Why the 60's were Good
Why the 60's were Good
Saturday, January 23, 2010
After reading an excerpt from his 1965 “Alabamy, With Hate,”
Harlan Ellison on why “The Sixties Were Good”:
"I know the 60s were good, and I’ll tell you why I know they were good.
"In the 60s and on into the 70s, you would go to a college and there was an electrical charge. There was a sense that people were weighing and evaluating-- that they were taking all the parts of society that we had lived with for over two hundred years, and they were sort of jostling them and shaking them up and seeing which ones would fall through the cultural sieve and which ones had enough weight and substance to stay.
"I’m not saying that there were not foolishness, love beads and people streaking ….
"When an entire decade--and we’re talking about a decade that runs from about 61-62 to about 75, so its more than 10 years-- but that era, when one talks about it in terms of its dumbest parts rather than its most noble parts, you know you are dealing with a prejudiced, with a closed and with a mean-spirited mind.
"And that’s what they invariably do. They don’t talk about any of the things they ought to: the emerging African nations, the civil rights movements, the feminist movement. They see the worst parts of all of these things because they fear change.
"These are the reactionary elements that have been in our society since the very beginning
"We have been always a fiercely anti-intellectual nation, fiercely anti-intellectual: 'If you are so smart why arent you wealthy?' Or 'You cant fight city hall.' Or 'Who the hell do you think you are?' Or 'I’m entitled to my own opinion!'
No, schmuck! You are not entitled to your opinion. You’re entitled to your informed opinion. Without information, it’s just babble, hot air, and farts to wind. So the 60s was a period in which a lot of things were questioned."
================================================
The excerpt he had been reading from -- "Alabamy, With Hate” 1965
"The 25th of March. Fifty thousand people walking the red-mud roads of Alabama, singing; the outsiders, come to tell a crazed bigot that the Civil War was long dead, that a house divided was soon to topple, that the state of evil that Alabama had become would no longer be tolerated in a United States.
"The Freedom March on Montgomery Alabama: A Biased Report. And if you weren’t marching with us, go screw yourself."
From the documentary, “Dreams with Sharp Teeth”
http://www.documentaryfilms.net/index.php/dreams-with-sharp-teeth
Available at Amazon and Netflix
Saturday, January 23, 2010
After reading an excerpt from his 1965 “Alabamy, With Hate,”
Harlan Ellison on why “The Sixties Were Good”:
"I know the 60s were good, and I’ll tell you why I know they were good.
"In the 60s and on into the 70s, you would go to a college and there was an electrical charge. There was a sense that people were weighing and evaluating-- that they were taking all the parts of society that we had lived with for over two hundred years, and they were sort of jostling them and shaking them up and seeing which ones would fall through the cultural sieve and which ones had enough weight and substance to stay.
"I’m not saying that there were not foolishness, love beads and people streaking ….
"When an entire decade--and we’re talking about a decade that runs from about 61-62 to about 75, so its more than 10 years-- but that era, when one talks about it in terms of its dumbest parts rather than its most noble parts, you know you are dealing with a prejudiced, with a closed and with a mean-spirited mind.
"And that’s what they invariably do. They don’t talk about any of the things they ought to: the emerging African nations, the civil rights movements, the feminist movement. They see the worst parts of all of these things because they fear change.
"These are the reactionary elements that have been in our society since the very beginning
"We have been always a fiercely anti-intellectual nation, fiercely anti-intellectual: 'If you are so smart why arent you wealthy?' Or 'You cant fight city hall.' Or 'Who the hell do you think you are?' Or 'I’m entitled to my own opinion!'
No, schmuck! You are not entitled to your opinion. You’re entitled to your informed opinion. Without information, it’s just babble, hot air, and farts to wind. So the 60s was a period in which a lot of things were questioned."
================================================
The excerpt he had been reading from -- "Alabamy, With Hate” 1965
"The 25th of March. Fifty thousand people walking the red-mud roads of Alabama, singing; the outsiders, come to tell a crazed bigot that the Civil War was long dead, that a house divided was soon to topple, that the state of evil that Alabama had become would no longer be tolerated in a United States.
"The Freedom March on Montgomery Alabama: A Biased Report. And if you weren’t marching with us, go screw yourself."
From the documentary, “Dreams with Sharp Teeth”
http://www.documentaryfilms.net/index.php/dreams-with-sharp-teeth
Available at Amazon and Netflix
posted by Mario | 5:54 PM
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