Seeking out our old Marxist professor January 7, 1985
We went back to WPC looking for something; I’m still not sure what.
In the midst of work and writing, we got a little lost,
desperate to get a clearer vision of the future, perhaps needing to get back on
the cutting edge of a new revolution.
Each generation needs its own revolution, and though I am
technically not a part of the current generation, I’ve adopted their revolution
as if it was mine.
I arrived slightly too late in the late 1960s to fully
embrace the revolution of that time, most of the heavy lifting already done by
the time I came on the scene, at a time when No Ideology became a buzz word,
and most rebels already rejected the war in Vietnam.
We came to the campus to seek out our old mentor, someone
who Michael always had a rocky relationship with, his generation seeing many of
the flaws the professor had, or perhaps simply felt slighted by the fact that
Ripmaster was a local icon for a movement Michael had missed by ten years or
more.
Ripmaster more than once had asked me why Michael disliked
him (when nearly every other would-be-radical of Michael’s age clamored to get
into those classes, so they might be instructed on how to become a good
radical). Ripmaster for all of his pontificating did not completely understand
the kind of rebellion Michael represented, a true No Ideology of the punk
movement that rejected everything, even the Marxism Ripmaster embraced.
Maybe the next generation will grow into Ripmaster’s vision.
Michael’s revolution is too wise and cynical to fall for the usual Marxist clap
trap, seeking some new firmer foundation on which to build the new movement.
Michael is not fooled the meanderings of the “New Left” upon
which so much of the 1960s was built and has been repackaged by people like Howard
Zinn and Noah Chomsky to resell to future generations, like bottled snake oil.
Ripmaster likes me because I am closer to his age, and carry
on my shoulders many of the mistaken notions of that day and age, the mixed up
repackaged crap from the Red Diaper era and Old Left of the 1930s, a mixed up, shook
up generation that became the hip movement Michael so thoroughly rejects – not because
the 1960s went too far, but because our generation did not go far enough.
Although I was not savvy to it at the time, our generation’s
revolution embraced the dismal philosophies of Camus, Sartre, and black humor,
bitter, frustrated writers with nothing positive to say about the world and no
better plan to lead us out of the demise of our industrial demise, spinning
their real wheels and producing a lot of burned rubber, without managing to go
anywhere.
Everything is based on isolation and misery, yet not
isolated enough, or miserable enough, still caught up in the Marxist belief
society can be rebuilt in we burn down the temple of capitalism and start over,
when Michael seems to believe it can’t be, shouldn’t be rebuilt at all,
especially not as a Marxist state.
I suspect future generations will more likely follow
Ripmaster’s vision than Michael’s, and will manufacture new philosophies based
on Mollenkott’s feminism, or the tree-hugging campus environmentalist, and the
movement started by the gays at Stonewall than they will the total annihilation
Michael would have.
People need ideology even if it is phony, seeking most often
to build the world out of the past – such as the new Reagan movement is, and
the new Marxist reaction to Reagan we all see being sold to us in classes like
Ripmaster’s.
Last year, I wasted a whole night at a Marxist dive on
Christopher Street listening to their ranting and raving when I realized within
the first few minutes just how full of shit they were. The whole pack was still
flush from some Marxist convention they had attended at Cooper Union a few days
earlier.
This new Marxist movement seems to be rising up Phoenix-like
from the ashes of the failed 1960s, at a time when Reagan-youth sit on top of
the world, little realizing just how fragile their platform is, drawn back in
time to religion and more fundamental believes the Marxists hate. They are as
infatuated with Reagan as my generation was with the Kennedys – a man whose martyrdom
helped push the radical agenda, just as the Civil Rights movement did, living
up to that old adage, give an inch, they’ll take a mile.
Each generation seems to have a motivating event. The 1930s
had the 1937 work riots. Earlier in the century we had the Triangle shirt
factory disaster.
Had Reagan died when
he got shot, the nation would have taken a serious turn to the right.
As it is, Reagan and his questionable policies in Central
America and elsewhere serve as a motivation for these deluded Marxists, inspiring
them to organize, and inspiring naïve people to follow them.
The Reagan revolution still relies on the World War II
generation, and the shift in unions to his side – little realizing unions are fickle
and indeed, unions paid for the buses that brought many of the WPC radicals to Washington
a few years ago to protest of over Reagan firing the air controllers.
The big change in the early Marxist movement is where they
recruit. In the bad old days, they ranted and raved in an effort to sway
workers to their side, now they invade schools where they can influence still
developing minds to their cause.
Perhaps this was the point of our return to WPC. Ripmaster complained
about apathetic students – like Michael – who seemed uninspired by his Marxist
propaganda. The Administration was controlled by conservatives (who indeed
brought Henry Kissinger to speak on campus) and had begun to defund many of the
leftist student organizations – who were largely populated by washed up has
been radicals from the past. He did not yet see the emerging new movements that
would turn campuses in Marxist training camps otherwise he might have held on
longer and been less depressed.
Ripmaster seemed to see only the New Right’s ability to
undermine the leftist programs, weaknesses that the emerging Marxists had
already learned to overcome, using racism, homophobia, environmental racism as building
blocks to a much firmer political revolution.
From his lofty ivory tower, Ripmaster saw only the losses of
the left that had fostered him, and seemed unaware of the uncurrent already threatening
to tear down the Reagan dynasty – although I suspect it might take years to
accomplish since revolution is a lot like hitting a dinosaur’s tail with a
hammer, it takes time for the message to get to the poor beast’s brain.
In many ways, the system itself is helping to spur on the
new Marxist revolution – new, questionably authored text books filled with
reinvented history with which to deviate pliable young minds away from the
classic belief of America as a nation of opportunity to a nation where people
of color are exploited – even though nearly all of the kids who are in college
got there due to opportunities America provided.
We have stuffed our schools with children from every race,
color and financial background and are selling them on the idea that they are
still oppressed.
Reagan has become the primary recruiting tool for the Marxists,
and the left seems to be coopting Reagan’s religious revival, by creating a new
movement based on superior morality, righteous indignation which lacks God, but
gives the left moral high ground (even if the whole thing is largely smoke and
mirrors, Marxists exploiting these children in much the way the right does).
The left even coopted Jesus Christ, turning him into a
revolutionary, even as the left desecrating the Church and its beliefs. The new
Sanctuary movement shows this diversion of Christians away from the right and
into the arms of the left when in the past people like Cardinal Spellman were
icons of conservativism.
I don’t think Ripmaster can see a time when these religious
movements become just one more tool that will allow Marxists to destroy traditional
values.
No doubt, there are movements emerging I can’t see either, more
issues the Marxists can exploit, more snake oil they can pour into the heads of
our youth, deluding kids into following a path to salvation that isn’t
salvation at all.
Michael would be appalled by such movements – not because he
agrees with Reagan, but because he knows all ideologies are bogus, a mask
hiding true intentions, and disguising the ultimate aim of all movements – a lust
for power.
For the disillusioned Ripmaster, the future is bright – even
if he cannot see past the smoke that obscures it.
For me, the future is just a recreation of the past, bearing
all of the delusion our ancestors had, a constant regurgitation of failed ideas
we cling to for lack of any real innovation.
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