Knows Best worldview that The Older Generation tried to teach us. The more the news from the civil rights movement and Vietnam—and sometimes from our own families and neighbor-hoods—taught us how much we’d been lied to, the more it seemed essential to our integrity to reject anyone else’s received wisdom. Sometimes it was glorious and sometimes it sucked, but for us, the only way we were going to understand how life worked was to figure it out for ourselves. Some of our generation’s finest moments came from what Todd Gitlin called Unraveling, rethinking, refusing to take for granted, thinking without limits. Some of our worst came when that rethinking calcified into new orthodoxies. I’ve always prided myself on not succumbing to that. The opinions that follow are mine, not designed to fit into any prefabricated ideological slot. I’d like to think that that still counts for something.

Third, don’t forget our old saying the personal is political. We’re the generation of psychobabble and Oprahfication. We don’t believe in keeping it inside till we die of a heart attack; we talk about our inner life. The increasing knowledge of human psychology combined with the influence of the liberation movements of the Sixties, especially feminism, to create a world where we didn’t have to suffer our problems in isolation. We have access to sources of information and understanding and support that go beyond anything that previous generations knew. The personal is political used to mean applying political insights to our private lives, but maybe now it’s time to reverse it. Why not take what we’ve learned from exploring our own psyches and apply it to figuring out how the larger world works? John Lennon himself (my people genuflect when they hear that name) was a pioneer in this area, most notably with primal therapy and the Plastic Ono Band album. In a similar vein, much of what I’m going to be saying about trauma and divided souls and family values is, shall we say, strongly influenced by my own history. Further details will be provided only when it’s relevant to a point I’m making; after all, I wouldn’t want to be guilty of whining.

Finally, there’s nothing that touches our generation’s dreams quite like the cause of peace. (Question: in these post-9/11 days, doesn’t the P word stand for weakness, naivete, potential suicide? Answer: at the very least, isn’t it more important than ever for Americans to be at peace with each other?) I guess it goes back even before Vietnam, back to when we grew up under the threat of the Bomb. We were the first generation to be born into a human race that was capable of destroying itself. Take a minute to think about the implications of that one. Not only does it mean that (Aha!) our place in history really was unique, it gave us our first lesson that the official Fifties head of Innocence and Progress wasn’t exactly the whole story. But more than anything else, the word peace brings up memories of the antiwar movement and how much it meant to us. Whether we were hardcore activists or just on the fringes, most of us still feel a lot of pride in the stand we took. (Largely because of my age, my own participation was pretty limited: the spring ’72 New York demonstration, leafletting for George McGovern, at least one letter to the editor, and the occasional contribution to classroom discussions.) And we’ve managed to hold onto that pride even when, as most of us have, we’ve acknowledged the ways in which our side screwed up. In the heat of the moment, we were too quick to lump the guys who did fight decently and honorably together with the Lieutenant Calleys; that was unfair and we regret it. (This is not to be confused with the view from Conservativeworld, where you’re supposed to believe that American soldiers have never ever ever committed atrocities, and at the same time also believe that American soldiers were completely justified in committing atrocities. I guess you’re supposed to have a little switch in your head to flick back and forth to whichever position is patriotically correct at the moment.) America was far less oppressive than our rhetoric of the time made it out to be, and the Vietnamese Communists were a long way from being the saints that some—I repeat, some—of us fantasized that they were. (But remember also their reputation for fighting hard, fighting like they believed in what they were fighting for—while the Saigon troops, the supposed forces of freedom, had a rather different reputation. That does say something.) And having admitted all that, we still remember what a sickening mix of lies, blunders, and brutalities the war turned out to be. We remember our outrage at a government that would ship eighteen year old kids ten thousand miles from home to kill and die, and didn’t even have the decency to tell them the truth about the war. We remember how betrayed we felt when the people who taught us that what makes this country great is our right to protest and dissent called us traitors for doing just that. We remember how deeply the war divided America, and we remember what the We had to destroy the village in order to save it mentality did to Vietnam. And that’s more than enough for us to still feel like we did the right thing.

