Oh, My Revolution, I Miss It So: The Paradox of Too Many Voices

More compelling than Occupy Wallstreet

Bernie Sanders calls for revolution and he appeals to two main demographics: Young people, mostly in school, who have not got deep into the game of economic survival and baby boomers, who once embraced a revolution of their own and who now feel dry roots stirring with Spring rain.

The fact is, the "revolution" Bernie calls for is a reprise of what once animated his own youth and the worry is he is simply an old man looking to recapture what once made his life exciting and worthwhile, one last hurrah.

Blowing in the Wind 

When Bernie and I were young, in the 1960's, there was actually not just one revolution, but three, which played off one another, and each drew recruits from the others: 
1/ There was the revolt against the war in Vietnam, which required a rejection of authority figures like generals, presidents, senators, parents, teachers, and all those who claimed the war in Vietnam was part of the war against Communism, atheism, hedonism and other bad isms. We watched "Dr. Strangelove" and that satire began to look like the real world.

2/ There was the revolution against racism, which found it's battleground, first and most visibly in the South, but eventually it spread to the Black inner cities all around the nation from Watts to Detroit to New York to Washington, D.C.

3/ And there was the sexual revolution, which was a revolution against the manifest hypocrisy of the generation which was our parents, many of whom, in fact, agreed what they had been taught about sex and what they had taught us was ridiculous and harmful and had to change.  The most central and intransigent resistance to the sexual revolution came from religious institutions--the Catholic Church, the Baptist convention most especially, but not exclusively--which inveighed against sex outside of marriage, and against sex for pleasure rather than procreation,  and against sex in general, which they saw as a sort of opiate addiction which prevented people from concentrating on the important things in life, like going to church, raising a family, earning a pay check and leading a boy scout troop.

The Boiling Point

The truth is, none of the revolts against these prevailing things could have been accomplished without clear, organizing focal images, which the three television networks (CBS, ABC, NBC) , and  the four print giants (The New York Times, the Washington Post, Time and Life magazines) provided.  Those were times when the media giants controlled expression of public discourse in a way it is hard to remember now, now that there are hundreds of channels on cable and now there is an internet.

In those days, in colleges, in front of home TV's, people actually gathered at 7 pm to watch the evening news. This was a daily version of going to church, where a community coalesced, and people watched a single broadcast together and reacted to it, and the next morning at work or school, they talked about that shared experience. Everyone was, in a literal sense, on the same page. There was only one page to read.

This control of mass communication from a few central points in New York and Washington meant it was far more difficult to change opinions and to undercut prevailing and conventional wisdom.  Without cell phones or internet or Facebook, using  paper posters on walls, or by students visiting dorm rooms, demonstrations were organized. Somehow, marches on Washington were able to organize a hundred thousand human beings, transport them by bus and car and train and they all showed up on the same day in the same place, without a single cell phone. 

The Fierce Urgency of Now 

Today, you read a New York Times editorial on line, or Gail Collins and there are 500 comments registered within an hour , sometimes within minutes, the chattering undercurrent of American discourse, unfocused, pebbles thrown in a swift river, registering but without power to change the current, unable to shift the flow of events.

How amazed we would have been to think we could virtually converse with Huntley-Brinkley or Walter Cronkite on the screen. These people were in our homes, but we could not interact with them. 

But what have we got from those 500 comments? There are comments cheering Ms. Collins and comments dissenting, but there is no movement. There is no crowd on the Mall, no sense of a community organizing around a common goal.

The three big networks were part of the problem, mostly, controlling discourse, silencing dissent by ignoring it, but eventually, Walter Cronkite on CBS, by simply showing video from Vietnam every night, without comment, by simply allowing soldiers, "grunts" in the rice paddies to tell their stories of what the war was like, built the fires of revolution among enough people to spell the end of that war.  
When you heard Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon speak of a fight for freedom or Peace with Honor, and then you saw some un famous kid wearing a helmet with a peace sign saying, "I don't know what we are doing here. Seems like we are fighting the wrong gooks, half the time," the foundations of that fantasy sand castle which was our war in Vietnam began to erode.

Right there on the CBS Evening News: Draw your own conclusions

No one figure could have accomplished these three  successful revolutions alone and likely no one of these revolutions would have been entirely successful without the others because they were all part of a rejection of  authority and we came to distrust all authority. It took Peter, Paul and Mary singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial just before Martin Luther King spoke, it took Joan Baez at innumerable rallies singing songs by Bob Dylan (who I cannot recall ever actually showing up) and it took Jane Fonda and lots of celebrities, to start pushing in unison to get the snowball rolling.

He helped change them

Right now we have a cacophony, no single hymn or choir. When Bernie speaks at rallies I'm reminded of that wonderful woman in the 1975 movie, "Nashville" who is seen throughout the movie, always trying to sing her song, but not being heard: the microphone goes dead just as she is beginning to open her mouth; she is put on stage at a motor speedway and the sound of the race cars drowns out her song. But finally, in the last scene she grabs a microphone on stage after a shooting and she belts out her song in an astonishing voice you never expected to hear from this anonymous waif and it's, "You may say that we ain't free. But it don't bother me!"

You may say, we ain't free. But it don't bother me.

That's where I sense we are now. Bernie is belting out his song, but there is no galvanizing force.  When you had Vietnam and a draft, well then people all over the country knew this thing could come claim them any time. When you could see the police dogs ripping apart Freedom Riders, you could see the ugliness of the right wing.  

But the "billionaire class" is a little too impersonal.  The Koch brothers are a little too slippery.  The visuals for the harm done are just not there. Nor is there the coalesced resistance. 

Pisses you off, but not quite a naked napalmed girl

To say Bernie is trying to herd cats is to minimize his challenge.  Nobody has been thrown into a boiling cauldron, like Vietnam. We have all been put into the pot of water and the temperature has been turned up so slowly we hardly notice it's approaching a boiling point.