palmer_eldritch's Journal

Mostly because I'm not posting on LJ today
From a Guardian article about 1968:

I wasn't even born in 1968, but the year's events - and in particular, the French end of things - have long filled me with generational envy. In 1988 the 20th anniversary seemed to make everything clear, when a brilliant Channel 4 season revealed what my lot seemed to be lacking: the rebel mindset, certainly, but also a strain of politics so all-encompassing that it seemed dizzying. Two decades on, we were presented with pop culture timidly pulling away from any meaningful engagement, and a left fragmenting into arcane irrelevance or the dominance of single issues. Our predecessors seemed to have confidently taken issue with just about everything.

This makes me want to cry. I recently read a David Lodge novel about academics in universities in California and in the uk (set in 1969 I think). It was written only a few years into the 70s. At the end one of the characters talks about a generational divide between the middle age academics and the students. He talks about the public/private distinction and about how what's really important for him is his private life; his family, his career etc. But for the students political/public issues are as important as personal issues. Throughout all my years of left-wingery I don't think that politics was ever really "so all encompassing that it seemed dizzying". I'm just a bit jealous really!

[And no, I'm not justifying communism here or anything, just saying that I'm jealous.]