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10 February 2011

Being a revolutionary I've been watching the events in Egypt, and at the same time, coincidentally, was reading Reading Lolita in Tehran, and so I've been thinking about living in revolutionary times...[More:]...even the other night, I happened to listen to this American Radio Works documentary on speeches of the Civil Rights movement...and this article on Egypt's young revolutionaries today was interesting: "They were born roughly around the time that President Hosni Mubarak first came to power, most earned degrees from their country’s top universities and all have spent their adult lives bridling at the restrictions of the Egyptian police state...Many in the circle, in fact, met during their university days".

The Civil Rights show was really interesting - they were interviewing people about Stokely Carmichael addressing students, and the interviewee kept characterizing the activists as "revolutionaries." You were a revolutionary, or you weren't. it was a category of person. "All these revolutionaries walked in with their Afros...we used to have meetings with other revolutionaries..."

So it's all got me thinking about being a 'revolutionary.' It has been a clear identity for people in all these milieus. The outcomes, obviously, really vary, but I'm so struck by people's descriptions of the atmosphere leading up to revolutionary times, and then activism during them. Not all revolutions are awesome. The Islamic Revolution in Iran followed on to a period of protest in which there were many, many ideological factions arguing in favor of their own desired outcome to the end of the Shah's reign; the Islamists ultimately gained control, but that was by no means determined early on. The revolution could have ended up a Marxist or a democratic one, had conditions been different. But it was really something to read about the impassioned debates, the way a classroom or party could just erupt, the long intense and abstract discussions of right, wrong, and strategy. What a unique human experience it is to join in a timely and huge and serious cause, to debate and struggle for leadership and direction and focus, and much of this is common to any revolution.

When I was in high school I read a ton of 60s counterculture literature, and I don't think I've thought about 'revolution' as a human experience rather than a historical process very much since then. Though I'm certainly no stranger to causes and activism, I also haven't partaken of any true revolutions. It's interesting to look back on the seriousness of the gender debates I got involved in while in college in the early 90s - one could sort of say there were gender revolutions, queer revolutions, but not on the calling-for-government-toppling scale of the Black Power movement or a democratic revolution. My mom was certainly involved in what was then called "Women's Liberation," and that had a lot of revolutionary feel about it, but I was a kid through most of the peak activity. The countercultural revolution was sort of something, but again, much more cultural than political. There are differences and similarities in these cultural revolutions vs. political/governmental ones.

I don't have anything of substance to say about revolution now, except how interesting it is to note the similarities in atmosphere from one revolution to another, and in some way to say there's part of that experience I envy, the part about a deeply felt commitment to ideas and finding common cause with a large number of others, and finding ways to lend your particular rhetorical or organizational or cooking skills or what have you to a much larger and decentralized event. Not everyone experiences this, and those who do have something interesting to say.

I guess my take is that there is always change, and activists always work to promote they change they want, and that can take the form of cultural revolution and create revolutionary rhetoric. But political revolution is a somewhat unique thing. It's not always called for and it's not always successful - probably not even mostly successful.

I suppose it's just the bearing out of the idea that, occasionally, very occasionally,

in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them...

I wonder...do you feel you've been part of any revolutions? Are you a revolutionary?
absolutely not a revolutionary. i want food, shelter, working institutions and shelter for my family. I don't want to get arrested, publicized, hated, anything of that sort. Tried as traitor, cracked on my head, raped in some random prison, flee to exile and have my family arrested instead, none of that. *comfortable middle class bourgeois*
posted by Firas 10 February | 13:34
Lucky me, no. I have always had some suspicion of my own tendency to join passionately with others, and as I get older I'm more suspicious as well of extremism in any form, which seems so often to be a shortcut to avoid the challenging task of confronting the merits of opposing positions.

