It is a queer fact, indeed, that none of the most outspoken and anti-authoritarian radicals in this country are under 65-years-old.
Queer because radicalism and the job of saying fuck you! to the bureaucratic versions of mom and dad have traditionally fallen to much younger men and women; men and women who, as they approach early adulthood, are suddenly outraged to find how disinterested the dominant culture is in their ideals and their passions and their deep desire to live, perhaps even raise a family, in a saner society.
One thinks of Voltaire, Rimbaud, Phil Oches, the young Picasso, the Beats, the Yippies, the hippies, the Panthers, Warhol’s Factory riffraff, the Gen X, Y and Z-ers, that sort of thing. One doesn’t typically think of somebody who might smell a little poopy or somebody who is likely to loose his teeth in a sneeze or who might proclaim loudly and repeatedly that Velcro, microwave ovens and cable television are newfangled and faddish and cockamamie.
Regardless, when Howard Zinn died last week at 87 there was something about the silencing of his voice that seemed unfair and tragic. How could a spirit that was so intellectually vibrant and forward-thinking and balls-to-the-wall energetic die, literally, of old age? It was like reading the impossible headline: James Dean Dies in Porsche 550 Spyder at Age 91. It struck me as absolute bullshit.
In fact, losing Zinn only compounded the loss, over the last 5 years, of fellow radicals such as Vonnegut and Mailer and Terkel and Said, whose interpretations of the day’s events and predictions of future woes, like Zinn’s, were often so relentlessly honest and thought-provoking and dead-on that the society can only become markedly less provocative and decidedly less thoughtful and increasingly more ill-prepared for whatever comes without them.
Specifically, who are the public intellectuals, freelance or otherwise, whose social commentary and wry observations and self-examinations can be relied upon to advance the species forward and to deepen our collective and happy misunderstanding why we’re all here? Who will be left once Chomsky and Sahl and Vidal and Allen and Scheer and Krassner disappear?
I can’t think of anybody …
{ 11 comments }