And while that war may have ended a long time ago, the War of the Sixties that it did so much to spawn is still very much with us. Whatever else the Monica scandal did, it made that fact so obvious that there’s no excuse for not seeing it. Not only were the sides basically what they were in the old days, you had all the aspects of a war mentality short of actually shooting each other. The hard line between Us and Them. The demonization of the other side. The refusal to take any responsibility for your own side’s wrongs: They made us do it!. The demand for blind loyalty, and the accusations of treason against anyone who dares to speak an inconvenient truth. The fear of deviating from the old orthodoxies, because what if it Plays Into the Hands of the Enemy? Most of all, what Sam Keen called the centering of one’s existence around the enemy—being so focused on what you’re against that you lose sight of what you’re supposed to be for. Unless that’s your idea of fun, it’s a situation that could badly use some peacemaking. So if the opinions and insights that I’m going to be offering can make a contribution to that cause, I’d say that that makes this a noble project indeed, one that does honor to my people’s best traditions. Something to give me a warm feeling of pride in being a boomer. Oops, sorry, I mean arrogance.

So if what I have to say about the War of the Sixties makes sense to you—

Or if you spent the Monica scandal wondering how we ever got into a mess like this—

Or if you’re one of those people who can’t resist anything that talks about the Sixties—

Or if you want to come along for the ride for any other reason—

As our demigod Kurt liked to say, Listen:

PART I

IN SEARCH OF AN EXIT

STRATEGY

"There was a year when we shot Kennedy

There was a year when we shot King

There was a year we all elected Not a Crook

And in all this time we haven’t learned a thing"

—Ed Ryan

1

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

One does not make peace with friends, one makes peace with enemies.

—Said Hammami

Santayana only got it half right. Those who go overboard remembering the past are also condemned to repeat it.

I’m not claiming to be superior, you understand; you don’t want to hear how disgustingly familiar I am with that pattern. So I suppose it’s only fair that I begin by repeating myself. Back in 1975 I wrote a column for my college newspaper about a couple of guys named Richard Nixon and Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda (the typesetter changed it to Hiree; I misremembered the last name as Onada). I’m sure you recognize the first name, even if you might be a little vague about what it was that he did; all these years of chanting the Everybodydoesithejustgotcaught have taken a toll. So let’s begin with a few of the basics. The thing about Nixon was that he was the perfect living embodiment of what my side in the War of the Sixties was fighting against. If we had any doubts about the righteousness of our cause, one look at ol’ Milhous was enough to reassure us that we were indeed the good guys. You have to keep that in mind to understand why we experienced Watergate as such a glorious victory. You also need to remember just whose fault it was that he did get caught. I’ll give you a clue: who’s the one who put the incriminating evidence on tape? Since the anti-Sixties side is always professing their belief in Personal Responsibility and Actions Have Consequences and all that, you might think that they’d be willing to hold Nixon accountable for his actions. Instead, they’re convinced that we victimized him. Curious.

You know the old saying that even a stopped clock is right twice a day? Karl Marx may have been wrong about a lot, but with the Monica scandal he certainly proved himself a prophet. History really did repeat itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Decades after Watergate, our opponents from the War of the Six-ties—the same people, need I remind you, whose deepest core belief is that they’re nothing like us—appointed Bill Clinton to a virtually identical Ultimate Symbol of Evil position to the one Nixon held for us. And once again, that hatred mixed with the said President’s personal flaws and led to the said President facing impeachment for lying and abuse of power and obstruction of justice. But ah, the differences…Nixon’s story was classic Greek tragedy to a T—a brilliant and powerful man, just off the greatest triumph of his long career, when his own dark side ruined it all. With the Monica scandal, on the other hand, the one thing that all parties agreed on—the Clinton backers, the Clinton bashers, and the just-get-it-over-with bloc in the middle—was what a farce it was. To the first, the farce was that he was impeached over something so trivial. To the second, the farce was that he was acquitted. To the third, the whole damn thing was a farce.

