SAME BUT DIFFERENT: 1965 AND 2009
It's always interesting to come in off the road -- in this case 10 days away from the unrelenting drumbeat of the news in the service of wrapping up my forthcoming book 
as well as catching some rays and music. (If you were a fan of John McLaughlin's jazz-rock Mahavishnu Orchestra back in the day, then you owe it to yourself to catch the Mahavishnu Project if they're in your 'hood. This is not merely a cover band as these lads make you realize that the original ensemble didn't merely break ground, they unleashed a sonic earthquake.)
Anyhow, having washed off the road bust, I learned after a quick scan of the MSM and my favorite blogs that the flavor of the month is the teabagging of town hall meetings called to discuss President Obama's health-care reform initiative.
As someone who was of age and then some when McLaughlin set the musical world on fire, it's easy to 
think of these latter-day disruptions as a mirror image of the 1960s. Then it was radicals and left-wingers shouting down speakers at campus forums on the Vietnam War; today it is radicals and right-wingers shouting down speakers at health-care forums. The goal was and is the same: Denying freedom of speech.
While there was a deep cynicism at work then as well as now, beyond hair lengths and fashion statements, much has changed since members of SDS and SNCC shouted down proponents of the war at campus Republican rallies. That cynicism has transmographied into a demon spawn sanctioned -- no, make that actively abetted -- by those now grown-up 
Republicans and financed by an army of lobbying groups who are playing pocket pool with politicians of both parties.
Oh, and there's another big difference: The people shutting down meetings during the Vietnam War era were trying to tear down America; the people shutting down meetings in the summer of 2009 believe that they are defending America. We're talking some really sick fucks.
The tide against the Vietnam War didn't really turn until the lies of the Johnson administration and the consequent carnage became too huge to ignore. It was the rare family who didn't know 
someone who came home in a pine box if they didn't lose a son, father or uncle themselves. Eight members of my high school graduating class made the ultimate sacrifice and I myself came thisclose to becoming a combat infantryman instead of a correspondent.
The tide against the Iraq war never turned despite the lies of the Bush administration. After all, what are 4,000 or so dead Americans in a country of 265 million people? And while the Vietnam era antiwar movement was never as influential as its leaders led themselves to believe, there was no such movement of any consequence over the last eight years. Far from it.
All that so noted, we have 
become nothing if not more cynical over the last 40 years, a period during which one president was driven back to his ranch by his lies, another tried to hijack the Constitution and was forced to resign, another asserted that he would never negotiate with terrorists while doing just that, another soiled a White House intern's blue dress, lied about it and stood trial in the Senate, and yet another engineered the kind imperial power grab that the Founding Fathers so feared with the help of a war criminal vice president.
This brings us to President Hopenchange, who has inherited a body politic so broken and so in the thrall of powerful corporate and lobbying interests (ditto for the news media, as is increasingly obvious) that a neutral observer could be forgiven for thinking that the 
passage of some kind of health-care reform will be nothing short of a bloody miracle.
As it turns out, Barack Obama's greatest ally is the burned out hulk of the Republican Party, which when not sending SWAT teams of teabaggers into those town hall meetings continues to scream that he's an Islamofascist socialist who will hand out abortions like all-day suckers and euthanize the elderly.
My fear is not that health-care reform won't pass. I do believe in miracles. No, my fear is that the Republicans will finally wise up.
Top photograph by Kimberly P. Mitchell/The Associated Press
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