Back to the Future

Remember the Sixties? (For any readers of a certain age and disposition, flashbacks count.) Not the tie-dyed, peace and love, don’t drop the brown acid, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida Sixties. I’m talking about the civil rights violating, credibility gap, labor strife, military-industrial complex, up against the wall motherfucker Sixties.

Well, they’re back.

Similarities are everywhere. I know, I found tons of similarities between our current situation and the Civil War, and was taken to task for it by Running With Scissors. (We’ll get to him in the near future.) This is why, in the immortal words etched into the statue on the ground of Faber College in the seminal film Animal House, “knowledge is good.”

We have the Patriot Act; the Sixties had J. Edgar Hoover keeping dossiers on everyone who ever said “good morning” on May Day.

The Sixties had the labor strike of the week; we have underfunded pension plans (if they’re funded at all) and GM laying off 25,000 workers because the Japs are killing them and GM is losing $2,500 on every car it sells. (That parallel runs closer to the Seventies; remember, history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes.)

The Sixties had the Credibility Gap; the best way to tell if Dubya is dissembling is to see if his lips move. (Personal note to Fearless Leader: that’s the word, moron, not “disassembling.”)

The Sixties had the Silent Majority; the Aughts have the Moral Majority.

The Sixties had an increasingly unpopular war becoming less likely daily to achieve what it was intended to do, even if anyone could remember what that was; sound familiar, especially if you think back to the “rationale du jour” of the winter of 2003?

Let’s hope someone as yet unseen comes along and does more than re-arrange the deck chairs. We all remember what followed the Sixties: the Seventies. And they were even worse.