http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/7061-greed-a-the-aquarian-conspiracy.html
By Nicholas F. Benton
August 04 2010
After 23 years, Oliver Stone is back with a sequel to his prophetic,
December 1987 release of "Wall Street," the movie that has indicted
the entire three-decade era from before 1980 to the great global
economic meltdown of 2008. Gordon Gekko, the character played by
Michael Douglas, delivered the chilling speech in that film that
continued to echo through the subsequent decades, and has been
repeated and replayed especially often in the last two years.
"Greed, for lack of a better word," he intoned to a room full of
shareholders, "is good."
Wall Street types still wet their pants when they hear those words,
as they furiously resist any obstacles that the Obama administrations
throws in the path of realizing that twisted vision. The GOP has
bought into it totally, now a curious alliance of the uber-wealthy,
their admirers and America's lunatic fringe.
It will be interesting to see, given the events of the last two
years, what Mr. Stone presents in his sequel film, due out in late
September, entitled, "Wall Street, Money Never Sleeps." Douglas is
back as Gekko, and Charlie Sheen is back as Bud Fox.
How did the country shift so dramatically between two great oratories
in the late 20th century, from Martin Luther King's immortal "I Have
a Dream" speech of 1963 to Gordon Gekko's equally unforgettable
"Greed is Good" only a couple decades later?
There was a great social paradigm shift that occurred starting in the
late 1960s that, in the context of the assassinations of King and
Robert Kennedy, tilted the nation dramatically away from popular
support for the kind of government-led efforts that began under FDR
and culminated in Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" and "The Great
Society" initiatives of the mid-1960s.
That shift is still manifest in a lot of what drives public and
social policy today, but it remains very poorly understood.
The nation was subjected to a massive, coordinated push to translate
years of anarchistic, hedonistic, nihilistic and Ayn Rand-style
libertarian theory into an action plan, unleashed out of think tanks
and university classrooms into the streets all across the nation,
infecting the fertile minds of legions of young people eager to break
with convention to bring about racial equality, an end to a terrible
war in Vietnam, and to liberate their personal lives from
conventional social mores.
Curiously enough, this counterinsurgency offensive was very neatly
chronicled in a book published in 1980, the year its work succeeded
in the election of Ronald Reagan and the shift of that movement into
the corridors of national power.
It is entitled, "The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social
Transformation in the 1980s," by Marilyn Ferguson.
Ironically, this is not a book aiming to expose a dark conspiracy. It
is, in fact, a book praising and extolling it, written by one of its
own activists, and replete with an appendix to tell readers how they,
too, could get involved.
It is a remarkably forthcoming testament to how the "movement" grew
and moved in on the socially-radicalized youth of the anti-war, civil
rights, women's and gay liberation movements. From the earlier-on
role of Aldous Huxley on Southern California campuses, to the Esalen
Institute in Big Sur, to the "post-modernists" in the philosophy
departments of colleges and universities all across America, the
"human potential movement" shaped young minds, with generous portions
of mind-altering drugs, against big government, against labor unions,
against technology, against responsibility in personal relationships
and in favor of a political "radical middle" that undercut
traditional liberal-left policies and institutions.
It obfuscated the structural differences between the rich and poor,
relegating fights against poverty to cult-like private sector
institutions, and by insinuating itself by way of religious cults
into transforming its mirror-image opposites in fundamentalist
churches to become politically active.
Among many others, for example, Karl Rove was an impressionable
student radical in the era when this stuff hit the consciousness of
the nation's young, and many of their rich and privileged daddies and
mamas were happy to see them get involved, despite their personal
distaste for long hair and free love.
It hasn't been that long since those days. For the record, this
seasoned activist has fought vigorously in his own way against those
forces since the early 1970s.
--
Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com
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