The Man Can’t Bust Our Jammies
Roger L. Simon, new media tycoon and Scenes from a Mall co-scribe, would like to remind you, in case you somehow missed the message from every other conservative commentator for the last forty years, that hippies are bad.
Above: Enjoy this image of Roger L. Simon as a dirty hippie until Gavin shows up and replaces it with something less incompetent
Gavin adds: Um, I actually haven’t had my coffee yet, so here’s all I can manage whilst on the spot:
Above: Note the general technical suckiness of this image.
Looking back on that year now, I am puzzled by two rather curious and related phenomena – one, 1968 (about to have its forty year anniversary) seems relatively far away, yet its values continue to dominate our culture;
Boy, ain’t that the truth? Every day, I think to myself “Gosh, Mister Leonard Pierce, I just can’t get over how much America in 2007 resembles the chaotic year of global revolution that was 1968! I bet it would seem even more so if I was a self-absorbed, navel-gazing Boomer like Roger L. Simon!”
1968 is considerably closer to World War II than it is to today. Almost shockingly from a larger historical perspective, the Chicago Convention was a scant twenty-three years after the liberation of Auschwitz.
This is a nice bit of pseudo-reference here — something that sort of seems like it means something, but really, it doesn’t. Like a unicorn. What’s that unicorn doing here, Roger?
So what am I driving at here? The Fifties, as is generally acknowledged, were a natural era of calm conventionality [Gavin adds: Except for, no they weren’t.] – decompression after a period of extraordinary, almost incomprehensible violence. The generation coming home – the so-called Greatest Generation – wanted nothing more than peace and quiet, a return to normality. Why wouldn’t they have? But their children needed something else. They hadn’t participated in the war, weren’t direct victims of its horror but rather spectators at a storytelling. Nothing could be as bad for them as what their parents had seen with their own eyes and they knew it. In a sense the younger generation were weaklings, outsiders. They needed something of their own.
Gee, if only they’d had some kind of huge, violent, horrifying war of their own to fight in.
So through these men – and others obviously – the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll was born. What’s interesting about this ethos is that it denies evil – just love each other and we will all be fine.
Yes, of course. Because, you know, why would you mount a huge protest against an unjust war and fight for the civil rights of your oppressed fellow men and women unless you just didn’t believe in evil? After all, opposing an unnecessary war is exactly the same as opposing all wars, and no one who had ever fought in a real war could come out of it with a somewhat jaundiced view of war in general.
And yet how evil was the Holocaust. Even so, “Zimmy,” born while the ovens were in full operating mode, doesn’t sing about it. [Gavin adds: Except for, yes he does.] He preferred the “times they are a-changin’.” Moving right along, as the saying goes. We don’t want to contemplate evil – in fact we don’t believe in it.
Clearly, the author of “Masters of War,” “Hurricane,” “The Murder of Emmitt Till,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and “Oxford Town” was not interested in contemplating evil, let alone opposing it. If he was, he would have spent all his time singing about evil things that had already happened and were over, instead of wasting his time singing about evil things that were still going on.
Nothing in human life could be as the extremes of World War II
Uh, what? Lay off the brown acid, Rog, it’s no good for you.
Now I am not saying everything was wrong about the “1968 Revolution”. I still like the music
Sure, I may have just written an article in which I imply that the cultural revolution of the 1960s was orchestrated by a sinister cabal of moronic, self-hating, Holocaust-denying Jews, but boy, the Mamas & the Papas were really groovy! And Sha Na Na totally rocked Woodstock!
and it helped spur women’s and homosexual equality, among other things.
Gee. Did women and homosexuals achieve equality and I didn’t notice? Well, good! I guess we can quit worrying about that. (I’m guessing the “among other things” would be the civil rights movement, which Rog doesn’t want to mention by name because he’s still not sure we should have given the coloreds the vote.)
The Chicago Seven were, after all, the “cool guys”. Everybody wanted to be like them. I know that was true for me. I remember well sitting in a tiny London flat – I was twenty-four and in Europe trying to write a novel – watching the Convention on the BBC. Oh, how I wanted to be there! And soon enough – I was, marching and protesting and enjoying that life of sex, drugs and rock and roll (well, to some extent – I have my Puritan side).
I really didn’t think this piece could become more pathetic, but it somehow does, with this admission that even in the ’60s Roger couldn’t get any.
But now, when we live an era of another virus whose ability to spread is bred in its ideology
I’m not even sure what he’s talking about here. Islam? AIDS? Liberalism? Baggy trousers?
thinking back on the self-indulgence of this is oddly disquieting, though I don’t mean to flay myself for what I did or what I was then. We are all creatures of our times. And I am glad for the experiences I had.