On the bright side, the contrast between Watergate and the Monica scandal does provide a convenient window of opportunity to compare the (to use one of our opponents’ favorite words) values of the two sides. They’re convinced that they’re so much tougher than us, but their man quit and ran while Clinton, who’s been knocked down and come back more often than Rocky Balboa, was still on his feet when it was over. They’re also certain that they’re so morally superior to us, but take a good look at what each side’s Ultimate Symbol of Evil was actually guilty of. One perpetrated a massive attempt to subvert democracy, undermine the Constitution, and turn this country into a place that didn’t recognize the difference between dissent and treason. The other lied under oath about a series of extramarital blowjobs.

I think I picked the right side.

Lieutenant Onoda, for those of you who don’t happen to be trivia gods, was a Japanese soldier who was discovered in the Philippine jungle in 1974, still fighting a war that had been over for almost thirty years. He refused to surrender until his old commanding officer showed up in person to give the order. The media coverage, even the ones that gave Lieutenant Onoda credit for warrior-type honor, all seemed to carry this undertone of smug superiority. These strange foreigners with their primitive customs! Aren’t we lucky to be Americans, to belong to a people far too rational and pragmatic to ever let ourselves go to such ridiculous extremes. Well, think again, because the War of the Sixties has turned us into a whole goddamn nation of Lieutenant Onodas.

As a matter of fact, we’ve been at it even longer than he was. Think about how long thirty years is, how large a chunk of a human life that amounts to, how much can change in that time. Remember too that this is an age when everything else is changing faster than it’s ever done in human history, when everything from technology to fashion is governed by the Law of Fad—this year you’re a loser if you haven’t already bought The Hot New Product, next year you’re a loser if you haven’t already trashed it. Hell of a time we pick to get stuck in the past. And which aspect of the Sixties do you suppose we’ve chosen to preserve? The explorer spirit? The confidence in the human ability to make the world a better place? The way that millions of people truly believed in peace and love and made an honest effort to live by them? All that seems to have gone the way of $3.50 concert tickets. But the sort of us-against-them mindset that led to Should’ve shot ’em all and Off the pig and similar sentiments—that’s the one we seem determined to hold onto. It’s still the War of the Sixties that determines how we choose up sides. The official names may be Democrats and Republicans, or liberals (there may yet come a day when the dreaded L word comes out of exile) and conservatives, or left-wing and right-wing, or maybe progressives and traditionalists, but more often than not they amount to code words for pro-Sixties and anti-Sixties. It still determines the issues that we fight about. Whether it’s politics or society or culture or morality, we keep going over the same ground that we went over then. Even when a new issue does come along, it’s like we don’t know what we’re supposed to think until we interpret it in terms of Vietnam or civil rights or the counterculture. It still determines what we blame each other for. It would probably take another thirty years to list everything that gets blamed on the Sixties, from the reasonable (the increase in sexually transmitted diseases did have something to do with the Sexual Revolution) to the ridiculous (was there really a cause-and-effect relationship between middle-class white kids taking LSD in the Sixties and inner-city blacks smoking crack in the Eighties?). Just recently I’ve seen the Sixties blamed for both September 11 and Enron; there truly seems to be no limit how insane this can get. And of course, just to make it a matched set, the faction of the pro-Sixties side that’s been dubbed politically correct has made an industry out of blaming the same things, in virtually the same words, as the New Left at its most rhetorically boring. And it’s still the War of the Sixties that determines the sort of things that make us fly into rages even all these years later, the sort of hatred where it’s like there’s a sense of moral obligation to keep it burning forever. Within barely a mile of where I’m writing these words (1.3 miles to be precise, Captain) you can find two different bars that feature anti-Jane Fonda urinal targets, where they’re being pissed on by patrons who weren’t even born at the time. (An example from the other side might be the sort of racial rhetoric that acts like nothing’s changed since, say, Mississippi in 1963.) And so another generation gets recruited into it, because, after all, wouldn’t accepting that the past is over amount to a betrayal of everything our side has suffered?

