Politics, Humor and the Counterculture: Laughter in the Age of Decay

By Vwadek P. Marciniak

Conclusion

The Modern Age, or Modern History, are now misnomers. They were farsighted misnomers centuries ago, when they were coined and put into intellectual currency by our ancestors who were overoptimistic in this regard; they took the growing and sprouting landscape of new trees for a perennial forest opening up around them. They are shortsighted misnomers now. Sometime in the future the now closing period of history will receive another name.

The war beginning in 1914 left us with attempts at nearly continuous wars; old habits are hard to break even if they have little or no positive applicability. Little wonder that in the days of Korea and Vietnam there was a growing countercultural drive towards pacifism. The young sensed that the modern concept of nationalism and its wars were dated, if not bankrupt.

We also entered into the new technological and electronic era with all its toys, distractions, new addictions and forces that inherently alienated us from our natural and inherent order. We now live in a global, not a national economy. Finally, we exist in a mass society without fixed class or community. Here the difference between the poor and the rich is that the poor have a 19-inch old television and the rich have a 60-inch flat screen TV in a viewing room with many thousands of dollars in sound equipment. The poor may drive but their vehicle is an older rusted Chevy that many are still paying for while the rich drive a brand new payed-for Mercedes Benz. In other words even class becomes difficult to define except monetarily.

The changes in the past half century of our social order are even more dramatic, being in some ways incomprehensible, at least for a good many. Most Americans in polls taken at the beginning of our new millennium agree that something is very wrong even if they cannot define the problems.

I would say that one of the problems is the emphasis placed on money and images. There is nothing inherently wrong with making money. The problem begins when you make an iconography of the process which we do from the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business and other business magazines as well to television’s own MSNBC Money channel. Most financially successful people do not believe in making a profit because they are caught up in the ultimate addiction of today’s society—greeditus. How many of these folk think they are good Christians when they are dedicated to one or more of the seven deadly sins—not only greed but the deadliest of them all, pride?

The humor presented here notes some of these issues in part because this humor can be termed as “radical,” a term well expressed as action in the 1960s. From the creation of the birth control pill and the corollary sexual revolution to legal abortions to beards and short skirts the old order began to flounder. From the civil rights and
women’s “movements” (a popular term of the age) to the assassination of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Senator Bob Kennedy, the shocks and sense of change were huge. It seemed that the center would not hold. We had the Cuban Missile Crisis and the rise of “teach-ins” about the war at colleges and universities as well as the creation of Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act and the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities; it was not difficult for bright young people to see change everywhere. For example, there were the riots in 1966 and 1967 in major cities, such as Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and Baltimore with the “Long Hot Summer” ending with a three-day riot in Newark that left 26 dead followed by the Chicago riots during the Democratic convention.

From the “flower children” to communes to “be-ins” as well as sections
of cities given over to the hip like the East Village and Haight-Ashbury, the revolution in music took hold. The most famous was “We Shall Overcome” of 1960, followed by classics like “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” (1961), “Blowin’ in The Wind” (1962), “The Times They Are A-Changing” (1963), and “Give Peace A Chance” (1969). The mood of these tunes should be called radical.

What is radical? Because of my own studies dealing with this term I would suggest a working definition as follows: Suppose you have a nice bicycle you use every morning for school or work and every morning the front tire is flat. If you are a conservative you will simply get the air pump out an put air in it since it has so far proven to be a slow leak and thus only a problem during the morning after it has been locked up for the night. Now, if you are a liberal, you will take the tire off, take it apart to see that the inner tube has some 20 patches which now requires you to put on one more making for 21 patches. Fine. But if you’re a radical? You take the tube off the bike and see the patches, but in your case, you simply acquire a new inner tube and put it on the bike, thus resolving the problem completely.

Why this difference? A radical seeks the fundamental cause of an issue and thus attacks it at its source. In mathematics, the cause of the circle is the radii, and without that you have nothing but patches.

True, the Unites States may not be dominating the dance floor any longer, but it still has few steps left, the issue is how much of a pleasant, supportive and cooperative dance we can make of our time.

As for laughter, we have the following:

Laugh and the world laughs with you. Even better, you might live longer, a Norwegian researcher reported… Adults who have a sense of humor outlive those who don’t find life funny, and the survival edge is particularly large for people with cancer, says Sven Svebak of the medical school at Mowegian University of Science and Technology.

Out of the Phoenix, may you have a long and healthy laughter.