An Enemy Will Bring Us Together

In song, at least, the ’60s Culture Revolution began rather
beautifully, with a call to smile upon your brother. Your brother
was assumed to be all of mankind. We might call that the “external program” of
the Counter-Culture, circa 1965-1968, posed as an alternative to the way the
New Left activists of the day were staking so much upon political action, with
an intensity that ran into ever more radical stances. By contrast, the
Counter-Culture proposed to embrace the way of love right
now (not, mind you,
“after the revolution”). What allowed this was, to use a slogan from Allen
Ginsburg, a “revolution in consciousness.” This was the internal program of
free-love, artistic creativity, pantheism, and of course, LSD. You say you’ll change the constitution,
well-ell, you know, you better free your mind instead.

If you were really serious about all this, you might even wind
up on a commune. But as discussed in my last post, communal life was too hard for most folks, and the lesser ideal
of the radical bohemian urban neighborhood, proved to have serious practical
shortcomings in the 60s. More broadly, as we saw when we considered “Alone Again Or” the feeling of being in love with everyone,
even if it seemed to have its moments of realization, such we saw in Taking Woodstock, couldn’t ultimately satisfy
one’s heart nor be sustained by it.

Honestly
considered, the hippies’ feeling of fraternity was felt most strongly when the
“everyone” was narrowed down to a certain “us” who accepted the basic creed.
Would that “us” and that creed be defined in a way that excluded the minds
that hate? Despite the initial Counter-Culture witness,
encapsulated by the lyrics of Lennon’s “Revolution,” it would not be. By 1969, hippies were
muting their criticism of radical politicos, and vice-versa. The
Counter-Culture became less defined by a positive understanding of the
alternative culture it offered, and more by a general antagonism towards the “Establishment.”

We
see it in song. If in 1966 The Jefferson Airplane issued an invitation for one
and all to “Get
Together” in 1969,
after Woodstock’s apparent triumph and momentum (and just before the Altamont
debacle), they released “We
Can Be Together.” It’s
addressed to the various counter-cultural “freaks,” on one hand, and the
various radical political types, on the other. It is they who are to get
together, and for the sake of some kind of revolution (the refrain in the
companion-song “Volunteers” is got a revolution, got to revolution)
against the Establishment, that is, against “Amerika.” Wikipedia tells us that
legal threats from the Salvation Army keep them from titling the Volunteers album the way they wanted, Volunteers
of Amerika. Because when the locals use zoning laws to bully a
commune, or the feds conduct a drug bust, or Democratic Party divisions get
Richard Nixon elected, it’s just like Nazi Germany, you know? Because,
Vietnam! In any case, the song’s spirit of opposition, and unity on the grounds
of that, is clear enough without that special “k”:

We can be together.
Ah, you and me,
we should be together.
We are all outlaws in the eyes of
America:
in order to survive we steal, cheat, lie,
forge, f$%#, hide, and deal.
We are obscene, lawless, hideous,
dangerous, dirty, violent, and… …young.
We should be together!
Come on, all you people standing around!

Circa
late 1969, the Airplane seems to sense that the generalized radical community
needs some encouragement, a pep rally of sorts to get them past all the
spirit-draining confusions that had been piling up, and all the
minor divisions radicals had made between one another in the course of late-’60s
intensity, you know, naturalist communalists v. wired hipsters, pacifists v.
biker gangs, Hare Krishnas v. Shamans, old-school SDS-ers v. the new
Weathermen-types, angry feminists v. “Ramblin’ Man” swingers, Black Panthers v.
white hippies, Maoists v. anarchists, health-foodies v. druggies, etc., etc.,
and to focus instead on the big divide between all of them and the
Establishment. It is a moment of sensing both the
possibility of political power, whether in an actual Revolution or a
McGovernite electoral victory, and the possibility of the whole movement
falling apart. So once more into the breach!

We are forces of chaos and anarchy—
everything they say we are, we are!
And we are very
proud of ourselves.
Up against the wall,
up against the wall(motherf%$#er)!
Tear down the walls!
Tear down the walls!