You know—the attitude that’s done so much for The Former Yugoslavia.

I guess I do have to thank the wonderful folks who gave us the Monica scandal for proving my point. As my old buddy Zonker Harris put it in a slightly different context, it was like the ’60s are being restaged in an alternate universe. Same old battles, same old rage, same old stereotypes—Irresponsible Spoiled Brats versus Uptight Hypocrites. And if the Watergate theme wasn’t enough, it also managed to include echoes of the War of the Sixties’ most emotionally charged battles of all—Vietnam on the political front and the Sexual Revolution on the cultural. (Nothing against race or drugs, but in the end they only rank second in their respective categories.) Thus you had the way the Monica scandal felt like an endless quagmire, the confusion over how we ever let ourselves get (excuse the expression) sucked into a mess like this, the way the majority of Americans came to care less about the rights and wrongs of it than they did about getting it over with as quickly as possible. And thus you had the resurrection of all the old arguments over what might be called the Battle of Pleasantville: was pre-Sixties innocence truth or illusion? This sort of disgrace would never have happened in the old days. Sure it would’ve, they just would’ve kept it quiet. But it was still a better way, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue and all that. But that’s exactly what created the Sixties; when people found out how much they’d been lied to, they exploded. Yeah, and you created a world where first graders have to ask Mommy, what’s oral sex?; I hope you’re happy. And so on, with no end in sight.

I also have to thank the zeitgeist’s casting department for their choice of chief protagonists. If you wanted to remind both sides of what they despised most about each other, could you have picked better than Bill Clinton and Ken Starr? Conservatives couldn’t have been any more explicit about how their hatred for Clinton is linked to their hatred of the Sixties. Pat Robertson accused him of turning his office into the playpen for the sexual freedom of the poster child of the 1960’s. John Ashcroft declared that The sun is setting on the last son of the Sixties. That’s another interesting difference from Watergate. At least we hated Nixon for things he did while actually in office, not decades earlier. If you asked us about it, we would have told you about the war in Vietnam and his war against us, not about Jerry Voorhis or Helen Gahagan Douglas or Alger Hiss. (Good thing, too, seeing that Hiss apparently was guilty.) With Clinton, it was just the opposite. When’s the last time you saw a Clinton-hater’s insult list that didn’t lead off with draft-dodger? And more often than not, it’ll be pot-smoker in second place. Even after they’d accused him of everything from rape to selling military secrets to China to murdering about half the population of Arkansas, the worst name they could think to call him was still draft-dodger. Weird, isn’t it?

Bill Clinton, Symbol of the Sixties. It always did seem a bit of a stretch. He was never a hippie or a radical, and he wasn’t much of an activist; as the famous letter to his draft board makes clear, he was always a politician on the make. And far from being a counterculture McGovernik, his whole political career was based on his genius for going left and right at the same time. Do you really think that a state as conservative as Arkansas would have elected some left-wing extremist five times? But if you try looking at it in terms of what they hate about us, it does start to make sense. He is a baby boomer. He did march against the war. He did dodge the draft. (Much as I dislike using that term, in Clinton’s case dodge actually does seem like the right word.) He did make love not war. Inhaled or not, he did partake of the devil weed. And if you believe that the Sixties generation’s moral claims were just an excuse to justify irresponsibility and self-indulgence, that even in their forties and fifties they still act like overgrown adolescents, that their abandonment of traditional restrictions in areas like sex has led to disaster, and if you’d like to have a prominent example to point to and say See? Doesn’t that prove it?—well then, Clinton’s your man. The only way he could have done a better job of reinforcing what they think of us would have been if he’d used a joint instead of a cigar. So the thought of one of them defiling the White House, this temple of our civilization as Pat Buchanan put it—it was like SDS had taken over the whole nation’s administration building. No wonder they wanted to see the National Guard—excuse me, the Judiciary Commit-tee—go in there and bust some heads.