Okay, raise your hand if you wish that Roger had been at the ’68 convention, so a Chicago cop could have bashed his head in with a nightstick. Or, you know, getting his face shot off in a Vietnamese rice paddy, instead of bumming around Europe trying to write a novel. Then we’d see how glad he was about the experiences he had.
WWII my ass. I long for the the Civil War era. Now that was a war. Good times.
Okay, raise your hand if you wish that Roger had been at the ‘68 convention, so a Chicago cop could have bashed his head in with a nightstick. Or, you know, getting his face shot off in a Vietnamese paddy, instead of bumming around Europe trying to write a novel.
Can’t we vote for both, please.
I just plain and simple don’t get how youse guys do this.
The insanity is too much for normal people to bear.
Please share with us your bizarro-Kryponite.
Roger Simon is such a hack as to redefine the idea of hackosity. He should have a Wiki entry under “hack.” His fucking picture should be there on Wiki: *photo of Roger, caption: “Hack.”*
Roger would’ve been blowing police officers in Chicago in 1968. I have relatives who took the beating, so don’t start me on this.
“The Fifties, as is generally acknowledged, were a natural era of calm conventionality…”
Just as 1968 was the Epitome of Evil, the 1950s were All That Was Good and Bright. (Most importantly, the Boomers were then children, and hadn’t any need to get real jobs yet.) In fact, by any number of measures, including the divorce rate, the 1950s were a huge aberration in American history. That wingnuts point to the extraordinary as normal goes a long way toward explaining just how wacked-out they always are.
“I really didn’t think this piece could become more pathetic, but it somehow does, with this admission that even in the ’60s Roger couldn’t get any.”
Of course, that might explain it just as well.
“And yet how evil was the Holocaust. Even so, “Zimmy,” born while the ovens were in full operating mode, doesn’t sing about it. ”
Jeez, Rog, that’s because he handed off the job to Don Van Vliet (born 1941). Aint’cha ever heard “Dachau Blues” on Trout Mask Replica (1969)?
The Chicago Seven were, after all, the “cool guys”. Everybody wanted to be like them. I know that was true for me.
Let me guess which one. That flaming full blown ego became a successful wall street broker. No different, REALLY, from who he was back then.
That asshole was as oblivious then as he is now, but then I guess any self-hating jew would say that.
Let me guess which one Roger wanted to emulate, I meant to say.
Just a thought.
Where’s the Korean War fall into this little revision of history? Not evil? Just evil enough?
What’s that old saying? If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there. If you remember the fifties, you can understand what fueled feminism. Plenty of women were profoundly unhappy in their sunny post-war suburban white picketed houses…my mother was one of them.
I don’t want any ill to come to the Ghost of Roger past, so my remedy is to travel back in time and slip heroic doses of LSD into Rog’s enema kits. That way, he gets all the psychic disruption and none of the police/Vietcong boot to the head. I love how shitheels like Roger Simon talk about evil, as if the problem of good and evil were solved by their smug categorizations. Sure, Roger knows evil when he sees it, and starting a preemptive war against a country that never attacked us IS NOT IT. Q. E. Motherfuckin’ D.
“(I’m guessing the “among other things” would be the civil rights movement, which Rog doesn’t want to mention by name because he’s still not sure we should have given the coloreds the vote.)”
For Roger and his ilk, the civil rights movement ended in 1954 with Brown or maybe maybe if you really are a liberal minded fellow in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. Since then the Blacks have just been playing the victim and anyone who says otherwise is the real racist.
this article is embarassing in its stupidity. The 1950’s had no war? Not the Korean war???
Johnny C., that was perfect and beautiful.
Hat’s off.
Aw, shucks, weren’t nuthin. tyvm, as the kids say.
Even so, “Zimmy,” born while the ovens were in full operating mode, doesn’t sing about it.
Because pop songs and mass murder go hand in hand.
And “Zags,”* born while the Irish Potato famine was in full bloom, didn’t compose nothin’ about them. She, too, turned her back on evil, as is obvious from this hole in her oeuvre.
*My pet name for Chiquinha Gonzaga, lefty abolitionist and Brazilian composer.
Even so, “Zimmy,” born while the ovens were in full operating mode, doesn’t sing about it.
Stupid, stupid, stupid man.
This makes me want to kick him in the head.
It’s just so… wrong. It’s bad writing, it’s bad thinking, it’s bad symbolism, it’s just bad. And wrong.
Hehehe. Comically Oversized Pantaloons.