Do
I have to report that the “up against the wall” line, which the boomer rock
sages solemnly tell us caused controversy,
was a reference to a radical Weathermen-aiding anarchist group and a quote from
an Amiri Baraka poem? I guess so. Wow, a deep gesture there,
perhaps calculated to provoke a censor’s response. To the extent we can take it
seriously as a political statement, what it amounts to is what “desire for
power” philosopher Michel Foucault said in 1971, as quoted in Mark Lilla’s
fine book The Restless Mind—note that Foucault
liked to speak in those days of the proletariat being joined in revolution by
“women, prisoners, homosexuals, psychiatric patients,” and of course student
activists and counter-culture freaks:

The proletariat
doesn’t wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be
just. The proletariat makes war . . . because, for the first time in history it
wants to take power. When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible
that the proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has triumphed
a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection could
possibly be made to this.

Had
America actually been ripe for a political revolution, and such had succeeded,
I have a queasy feeling that the likes of the Airplane’s Paul Kantner and Grace
Slick would have been among the Party’s willing executioners.

Look,
the whole thing’s just as dismal as can be. Lyrically, it shrugs off the better
lessons from the Counter-Culture’s own songs(they’re
singing songs, and they’re carrying signs, most of them say, hooray for our
side) and baldly declares how proud of themselves the hippies
should be. “Hey, mainstream America is being mean, and so to punish and confound
them, let’s adopt as positive terms the very words they’re using to damn us!”
So reactive, so juvenile. (And, so Republic book VIII.)

Musically,
the less said the better. Sluggish beat, muffled sound. “Volunteers,” at least
has that anthemic fight-song thing going for it, nor is there any denying the
power of “Good Shepherd.” But “We Can Be Together” is weak, and all-in-all, the
glorious Airplane of the first two albums is a distant memory on the Volunteers album. The overall feel is forced,
and decadent.

How
did we get from the voice of Joan Baez, which contained the
promise of a flowering for everyone who listened, and from the overall love-stream vibe of the Jefferson Airplane’s first
LPs, to this?
But really, much of the ugliness was there from the beginning, and just needed
time and confidence to fully unfold. As I showed early on in the Songbook, the
wistful idealism of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (Songbook #6) was linked at
the hip with the Lenin-like demonizing of his “Masters of War.”(Songbook #8) There was something
remarkably un-peaceful about ’60s peace-and-love from the get-go.

Oh,
it sounds so
gentle when the likes of Lennon say I hope one day, you will join us, and the world,
will be as one. But
for every “us,” there is a “them,” isn’t there? Wise advocates of fraternal
love face that fact, and seek to keep the human instinct to demonize the other
in check. Wilson Carey McWilliams said that “The political process is an
effort to unite men in the pursuit of a common goal and vision. Politics, then,
involves two questions: the question of ‘with whom,’ and the question of ‘for
what.’ Furthermore it involves these questions in precisely that order.”

But
those who do not accept the to-some-degree given character
of our political communities, who want to reverse McWilliams’ order and “start
the world anew” on the basis of a creedal community, and who ultimately seek to
unify the world into such, must divide all mankind into two groups, of which
one group will absorb the other. They will find, no matter how
peaceful-sounding their songs, or anti-authoritarian their slogans, that they
wind up with minds that logically have to
hate. They will think that most everything that goes wrong must be blamed upon
a them, upon the likes of Richard
Nixon or the Koch
Brothers, and that the most patriotic thing one can do for the sake of
America’s future is to regard its past and present as largely worthy of the tag
“Amerika.”

In
sum, what the hippies found is that when the call to love one another isn’t
being matched enough by the actual feeling (and doesn’t even seem to be working
for the really radical ones out on the commune), and when the life immersed in
drugs, hedonism, festivals, personal drama, and song can no longer keep one
from noticing this, there’s always the old stand-by, the
enemy, which can be evoked to bring “us” together.