America The Violent - 1969
By Gordonskene Saturday Aug 22, 2009 6:00pm
(Beneath the posture - afraid of shadows, most living things, life in general)
With all the talk, all the hate and all the posturing going on - not only about the current Health Care debate, but our current state of life and society in general, I was wondering if this was anything new, some new direction our society had suddenly and dangerously taken.
Regrettably, no. As is evidenced in this documentary, part of the Second Sunday series produced for NBC Radio on March 3, 1969 - we've been a country fed on fear, hate and paranoia for a very long time. It appears to have cropped up in our DNA.
Frank McGee (Narrator): “Have we had time to become, or do we care to become something other than a collection of irresponsible individuals, having in common little more than a toleration, if not an endorsement of violence?”
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “We are today the most frightening people on this planet. The ghastly things we do to our own people, the ghastly things we do to other people, these must at least compel us to look searchingly at ourselves and our society before hatred and violence rushes on to more evil, and finally tear our nation apart. . . . we cannot blame the epidemic of murder at home on deranged and solitary individuals, separate from the rest of us. For these individuals are plainly weak and suggestible men stamped by our society with a birth rite of hatred and a compulsion toward violence. We must recognize, I believe that the evil is in us, that it springs from some dark intolerable tension in our history and our institutions. It is almost as though some primal curse had been fixed on our nation. We are a violent people with a violent history, and the instinct for violence has seeped into the bloodstream of our national life.”
And considering 1969 was a comparatively good year in retrospect.
Forty years on it's only gotten stranger - or maybe the microscope is looking more closely.
In any event . . .
Login or Register to post comments.
Is that a bald headed girl or a guy with lipstick?
LMAO....I was just going to type "sweet lipstick and eyeliner. makes you look so scary"
on a pig....but it's still a Pig! Look at Miss Sarah??!!!
is this what sarah looks like
with lipstick and her real hair?
nt
... judging by the size of the strap on.
Sorry.........I don't agree.........I'm not evil nor do I know anyone who is..........I wouldn't know how to be evil if I tried. The people being evil are usually the ones cloaking themselves in their "aura of christianity", or whatever they call it these days. They know exactly what they are doing, and they know how to cover their tracks with their "christianity". Perhaps if we got rid of all the churches who spew such evil and hate from their pulpits, then maybe we could make some progress..........but as long as they have that pulpit..........things will only get worse!
you are right and they do know what they are doing.
the hate and bigotry that comes from their mouths is
just a projection of who they are, like Steven Anderson,
in an earlier article today. he voiced so much hate towards
gays that it makes you wonder if he truly would like
to be someone's bitch in a prison, where he can actually
eat butt instead of fantasizing about others doing it
or watching others do it now.
The single minded pursuit of the material.
Electronic trinkets and sugar-lots of sugar.
Oh-and the continuing rise of military cop rock culture and rampant Nationalism.That too.
And carnies. Circus folk.
Small hands...smell like cabbage...
Shave head and Clara Bow lips?
But, if you put an up-do wig on 'that'...don;t you get Miss Sarah on a hunt for ....whatever?
... i can't take another one...
The DNA is sick. It most certainly is.
was not a good year. Vietnam, bombings at home, cops killing Panthers & other radicals, radicals killing themselves & each other, lots of violence as organized crime muscled in on drugs, overdoses, madness, disruptions on campuses, right wingers attacking peace marchers, Manson, etc, etc. 1969 was a very bad year, as I recall experiencing it. The left had almost given up on believing America could be reformed and was more and more convinced a revolution was necessary; the left's rhetoric called it that way {though it was a hopeless fantasy that could only be believed as long as you were tripping with other people who saw the world the way you did and there was no one around who saw it differently to burst your bubble) and Nixon & his "silent majority" reacted as though that revolution was actually unfolding and anything that was done to stop it was acceptable. Nope, 1969 was a very bad year, as I recall. Though I gotta admit, Bad Moon Rising was a great song.
It's just teh roar of teh greasepaint and teh smell of teh crowd.
Love that photograph of the typical NRA gunhomo.
that is probably more typical of the average NRA homosexuals.
http://www.pinkpistols.org/photos/thegang.htm
small brain...
miniscule genitalia.
Is it just me or does this report indicate something about the effects of hate radio and hate TV? This type of report is now basically defunkt? That it is not masculine or aggressive enough to respect?
Great post C & L.
Vietnam killed about 10 times the U.S. soldiers Chimpy's, and now Obama's, Middle Eastern folly has so far. I remember '69 as the year the mescaline dried up and the bad drugs started to flood the market. Mostly stuff like PCP but also opium from kids who had siblings in the war. I remember carrying tear gas because the rednecks were a problem. I ended up at a 90% white evangelical Lutheran college because they gave me a scholarship where I had to endure an environment where women couldn't smoke, there was no dancing during lent, the place closed for morning chapel, theoretically you'd get tossed out for drinking no matter your age or where you were doing it, there were mandatory religion classes and, obviously, there was no mingling of the sexes in dormitories. Mostly, I remember 1969 as the fuse that exploded in the National Guard shooting students on campus in 1970. I should have better noted at the time the black students killed in, I believe '69, but I guess the students at Kent were White and that made all the difference back then. Our neighboring college 1000 miles away closed for the season as a result and everybody was dispersed. But I remember their SDS President turning in every night to the Door's Five to One: You get yours, baby. I'll get mine. They got the guns. We got the numbers.
We didn't worry about torture. 1969 was the year we found out about My Lai, where they gathered the women, children and old people of an entire village into a ditch and shot them.