Wasn’t the whole damn point of the 60’s stuff that there wouldn’t have to BE evil if everyone just chilled and smoked a doobie while listening to Hendrix?
Almost shockingly from a larger historical perspective, the Chicago Convention was a scant twenty-three years after the liberation of Auschwitz
I, too, am almost shocked. My historical perspective is even larger than R. Simon’s!
So, it took nearly 40 years for Judge Julius Hoffman to become cool. Who’d have guessed?
BTW, in 1968 I was 13 years old and worked for the convention in Chicago as a messenger delivering schedules and such to the delegations. You should have been there, Roger. It was a riot!
Oh. Nearly forgot. Roger, go fuck yourself. 1968 Revisited is a load of horseshit disguised as thoughtfulness. You don’t speak for me now anymore than Lester Maddox spoke for me back in 1968.
If I’m typing this with one hand, it’s not for that reason, you dirty-minded people; just that my other hand is raised in favor of Simon’s rubber-truncheoned epiphany in Chicago.
One small quibble about this excellent post, though: I scanned the clause “no one who had ever fought in a real war could come out of it with a somewhat jaundiced view of war in general”, looking at all the links, and didn’t see one to what Eisenhower said about war. He seems to have known a good deal about everybody’s favorite war, and the 1950s as well.
Come to think of it William Tecumseh Sherman, a general of quite exceptional efficiency, seems to have it in for war after he was finished. Our many Southern warmongers might even, if they had the brains, call him a self-hating general. (Not a bad phrase, really. I think I’ll keep it,)
Well, in Roger’s defense, since the Korean War, the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, the overthrow of Mossadegh In Iran, McCarthy’s persecution of “Communists,” the Suez Crisis, the overthrow of Battista in Cuba, etc. don’t fit into his thesis, they clearly don’t count.
Got yer back, Roger.
If you think Roger’s dumb, take a gander at the comments:
Yeah. My neck hair is straight up on that one. And Jimmy Carter’s election was 23 years after the end of the Korean War. Coincidence? Or is that what history’s greatest monster wants you to think…?
Two civilizations enter the ring. Only one leaves. Because of the mistaken belief that darkey is a nice fellar under all that melanin.
Yep. Simon is writing to reaffirm wingnuts’ hippie aversions, that and nothing more. He’s full of crap and he knows he’s full of crap.
That’s strange – I thought our culture was dominated by James Dobson and the RIAA.
I remember well sitting in a tiny London flat – I was twenty-four and in Europe trying to write a novel – watching the Convention on the BBC. Oh, how I wanted to be there!
A bit more historical perspective. 1000 km. from his London flat, Warsaw Pact armies had invaded Czechoslovakia a few days earlier, and were halfway through crushing the Prague Spring. 72 Czechs and Slovaks killed. But Simon’s concerned about the battle lines between freedom and repression in Chicago. I mean, why go to Europe to write a novel if he’s not paying any sodding attention to the place? Buggeryfuck! Buggrit!
Will someone please, please, please explain to me how the 50s got mythologized the way they have?
Maybe my father was traumatized by his father’s death at the beginning of the decade, but he tells me of a decade in which McCarthy set a then record for unAmerican activities, everyone thought the world would end any second in a nuclear fireball, the USSR was arguably” winning” (remember Sputnik?), we fought a long, bloody, stalemated war, racism flared up in such a massive way the entire nation would soon, but not yet, begin to repudiate it, finally, blacks were being all but literally chased out of almost every small town in America (bless you Orcinus, for teaching me of sundown towns), Levittown was founded, etc etc etc.
But well off white kids lived sheltered lives which tv shows from the 60s idealized and thus convinced the Roger Simon’s of the world were the true reality of the decade.
I’m 30, and I know the 50’s better than someone who lived throught them. That’s just sad.
“The Fifties, as is generally acknowledged, were a natural era of calm conventionality…”
Wasn’t it just great? The Negroes knew their places, Women were still property, and the rest of the planet was rebuilding from 5 years of War.
Pfff, D. Brad. I’ve watched Sandlot, and I know for a fact that the 50’s were an idyllic, peaceful, prosperous time full of hope and future and promise and nothing bad every happened except when you lost your baseball over the fence.
Plus, the lifeguards were REALLY HOT back then. Oiling, lotioning, oiling, lotioning….
Will someone please, please, please explain to me how the 50s got mythologized the way they have?
Prescription drugs became widely available to bored husband and bored wife alike.