I'd just add that Lolita in Tehran broke my heart . . . what a lot of damage and terror was wrecked by the willingness to pay any price for ideological purity. I also remember being in college and listening to the Persian women I knew there talk about (and weep about) the executions of their loved ones in the wake of the revolution in Iran.
posted by bearwife 10 February | 14:05
It broke my heart, too. It also made me want to start reading Iranian blogs...I read a little but haven't stuck with it.
posted by Miko 10 February | 14:23
If it's a binary thing, if those not with 'em are against 'em, I'm a revolutionary. Though ,in practice, I support the revolution of nuance. I want to overthrow the binary. Believers in binary are those who think liberals can't make clear distinctions. I thought Obama reaching across the isle was a good thing, for a while. I'm glad to see teaparty support for ending the Patriot Act. Make of that what you will.
posted by Obscure Reference 10 February | 14:24
I came of age during the 60's, having turned 18 in 1968 (yeah I am really old, please don't rub it in). It was a heady time, both in the civil rights arena and the anti-war arena, and these two spheres touched one another some.

But what I realized, as time went on, that nothing really changed, or if it did, not much. Plus, the typical fire-brandishing anti-war guy was inciting crowds and whipping up a frenzy then going home and literally whipping his spouse or partner. Gender equality was not really on the radar as much.

Also, one traded one kind of conformity for another, albeit long hair, tie die conformity, and anyone who fell outside of this new conformity was looked upon with suspicion. I remember that Carlos Casetaneda spoke at my college, and we were really psyched to go see him, having read his books (I think he'd just published the second by that time). So when this little guy in a dark suit and tie, very groomed, very short hair, got up to the microphone, we thought that he was some kind of school functionary, and it turned out to be Castaneda. What a surprise.

Leonard Cohen's line, "the gates of love, they budged and inch, I don't think much has happened since" really sums up this period for me and a lot of people. A lot of energy spent and not much came of it.
posted by danf 10 February | 14:40
"What are you revolting against?"

"Whaddaya got?"

SEE ALSO: Billy Joel's "Angry Young Man"
posted by Eideteker 10 February | 15:18
the gates of love, they budged and inch, I don't think much has happened since" really sums up this period

Thanks for those thoughts, danf. I would love to hear from more people who can remember the tenor of those times as young adults.

These days, my thoughts on the 60s countercultural movement are not that it completely overhauled all society according to its expansive goals, but that it essentially went to work reverting the social regression of the 1950s, and was pretty successful at that, and that it did a whole lot for civil rights. I think it made the war more unpopular but one couldn't say it ended the war, which was doomed from a long time back. And I think it ended up advancing the celebration of individualism over collectivism, which is sort of ironic, but that does seem to be one main result.

Still, I'm really glad it happened, for civil rights and women's rights alone, but also because there ain't no way I want to live in an extended 1950s.
posted by Miko 10 February | 15:54
Thanks for those thoughts, danf. I would love to hear from more people who can remember the tenor of those times as young adults.


Well also, more people also claimed to be getting laid then were getting laid in actuality. But if you believed what you heard, it was a non-stop daisy chain.

Which made those who were not taking part (me included) feel really bad about themselves for being unable to access something that seemingly everyone else was getting easily and often.

posted by danf 10 February | 17:12
The 60s did make some difference. Watch Mad Men if you want to see what it was like before. A lot of people take for granted now, things which before the 60s were unimaginable. Sure there was also a lot of hype and much cooptation, but the times were a' changin', even if they ended up changin' back in many respects. A paranoid Republican like Nixon would be called a Socialist today.
posted by Obscure Reference 10 February | 17:30
The thing is that a lot of those things were imaginable -- before the 50s. The 1920s and 1940s saw a lot of progressivism in a lot of ways. The 50s were in many ways an anomaly, a retreat, a rollback, an interruption caused mostly by the aftereffects of the Depression and the war.
posted by Miko 10 February | 18:11
Maybe so. I guess we had FDR & Eleanor, but being born into the 50s stunted my imagination until the drugs could free it. You can probably see more clearly from a distance than I saw stuck in the middle.
posted by Obscure Reference 10 February | 18:36
Many of my earliest memories -- I'm talking kindergarten era -- involve being identified as one of the imperialist oppressors in the context of a monumentally stupid revolutionary movement.

