A Failed Revolution

This is an excellent genre, traditionally confined to those who have been prominent. The idea of a "memoir" is simply to recount scandalous and shocking events, or to reveal what has been hidden from the public. They used to be the playground of Courtesans and Dandies catering to peeping Toms, or aristocrats fallen to low estate. They were usually quite literate, some romantic. Many were also among the belles lettres people once wrote.

But that is once upon a time, mostly in France. It is not what the memoir has become in today's America, where every rock star, politician and CEO has paid for an "as told to" book. The only tradition apparently retained is the scurrilous nature of the contents, less any literary quality. But who am I to undermine the employment of scribes - people who can write - in an age that is forgetting how to read?

Do I fit in any of those categories? I hope not, if only because I, not "as told to," wrote my book.

Revolutionaries

It is impossible to tell how one feels, when the dream of a lifetime is lost. It may suit the lurid curiousity of onlookers to see injured dogs die slowly, but I think it better to avert one's eyes.

The 1960s was a failed Revolution. Conservatives prefer to call it the "counter-culture" and a bunch of other prejorative names. Conservatives rarely face up to the content of the Berkeley Revolution, because a serious discussion would undermine most everything conservatives believe. According to a book I will soon review, Gary B. Nash's The Unknown American Revolution,  the same sort of thing happened during the American Revolution. Basically, conservatives have almost always succeeded in undermining the aspirations of the great majority, starting by suppressing the issues and feelings closest to the people. On the occasions when conservatives failed in their purposes, as in the French and Russian revolutions, for some time they paid a terrible price. It is very difficult for revolutionaries to exact sufficient payment for the torments they endured at the hands of conservatives, as conservatives are usually soft and die too soon.

There are no "stories" in a Revolution. That fact is confronted in Dr. Zhivago: there are no "personal lives," it is all "political." To the extent that a revolutionary lives, life is communal. I/we are all the same thing. When a revolution fails, revolutionaries die, if not physically, then spiritually. Life after the revolution is like being in a terminal care Hospice, but death does not come soon. The veterans of lost wars know this feeling; e.g., those who fought in Vietnam, doing what they were told, believing the lies that kept them there. But, at least, while having no personal life, warriors and revolutionaries lived.

Those who didn't fight that war, or were not part of the Revolution, will never know the emotions of that life. They will never know what it is to live a life and die every day, hopefully to be reborn tomorrow. That is anything but the continuity of safe and secure, middle class America.

To be part of the Revolution is to undergo Paulist conversion many times. I remember, while attending the Vietnam Day Teach-In, suddenly being struck, as if by lightning, by the necessity of taking action - even arms - against our oppressors. The doubts and uncertainties of my teenage years and early adulthood were set aside in a moment. The plain truth of my situation and the dishonesty and hypocrisy of our society were obvious to me.  I never recovered from that stroke.

I was sent on another trip when I attended the Digger's lunchtime spiel in 1967. The Digger concept of time was suddenly clear to me. What counted was the time of my life. I have never  since worn a watch.

Do I care about this society's mores? No, not at all. My disdain for those hypocrisies strongly motivated me to seek the company of other "non-conformists" like myself. And, where did I find them? In scientific labs and coffee houses, huddled in corners discussing "things" in tones only they understand. There are the real people; elsewhere is filled with ghosts.

The ghosts destroyed the Revolution, because they only know death. In a truly weird reversal of everything, it is the revolutionaries who died, who have no "personal life," who succeed in living. The ghosts are never born; their lives are but shadows of what might have been. They only think they are alive. But they put their hands out over the land, and convince many that their ghostly existence is real; so many join them. Perhaps because they wear robes threaded with gold and studded with diamonds that shimmer and sparkle in the sunlight, people are deceived about their existence. But, at night, when they are alone, when they put aside their finery, and steal away to their beds, they are as light as a feather on their pillows, for they have no substance.

Those who have not dreamed have never lived.

My Story

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