And Ken Starr showed us the face of our enemy just as clearly. He was the opening lines from Blows Against the Empire come to life: Hide, witch, hide/The good folks come to burn thee/Their keen enjoyment hid behind/A Gothic mask of duty. If you remember how it was, our deepest hatred wasn’t directed toward the screaming George Wallace types; at least they were honest. We were children of Holden Caulfield, and what we found most despicable about the Starrs was their phoniness. They’d look down on us from their moral high horse, they’d spout their most pompous-ass rhetoric about how they were only motivated by the highest principles of Duty and Law and Righteousness, when we could all tell that just below the surface burned the same sort of passion to inflict pain and punishment that you saw in the segregationists and hard-hats and Mayor Daley’s cops. Not that Starr would ever get the blood on his own hands, of course. He’d send out his underlings to do his dirty work (like when his agents detained-butreally-didn’t-detain Monica). And after they’d beaten the shit out of us, he’d be the one to hold the press conference and declare how deeply he regretted the violence, how deeply he regretted that our behavior had left him no choice, when he’d really loved every minute of it. And we also couldn’t help noticing that, just like the old days, Starr was so hot to punish that he didn’t hesitate to violate the very principles that he was proclaiming such devotion to. He would have made a perfect Pentagon spokesman during Vietnam, explaining patiently why we had to destroy the village in order to save it, and what do you want to bet that he’d actually believe that the concept made sense?

And while both sides insist that this is about values, principles, things that we’re fighting for, don’t we both sound more real, more honest, when we’re talking about what we’re against? As I noted in the introduction, that’s one of the problems with wars, especially wars that have dragged on for this long. It becomes all about what you’re against, and as for what you’re for—oh, you still mouth the rhetoric, but at best, it really doesn’t get your juices flowing anymore, and at worst, what you’re for is a luxury that has to be sacrificed for the good of the fight. If we needed definitive proof that that’s where the War of the Sixties has ended up, maybe the Monica scandal did serve a useful purpose after all. Maybe that’s the best explanation for why the public grew so turned off by it; while it was full of stuff to be against, it was singularly devoid of anything that made you want to stand up and shout "Yeah! This is what I’m for!. Out of all that proud speechmaking about the Constitution and The Rule of Law and Justice and Truth and Morality, how many who claimed to be motivated by those principles truly meant it, compared to how many simply found them a convenient tool to bash the enemy? My guess would be maybe ten or twenty percent—maybe. The American people’s verdict—yeah, he acted like a jerk, but it’s not worth kicking a President out of office over—may have been the most sensible one under the circumstances, but that’s hardly anything to get passionate about supporting. Let’s try an experiment. Forgetting completely about what you’re against, choose a side in the Monica scandal based solely on that side’s actions. In other words, choose between siding with people who raised sanctimonious, self-righteous hypocrisy to an art form, and siding with someone where even his supporters described his behavior as immoral, reprehensible, inexcusable—or if you’re the plainspoken type, big creep will do nicely. Choose between siding with people who constantly declare their reverence for Universal Moral Absolutes and then throw them out the window whenever it’s politically expedient, and siding with someone who actually says things like It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is".

Since I was fourteen years old, my War of the Sixties allegiance has been an important part of how I see the world. More than that, it’s been one of the first things I go to when I want to say This is who I am. But if this is where continuing to fight that war has gotten us, I have to think that maybe it’s time to see if we can end it.