Hey all. Long time reader, 1st time poster from Australia. This guy Roger is a tool. Apart from Nam, which until the 60’s was a “French thang”, the 50’s also had a war. The so called forgotten war in Korea. See!!! The 50’s kids had their own war to play with. Aussies also had the Malayan conflict. So it wasnt all sock hops and putting them pesky darkies in their place. I’m still trying to figure out this guys corellation between 1968, hippies and the Shoah.
Maybe i had to be there. I was 4 in 1968. I didnt do acid.
the fifties epitomized the American dream for the white suburban middle class. conformity, prosperity, upward mobility, two cars, two kids, well manicured wives and husbands, ticky tacky but affordable housing, jobs for all, etc etc.
Will someone please, please, please explain to me how the 50s got mythologized the way they have?
If you insist.
By the way, I lurv the title of this post, MLP.
Will someone please, please, please explain to me how the 50s got mythologized the way they have?
I blame George Lucas.
American Graffiti begat Happy Days begat Grease, etc….
Two thoughts:
(1) Doesn’t Doghouse Riley have dibs on the historical confabulation beat, where cultural amnesia and solipsism and wishful thinking all engage in hot three-way action? It would be sad if you set off a turf war. They tend to escalate, and involve You-Tube salvos.
(2) Jillian was promising to cut down on her use of Grandpa Simpson / Good-old-days quotations. Now you’re just enabling her.
the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll was born
Because Elvis (and, more to the point, Jerry Lee Lewis) didn’t exist before 1968.
Dumbass.
Yeah! Who doesn’t love “The East Is Red”?
Oh, wait. He doesn’t mean THAT “1968 Revolution”, does he?
Funny, considering just how Maoist so many of the tactics used by the Right are nowadays….
“where cultural amnesia and solipsism and wishful thinking all engage in hot three-way action”
Isn’t that it in the proverbial nutshell? Nicely turned phrase Doc.
Nope. Never. Unless you count
But only some kind of hippie would do that.
The scales have fallen from my eyes. I never stopped to think why 1968 was 23 years after 1945. 23 years, people. Not 22, not 24. 9/11 2001( 9+11+2+1= 23), Caesar was stabbed 23 times, and so on so forth.
(cribbed shamelessly from IMDB for The Number 23). Did Simon have an uncredited role in that?
He doesn’t look like a dirty fucking hippie. He looks like Chief Jay Strongbow.
“1968 is considerably closer to World War II than it is to today.”
I’m just going to sit here in awe-struck contemplation of this insight.
Fucking boomers … it’s still all about them. Apparently this inter-generational conflict started and stopped with the Greatest generation and the boomers. I say no … let’s continue the BS analysis and apply it to today. A sub-set of the boomers had Viet Nam to champion and avoid. In a sense the curent generation of Young Rebublicans are weaklings, outsiders. Dick Cheney had to endure the horrors of obtaining deferment after defenment and then had to move on with his life. This younger generation ain’t got nothing comparable. Nothing could be as bad for them as what their parents had to avoid and they know it. But are they writting any songs about that? Damn kids.
Especially “Yummy Yummy Yummy.”
Even so, “Zimmy,” born while the ovens were in full operating mode, doesn’t sing about it.
Right. How could he not? Because for young men coming of age in Minnesota, the most compelling cultural scene was one that took place when they were infants.
Meant to add — and 3,000 miles away.
Even so, “Zimmy,” born while the ovens were in full operating mode, doesn’t sing about it.
In addition to “With God on our Side”, which has been mentioned, how about Desolation Row? The whole friggin song is a metaphor for the Holocaust. But I guess Roger doesn’t speak metaphor, he’s a writer.
Ah, Roger is the “jilted liberal” brand of conservative, you know – “I didn’t leave the party, the party left me (and my brilliant ideas).” My mother-in-law is of the same variety. She marched in Selma, but now worships Reagan. Getting her to acknowledge the disconnect is futile.
Apparently, Raj was busy researching hallucinogens during the sixties and seventies. I think he switched to alcohol and cocaine after that.
Even so, “Zimmy”
Random DAS fact: my grandmother baby-sat “Zimmy” a couple o’times … changed his diapers and everything.
So I can say with some expertise based on family lore that lil’ Robbie Z. has shat more intelligent things than your typical R.L. Simon navel-gazing in PJM.
The irksome part is that Roger el-Simon made his money writing novels about a turned-on detective, Moses Wine. The very character that gave him his money and reputation…
The even more irksome part is that I liked the first two of those novels…
I think the 50s were such a terrible cultural straight-jacket because it was the first era where television created an image of a homogeneous happy nation, and the same message was digested by people everywhere. TV conveyed the message “this is who we are,” and the people sitting at home with their tv dinners saw lassie, june cleaver, etc. It was like the whole country became LDS for about ten years. And I think the degree of repression correlated to the degree of backlash in the sixties.
