The sixties

Much can be explained about today by accepting that older people have a great deal of nostalgia for life in the late sixties. For instance, older people want to see the Iraq war with the same lenses they saw Vietnam, as if their generation is the expert about such things. Indeed, it does seem to me that culture made great leaps at that time. In particular, it is obvious that the music of that era was head-and-shoulders above that of this era, both in quality and originality. Not only that, great accomplishment were made in civil rights and we actually managed to send men to the moon and back. Cultural advances came in leaps and bounds. Why?

What most seem to agree on is that during that time, on average, people rather quickly became much more permissive in their sexual morals. This permissiveness I do believe is responsible for the sudden advancement of the arts. Even in the sciences, it seems to have had no bad effect. But you have to ask yourself, What went wrong? Why for instance did we end up with the crummy music (on average) of the Reagan years? I suggest the reason is simple. Becoming more permissive is mostly all for the good so long as you don't get screwed-up. And if a girl does become sexually permissive and imprudent in some general indiscriminate sense, she is likely to get screwed-up, but her fall is not something that is going to happen immediately. It is not as though once people in the sixties decided to be sexually carefree they all immediately ran to their nearest drug dealer and sodomizer for depraved kicks. No, doubtless it took time for them to get screwed-up. More especially did it take time, because presumably only after a good many people started enjoying depravity did it seem very plausible that such depravity was something that a carefree nature might want. So after a people becomes imprudently carefree, there is a little time where the people are artistically profound because they now lack the artistically repressive false stupid prudish fears yet still haven't had time to be encumbered by the impure defiling of depravity notwithstanding they have abandoned beautiful and reasonable prudence.

If my theory is right, it would seem that when a society suddenly becomes more sexually permissive, one would expect a sudden cultural advancement, especially in the arts, but it would not tend to last very long, and would tend to be followed by a screwed-up period of little cultural advancement. It would be interesting to study whether history bears that out quite generally.

Anyway, I can't see the Iraq war has many points of resemblance to the Vietnam War. The South Vietnamese government was corrupt—though I am not an expert about the war, I trust that whatever the difference was, there wasn't the night-and-day difference in terms of virtue between the two sides fighting. In Iraq, however, it is perfectly obvious that Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists are quite evil in comparison with the democracy-desiring coalition forces. I think the surprising amount of vehement opposition to the Iraq war has a good deal to do with people's attitudes toward the sixties. Young people then made such great artistic advancements, and naturally (the Vietnam War being stupid) it was the anti-war artists who mostly made these advances, so there is the tendency to believe that if we can somehow rekindle the anti-war sentiments, we'll end up with cool music, a more beautiful freer love, great sex, etc., etc., etc. And if there is going to be free love and great sex in the new anti-war movement, many will not want to be left out or thought the new kind of "square". It all seems rather silly to me. The sixties are over and done with. People don't need to be sexually more permissive, and they don't need to be sexually more puritanical, it's six the one half a dozen the other. What is needed now as ever is discrimination between selfish loveless prudishness and prudence. Too many people don't know the difference between love, the most beautiful thing there is, and getting screwed in the hindquarters, the most disgusting. Why? Because on the one hand, right-wing cold women want their cold sexually loveless selfish prudishness to be viewed as just not wanting their hindquarters to get screwed, while on the other, left-wing sodomites want not wanting your hindquarters to get screwed to be viewed as cold loveless prudishness. Evil is strongest the one place it is united, and where evil is most united is in identifying prudishness with prudence, depravity with love.