And don’t imagine that the problem was confined to the Monica scandal. The months after Clinton’s acquittal were spent jumping from one replay of the War of the Sixties to another, and if anything it got worse. Some of the earliest and bloodiest (both literally and figuratively) battles of that war were fought around the issues of race and crime and the interaction between the two. The demand for racial justice was the pro-Sixties side’s founding moral principle, while the insistence on cracking down on crime was (and remained so even when violent crime dropped so dramatically in the Nineties) anti-Sixties conservatism’s most popular issue. Even before the Senate voted, the shooting of Amadou Diallo brought us back to that battlefield, and the sides this time…at least with the Monica scandal you could side with Clinton as the lesser evil. But I truly felt like I was in hell at the thought of choosing between siding with Rudy Giuliani and siding with Al Sharpton. (Yes, yes, Giuliani did do an admirable job in the 9/11 aftermath. But if acknowledging that means you have to treat his bullying side like it doesn’t count—or vice versa—well, that’s as good a way as any of restating the problem.) Dictator or demagogue? Justify any abuse in the name of fighting crime or justify any abuse in the name of fighting racism? Treat black people like they’re guilty until proven innocent or treat black people like they’re innocent even if proven guilty? (Language note on the use of black instead of African-American: I don’t believe in trading in a one-syllable word for a seven-syllable word without a hell of a good reason. So far I haven’t heard one.) What the two sides did have in common was their method of dealing with complaints like that. First they’d give you a blank look like they have no idea what you’re talking about, then they’d shove a finger in your chest and demand to know "What’s wrong with fighting crime/racism?" A third option would have been nice. There was none to be found, at least none with the power to compete with the other two.

And after that? Watergate and sex and race and crime are all very well, but to really redo the War of the Sixties, you have to have a war—so with perfect timing, along came Kosovo. Fortunately (like the Monica scandal) it didn’t quite live up to its predecessor, but the basic Vietnam parallels were still there. First you’d need a prowar side that was willing to destroy the village in order to save it, and that we certainly had. The Kosovars are worse off than they were before the bombing? Guess we’ll just have to bomb harder! The antiwar side was a little tougher. You did have the old The U.S. is the root of all evil attitude back again, and that was a good start. But to truly get it right they’d have to commit violence in the name of peace. So when I heard about the Green Party demonstrator in Germany who threw paint at his own party’s Foreign Minister, my reaction was a combination of Oh, shit, here we go again and All right, this’ll fit the book perfect! And I followed the news from Kosovo, and I thought really hard about it, and I decided that the only side I could support was the one that had actually learned something in the past thirty years. You didn’t happen to see it anywhere, did you?

And in the summer that followed, two of the biggest stories were the death of John Kennedy and a rock concert that called itself Woodstock.

And on issue after issue, it’s the same sort of shitty choices. If the question is a more general one of foreign policy, military force, and America’s role in the world, one side claims to be about pride and patriotism when what they really mean is America the bully, and the other side claims to be about justice and compassion when what they really mean is America the masochistic. (Finding a better way would have been a good idea back when the Twin Towers were standing. How important is it now?)

If it’s education, one side believes that kids are so rotten that the only way to get them to learn is to treat them like they’re in boot camp, and the other side believes that kids are so fragile that you have to stroke their self-esteem every time they tie their shoes right.

If it’s the environment, one side believes that it’s nature’s purpose to be humanity’s slave, and the other side believes that it’s humanity’s purpose to be nature’s slave.

If it’s American history, one side wants to teach it as two hundred years of nothing but D-Day, and the other side wants to teach it as two hundred years of nothing but Wounded Knee.

If it’s sex, one side is Ken Starr and the other side is Larry Flynt—and oh yeah, I almost forgot, the third side is Andrea Dworkin.

Make that definitely time to see if we can end it.

2

THE FAILURE OF THE SENSIBLE CENTER

Once we are traumatized, it is almost certain that we will continue to repeat or re-enact parts of the experience in some way. We will be drawn over and over again into situations that are reminiscent of the original trauma.