Not really as much fun as the retro clothing and home furnishings commercials would have subsequent generations imagine.
Thank You great post. I didn't think I was going to listen to whole thing. But, I did.
If your the one I met at NN09, ask John about the photos I shot from his I-phone of him and the cute Blue Cross finance young lady.
While things like the killing of an pro-abortion doctor are emphasized, most of the violent crime in my city is drug related, specifically, fighting over the cash flow associated with drug trafficking, and armed robberies to purchase drugs.
If we legalized marijuana, and provided prescriptions for addicted heroin and cocaine/crack addicts like England does, a majority of the violence in this country would disappear, so I think.
After these things are done, then, I would like to see where we stand.
Yup - that's me and I was there for those photos!
Good to see you and thanks for the props!
Gordon
Get a real gun, ya girly men. Like an MP-7 or Dragunov!
Pew pew!
They are just having fun.
They are looking for excitement. They have little feeling of any kind, least of all fear. Only hatred, conflict and violence can make them feel alive.
Handicapped by their own willful ignorance, they NEED someone to blame for their many failures. They NEED an enemy or perhaps a sanctioned scapegoat to prey upon when killing animals becomes a bore.
They are driven by a primitive tribal instinct to follow a strong leader who will lead them to war against the tribe whose territory contains the biggest waterhole and the best hunting ground.
They are looking for a leader who will call them the Super Race, God's Chosen or the REAL Americans, someone to lead them into that great, glorious and bloody orgy called War.
Who will it be? Sarah Palin? Glenn Beck?
these idiots are most definitively afraid, else how do you explain the constant militaristic posturing trying to intimidate non-existent threats?
Google fearless sociopath.
the case that America is a uniquely violent society or that humans are a uniquely violent self-destructive species is pretty flimsy. The notion that violence is encoded in our genes or cultural DNA is a lot more persuasive in the abstract than if examined against the facts. First of all, the idea that humans are the only species that kill their own is based on a finding that Konrad Lorenz made in the 1960s. We now know that dozens of species kill their own, even their own young, for reasons that have to do with evolutionary biology. Nothing unique there. As for the level of violence perpetrated by Americans domestically and abroad, I don't think the U.S. has anything on colonial Britain, France, Spain, or Portugal, and let's not forget the Huns and the Mongols! Even considering the genocide of Native Americans in early colonial America--who was really doing that? "Americans" or refugees from *European* societies? I'm not trying to make an invidious comparison between America and European societies--after all, I live in Europe and I quite like it here. Only saying that it is silly to imagine that there is something desperately wrong with America that is encoded in our social or cultural DNA. What we see in America today is nothing that some well-considered laws like some friggin gun control, more effective public education, and a stronger social welfare system couldn't go some distance toward fixing.
Yes other animals kill their own, humans are animals, violent animals. Most of us try to rise above our nature but, lurking just below the surface is an animal whose nature is to do whatever it takes to survive.
What is missing in our society is commonality. We have been divided into camps and set against each other. There is no common purpose to cause people to band together and move forward. Passing more laws doesn't do anything when people are ignoring the laws already enacted.
Several commenters have joked about how the guy in the photo's feminine facial features make him seem a parody. Think about that a little more. Is it really the American "people" who are violent? Or is it just American MEN? And then think about the rest of the world's violence... it's overwhelmingly men organizing, funding, and perpetrating the violence, and women and children as well as men themselves are the victims. It's been this way throughout recorded history.
So I think we should be asking ourselves, not what's wrong with Americans, but what's wrong with men? And what can we (male and female) do about that?
Elizabeth I, Catherine II, Queen Victoria, Marie Antoinette, Queen Isabella, and a cast of others say "what's up"
I repeat, it's OVERWHELMINGLY men organizing, funding, and perpetrating violence, and always has been. Do you dispute this statement, or did you just want to argue with a strawman?
Just another bedwetting, scared Right Wing skinhead and racist hiding behind a gun. He should use Palin's Pig lipstick and try coming out of his momma's closet.
You see, in 1969, we the (young) people were angry because the Powerful of the nation, the Senators, Congressmen, President, Propaganda apparatus, were all pulling our Senior High School Boys out of their graduation parties and shipping them off to Vietnam AGAINST THEIR WILL. We protested to stop the WAR and stop the CARNAGE and to tell the world we HATED VI0LENCE but that we were not cowards and would not back down from our convictions.
Somehow today's angry people (and they don't seem to all be young) are the DISILLUSIONED, living in poverty, or coming out of posh childhoods staring at the streets, pondering how they will EVER earn enough money to live posh again. The very idea of not being privileged is enough to send them off the deep end.
Our nation provides no choices to young people other than to join the military and get ground up in the MIDDLE EAST WARS, which are just another practice in national blood lust and greed. Or they can sign up for college loans which bring a lifetime of USURY with the IRS standing behind the creditor, at the ready to completely ruin you and no ability to discharge the debt load. So it's immediate suicide versus long term suicide.
And you wonder why today's young folk are angry?
Hell, I am almost 60 now, and I AM ANGRY. I think the young people should have nationalized medical care, and nationalized college, afforded to those who have the grade point average to win the placement. I think there should be secondary education for essential skills too, like welding, mechanics, electronics, manufacturing of all sorts. Did you know these skills USED TO BE TAUGHT FOR FREE ON THE JOB? It was called TRAINING. And you got a paycheck while you trained.
Now you go into debt to learn a skill and take your chance you'll find work.
By the way, the cost of college is WELL OVER A HUNDRED GRAND and the cost for "training" is OVER FORTY GRAND.
So I ask you again. Why do you THINK the youth are angry?
Login or Register to post comments.