So like bearwife I'm suspicious as well of extremism in any form, which seems so often to be a shortcut to avoid the challenging task of confronting the merits of opposing positions.

That said, if I were Egyptian you can bet I'd be out there in the square.
posted by tangerine 10 February | 18:41
I would too, tangerine, but I'm pretty sure my objective would be a stable, elected government versus just wanting a simple overthrow of Mubarak.
posted by bearwife 10 February | 18:55
I've thought of myself as a revolutionary and anarchist since I was 12. But what's changed as I've aged is seeing how few revolutions leave a substantially better reality for the average person, a dozen years after. There are some where you can see an enormous difference of course - the average Cuban who is over 50 or so still is grateful to Castro right? I mean, people can all eat now. Life got significantly better for most people in most meaningful ways. But in so many cases while the revolution got rid of one terrible reality of colonial apartheid systems, other terrible realities of poverty, violence, or despotic leaders remained. So many African revolutions left these miserable realities. I find it so sad and it leaves me with less hope in human nature - a hope that is necessary to have a real belief in a future where we don't need centralized governments.
posted by serazin 10 February | 22:49
You can probably see more clearly from a distance than I saw stuck in the middle.

Yeah, this is a really common thing in thinking about the social history of the US. There's a huge illusion that arises because so many people share the 50s as a point of reference - both people who grew up in the 50s, and their children who heard about the time period through them and relived it through mass media.

The 50s were such a strange time, really a peak of social control in the US that resulted from the focus on absorbing the results of WWII and building on its economic boost, with tremendous power coming through a few mass media channels, a very few industries dominating the economy (and working in concert to bar women from the workplace and from advancement therein), and rolling back muhc of the progressive political agenda that had dominated the new modernist era leading up to WWII.

With the 50s occurring as they did at the start of the baby boom, a lot of people grew up with the view that things were 'always this way' until the 60s, because they had always been that way in their memories -- believing the lie that the usual social order of the US had always and properly been Dick-and-Jane-land, white nuclear families with a fully employed father and a stay-at-home mother, who owned a home and a car and appliances, earned a middle-class income and had disposable funds for vacations and toys, were socially conservative and anti-collectivist, were mainline Christian or Catholic and went to church, lived in suburbs and sent their kids to neighborhood schools or parochial schools and then to college. When in fact, the 50s are totally anomolous in American history in all these ways, and to cap it all off, that image isn't even an accurate picture of the American 50s - it describes a segment of the population but ignores vast swaths of other kinds of people in other kinds of places.

Unfortuntely, this widely shared memory of that time creates a very powerful illusion of an American past that never really existed. That makes it really hard to have meaningful historically based discussions about what America is or can be, when there's this entrenched idea that the 50s are the most accurate sample of the American past, and that its mores and values existed in steady state from the Revolution until the countercultural revolution. That's far from true - the US has swung back and forth many times from socially conservative to socially progressive, politically reactionary and conservative to politically expansionist and welfare-oriented, and even family life never really resembled the family life of the 50s until the 50s - and then never again did after. The only real analogue to the 50s in American history is probably the 1870s-early 80s, when Victorian middle-class values reigned and people were similarly prosperous and not interested in social upheaval, but apart from that, America had not always been locked in a conservative straitjacket before the 60s arrived.

This is one reason I love historians and sociologists who write accessible history, like Jim Loewen and Jill Lepore. They really help set the record straight by providing new reference points for the past, based on evidence, and put the detail, surprise, shock, and nuance back into the American past.
posted by Miko 11 February | 09:19
Hi bunnies! Got camera recommendations? || OMG BUNNY (with a beard)

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