The Fifties, as is generally acknowledged, were a natural era of calm conventionality.
Roger L. Simon, meet Esquerita.
What a fucking idiot. Truly. A fucking, fucking idiot. I’m so peeved at this (fucking) idiot I haven’t even read the above comments yet. So if others have
characterized him as a fucking idiot, I apologize for the redundancy.
But what a smug, self-regarding jerkoff. He must think his readers are cretins which, arguably, they are. But how much integrity does it take to write something and then read it silently to yourself and ask, “Is this really true? Is this defensible, or am I just spouting shit here?”
To sum up: He’s a fucking idiot.
Now I’ll take questions from the floor.
This reminds me of the Star Trek fans who publicly cheer on wars of agression, crusades against other ideologies and meddling in the affairs of others for personal gain. I mean, were they even paying attention?
Acknowledging the many bad things in the fifties, I’d also like to point out that what WAS good often grew out of liberal policy: increased home ownership, increased entrepreneurism, and better jobs obtained because of higher education are all attributable in large part to the GI Bill, for example.
This Simon guy’s gotta stop using his penis pump for a bong. He’s mixing metaphors with great abandon.
What a stupid hack.
“I don’t mean to flay myself for what I did or what I was then.” …only others.
There isn’t so much as a syllable in Simon’s piece that makes me believe that he was even alive in 1968.
Well, I was three-quarters of the way through my own Roger Simon is a moron post when I saw that you already had it covered. So I did it anyway.
I think this guy smoked too much weed when he was a hippe.
I seem to recall P.J. O’Rourke wrote essentially the same essay. Except his was funny. And he actually copped to participating in the sex and drugs. And this was back in, oh, nineteen-fucking-ninety-TWO.
“The Fifties” didn’t exist until “The Sixties” made social obstructionists and other annoying old farts pine longingly for yesteryear.
If you think Roger’s dumb, take a gander at the comments:
That proximity to the Holocaust is eerie. Hadn’t thought of it before.
Right, because we all know that the Holocaust was some strange little Burp in Yurp that took place between 1940-1945, and all that stuff about pogroms and whatnot that predate WWII never happened, and Jews were perfectly happy in Germany until around 1938.
Sheesh. What a maroon.
Uncle Joe McCarthy must have been part of what made the 50s seem so normal and wholesome. And that the Soviets had the hydrogen bomb (then crushed goulash socialism in Hungary in ’56) and then built the Berlin Wall while…oh forget it. Just check out this lovely little directive that helped kick off the calm, peaceful era.
The 50’s had much of the same us-v.-them panic (and at least it was more warranted) as we do now. Maybe that’s why he’s so fucking nostalgic for it.
Oh, Jay, as I pointed out in my own post on the matter, Roger Simon is sippin’ some strong Kool-Aid because he didn’t know about Vietnam or the Korean War or Rosa Parks or civil rights or the Little Rock 9 or the atomic bomb or ANYTHING that started in the 50s.
We all lived a nice, peaceful Leave It To Beaver-land existence.
Denial, it ain’t just a river in Egypt, it’s Roger Simon’s brain.
No one who actually remembers the fearful, oppressive fifties would describe it as “a natural era of calm conventionality.” And no one who actually lived through the late sixties would say that it was characterized by a tendency to deny evil. Au contraire – the end of the sixties was the fucking Golden Age of Paranoia.
But this bullshit take on the past has long been standard wingnut fare. The real events of the fifties and sixties don’t fit their worldview, so an understanding of what actually happened is out of the question. The past has to be reshaped, and Simon’s happy to help His distortions and falsifications are so blatant that he’s almost certainly lying outright rather than just mis-remembering, but mendacity is never a problem for a dedicated hack.
…but mendacity is never a problem for a dedicated hack.
But mendacity requires a level of skill that eludes dear Roger. I would like to know how much he gets paid for churning out this crap.
“The man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but if he is not editing his memories and rewriting history at fifty then he has no head”.
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Not even a mention in passing of the assasinations of liberal heroes Robert Kennedy & MLK or the murders of Kent State. As for Mr. Simon calling Dylan “Zimmy”, well that’s just disgraceful.
Simon’s projecting. He’s taking the determination of the warhawks to beileve that they’re living in the greatest battle against the most powerful foe ever faced–and in fact, on the front lines of it when they sit at their computers–and transferring that thought pattern to the sixties left.
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