Some of those same sixties kids are now themselves forty-eight. Give me sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” Incredible mind-blowing experiences, head-banging, screw-your-brains-out experiences in service to immediate and transitory pleasures.īut the one kind of gratification is simply an outgrowth of the other, a more extreme form of the same hedonism, the same need to indulge and consume. So that was the generation who decided, “Hey, guess where the real action is? Forget the Winnebago. But the children they had raised on that pleasure principle of material goods were by then bored to death.
These postwar parents thought they were in nirvana if they had a color TV and two cars and could buy a Winnebago and a house on the lake. And, boy, did that curve bend and bend and bend. They had kids twenty years old, kids who had been so indulged for two decades that it caused a huge, first-time-in-history distortion in the curve of values. One generation later it was the sixties, and those twenty-eight-year-old guys from World War II were forty-eight. It was during that period that the pleasure principle started feeding on itself. The incredible, explosive economic prosperity that resulted just went wild. It rebuilt Europe, yes, but it also enabled those war ruined countries to buy from us. Take the Marshall Plan, which we implemented at that time. As the victors, we decided to spread the good fortune around, and we did all kinds of wonderful things-but it wasn’t out of selfless idealism, let me assure you. We came home to a country that was in great shape in terms of industrial capacity. When I got out of the Army in 1944, the guys who were being discharged with me were mostly between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Before they came into our lives, we were on a pleasure binge, and the need for immediate gratification passed through us to our children. “In my generation we did a lot of pleasure chasing-we, the generation responsible for today’s twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds and forty-year-olds. We have lots to do, and some things just aren’t going to get done, you know?” And you can take that hat off your head when you come in here thanking us. Now let us hear you applaud that for a little while. It may not be perfect, but it damn sure comes close to being okay. That’s the gist of it: we’ve done something, and we think it’s enough. We did something for you people, whoever “you” are. And they say it not just about black people. Black people-it’s their own fault if they can’t make it today.” Yeah, well, of course they say that. There are also people who say, “Hey, after thirty years of affirmative action, they’ve got it made. It was for the cohesion of the political process.” There are myriad justifications for denial. There are those power symbols that always say, “Well, it was for the good of the states. There are people in the United States-people among that power echelon we speak of-who maintain that all slaves were happy.
Today there are still people all over the world who maintain that the Holocaust didn’t happen. I mean, even the most modest expectations are going to be unfulfilled. If you’re going to say, “Hey now, look you guys, please look at what you did and look at yourselves and punish yourselves and at least try to square this thing, right?”-well, you’ll make slower progress at that than you would expect. “When you’re addressing power, don’t expect it to crumble willingly.