—Peter A. Levine

The Fairness Doctrine may be gone, but the line about giving equal time to responsible spokesmen [sic] for opposing viewpoints is permanently stuck in my head. It’s not a bad principle. There is actually one political tendency that has tried to bring peace to the War of the Sixties, so in the interests of fairness, I’d like to briefly assume the guise of a generic spokesperson for that point of view.

Look, we don’t have any use either for those assholes who want to keep fighting the War of the Sixties into eternity. But don’t make it sound like they represent the whole country, because they certainly don’t speak for us. Who are we? A good name for us might be the Sensible Center, and we happen to represent the true voice of the American people. Yes, we know that everybody makes that claim, but we’re the ones who can back it up, because we’re the ones who have been deciding elections for the past thirty-five years. We voted for Nixon and Reagan when the Sixties went too far, and then we turned around and voted for Clinton when anti-Sixties conservatism went too far. Our values are the values of the American people, the ones that the War of the Sixties factions keep distorting out of recognition. We agree with the anti-Sixties side on crime, and the pro-Sixties side on the environment. But on most issues, even the really divisive ones like abortion and gun control and gay rights, we find that each side has some valid points, and the approach we feel is wisest is to try to work out a position that combines the legitimate concerns of both. If we do that, we believe that we can end the War of the Sixties on terms that the overwhelming majority of Americans can live with. America will no longer be a house divided against itself, reason and common sense will rule, and if there are still a few pockets of fanatics who want to keep fighting, they’ll be irrelevant to the rest of us. Put ’em on Jerry Springer, or give ’em a steel-cage wrestling match or something. On second thought, once we’ve gotten to that point, American society will probably be too healthy for Jerry Springer or wrestling to find an audience.

Those of you who are into supplemental reading assignments are advised to check out the Sensible Center’s masterwork, E.J. Dionne’s Why Americans Hate Politics. I’ve never seen a better summary of their position than his declaration that the false choices posed by liberalism and conservatism [as noted earlier, that could also be translated as ‘pro-Sixties’ and ‘anti-Sixties’—W.K.] make it extremely difficult for the perfectly obvious preferences of the American people to express themselves in our politics. We are encouraging an ‘either-or’ politics based on ideological preconceptions rather than a ‘both-and’ politics based on ideas that broadly unite us. If you want some practical ideas for what a new political center based on Sensible Center principles might look like, he gives you that too. And while he’s at it, he manages to throw in some pretty perceptive analyses of just about every political movement this country has seen since the Sixties. It’s the kind of book where no matter if you agree or disagree, it’s guaranteed to get you thinking. (And if the same gets said about this book, consider me honored indeed.)

Up to now, the Sensible Center approach has been the only plausible idea that anybody’s come up with to end the War of the Sixties. There is much about it that seems eminently, well, sensible. It appeals to Americans’ pragmatic streak. In the hands of its best practitioners, such as Dionne, there’s an admirable courage to face up to the tough questions, and a real effort to see the world as it is, rather than what preset ideologies say it’s supposed to be. They may be dissatisfied with the current state of politics, but they’re far from being apathetic; they’re quick to get excited at the hope that a Ross Perot or a Colin Powell or a Jesse Ventura or a John McCain (how’s that for an eclectic bunch?) might lead us to the Sensible Center. And by and large, they really do seem like they mean well.

Yet the bottom line is, it hasn’t done the job. The Monica scandal. Diallo. Kosovo. Three perfect opportunities for the Sensible Center to deliver on its promise, three times when millions of people were hungry for a better alternative—and three times when it failed to provide one, three times when the public was still left to either choose one of the same old sides or say the hell with it and tune out completely. It got yet another chance in the 2000 election. George W.

Bush and Al Gore ran as the right and left wings of the Sensible Center; Bush even had a cute alliterative slogan to get the point across. (Which benefited Bush more: that he was able to get away with that pretense of moderation, or that poor stiff Al couldn’t come up with anything catchier than pragmatic idealism?) The public was noticeably unenthusiastic about both. We had trouble making up our mind between them. The