Stardate 20040429.1400

(Captain's log): Daniel writes:

I had a powerful "the truth is" moment this past Saturday, while I strolled through a packed Union Square Park (NYC) on a beautiful day, reading the banners (Stop Funding Terrorism--End US $upport for Israel, Stop American Imperialism in Iraq, etc.), browsing the Marxist books for sale at the activist stations, listening to a brashly charismatic youth on a megaphone explain how and why Bush engineered 9/11.

The truth is that it is now and forever more fun to be proud of your courageous stand against "the man," to make yourself part of society's salvation, than it is to stand in humble appreciation of civilization's great achievements and to see yourself as their beneficiary. It's more fun for other people, too, especially hipsters and hot chicks according to my Saturday stroll. The truth is...so damned easy to ignore. Thankfully, I didn't have a megaphone.

It's a pretty standard failing of the young to assume that disagreement is a demonstration of independence. But that can lead to a fallacious intellectual shortcut: I don't actually have to understand the situation in order to triumphantly prove that I'm independent of my parents; all I have to do is to disagree with them.

In fact, real independence requires coming to understand a situation and then making your decision without reference to how your parents may have decided. Sometimes that means you find yourself agreeing with them.

Every generation of young people feels a need to rattle the bars and to make changes, and to rebel against their parents. This is usually healthy, but it can become pathological. However, the most common and obvious manifestations are usually unimportant in the long run, in things like taste in clothing and music, and part of the appeal for the young is precisely the fact that their parents disapprove. So you had the flappers in the 1920's. In the 1930's young people were dealing with the Depression and didn't have the luxury of doing this kind of thing, and in the 1940's there was the war. But in the 1950's you had greasers, and in the 1960's there were hippies. In the 1970's hippiedom led to the freaks (me), and that kind of thing hasn't stopped happening. Modern kids are into strange hair styles, weird hair colors, tattoos and body piercing, and among the greatest appeal of all those things is the simple fact that their parents disapprove.

The 1950's also saw the beatniks. I vaguely remember them, but more because of the character Maynard G. Krebs from the TV comedy Dobie Gillis. (When Maynard finally grew out of his rebellious phase, he became Gilligan.)

The beatniks were non-conformists. They were independent; they were into cool and jazz and obscure poetry and modern art. And there was an amazing degree of uniformity amongst them in styles of clothing, and in ways of talking, and in attitudes and values; it was almost like there was some official "non-conformist" way of dressing and an official "non-conformist" set of attitudes and values to which these "non-conformists" all closely conformed.

There was a lot of ridicule about their presumption of "non-conformity". The beatniks were lampooned quite a lot by Mad Magazine, for instance. Because, of course, it was not the case that they were non-conformists. They just conformed to a different standard.

In the 1970's the Women's liberation movement worked to break the hold of traditional stereotypes of women's roles in life. In the 1980's, it ran into an existential crisis from which I don't think it ever really recovered. (Rather, it fractured and the pieces never really recombined.)

In order to break the hold of "barefoot and pregnant" and other equivalently constraining molds, the movement created its own ideal of what a woman should be and pushed it hard: the woman who had it all. She was married, but was not a slave to her husband. She had a career which challenged and satisfied her, but she also had children. "I am woman, hear me roar!"

But in the 1980's a lot of women, especially younger women, rebelled against this new role. Women should not be forced into choosing between the wife-and-mother role or the subservient-secretary role or the elementary-schoolteacher role or a limited number of others; that part was fine.

But the more radical members of the women's movement ultimately decided that any woman who ended up in such a role must have been a victim of oppression. She might have been forced into that position by direct coercion, or she might be a victim of pervasive indoctrination and brainwashing, but either way it meant she was not "liberated".

So pre-liberation women nearly all occupied one of those roles, and therefore no "liberated" woman could be permitted to occupy any of them.

The rebels (or reactionaries, depending on your point of view) rejected that. Though many women had been forced into such roles in the past, and perhaps many still were, the problem was that the women's movement implicitly rejected the idea that any woman might actually want to be a wife-and-mother. The rebels/reactionaries claimed that if the only achievement of the movement was to trade old roles for new ones, then no one had been liberated.

True liberation meant free choice for women, and that meant that some of them would choose the roles the move