I was two years old in 1967 when the “Summer of Love” skipped Detroit.
Alas, while in San Francisco all you needed was love, in Detroit we needed the National Guard. Even so, as hippies were taking the brown acid and I was crawling for another jar of Gerber’s strained bananas, the Left’s infantile antics and ironies were then beyond my musings (the foremost of which, at that time, probably had to do with who would change my diaper—ASAP!).
Only post-Pampers did I learn, somewhere along the assembly line of force-fed, ubiquitous, and interminable spasms of Baby Boomer romantic nostalgia, that the Left had coined the latter stages of the 1960s “the Age of Aquarius.”
And my Gen X slacker intellect wondered, “Why?”
Plucked from a song in the musical “Hair,” the lyrics captured all the “New Left”— well, the hippies basically—claimed it would achieve:
Peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind’s true liberation
Aquarius!
How this would be achieved is left to one’s imagination—though, in fairness, many ’60s radicals did cite LSD. When this would be achieved was less nebulous, per the song:
When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Unfortunately, per Wikipedia (forgive me) and astrologer Neil Spencer (ditto), the lyrics are “‘astrological gibberish’, [because] Jupiter aligns with Mars several times a year and the moon is in the 7th House for two hours every day.”
I have no idea what the hell that means, but I do know the sun is setting on the New Left’s Baby Boomers, and by no means are they going gently into that good night or anywhere else on God’s green earth. Just ask the next generation of Democratic Party leadership—if you can find where their Baby Boomer brethren have buried them.
No, in the time remaining to them, the New Left’s Baby Boomers are still bent on achieving their ends “by any means necessary”; and, though possessing the aforementioned penchant for self-aggrandizing retrospection, the New Left lacks a similar desire for self-assessment. Thus, if for no other reason than to predict what manner of things they’ll do next, with the help of their slogan-song’s lyrics, it falls to us to chart their progress to date.
“Peace will guide the planets”: Communist China’s put a man in space.
“Love will steer the stars”: ISIS begs to differ.
“Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding”: Not in the Swamp.
“No more falsehoods or derisions”: The Russia-gate myth.
“Golden living dreams of visions”: Pot is legal.
“Mystic crystal revelation”: Unless it contradicts Leftist groupthink.
“And the mind’s true liberation”: The PC police are arresting free speech.
Even when graded on a curve with bonus points for persistent attendance (New Left Baby Boomers are always on hand and punctual, especially when uninvited), the above warrants a failing grade.
Ah, but the New Left’s Baby Boomers are the first to admit this—and blame everybody else.
What the New Left’s Baby Boomers have never understood is that their aims, while seemingly laudable in the abstract, are impossible in practice: millennia of history reveals the intractable imperfection of humanity. Thus, unwilling to accept the limits of our human condition and toil for what can be, the New Left’s Baby Boomers persist in demanding that what “can’t be,” “must be.” Inevitably frustrated in their delusory dream of recreating flawed humanity in the image of a terrestrial Eden, the “Age of Aquarius” has become a march through the institutions with the aid of coercion, be it through the organized power of the state or the anarchic power of the street.
Ergo, the fatal intrinsic contradiction of the New Left Baby Boomers. With “Love” and “Hate” tattooed on each hand, peace and violence are equivalent means situationally justified to wrest about their arbitrarily defined “greater good.” The “Sunshine Superman” and “Street Fighting Man” are strange bedfellows heralded in the struggle for “social justice”; the San Francisco and Detroit of 1967 are commemorated as milestones on the serpentine path to Progressivism’s dead end; and, in brutal sum, why the New Left ideology has degenerated from fantasy to hypocrisy.
Their taste for power whetted and unabated, characteristically the New Left’s Baby Boomers will cling to power the way a soiled diaper clings to one’s backside, an image that probably “sticks” a little too close for comfort for much of their anile leadership. Hence, sane Americans must remain ever vigilant as the last gasps of this dying idiocy as its aging acolytes desperately bid for their last chance at remaking America into a Ukrainian paradise, circa 1921.
So, “Gimme Shelter”; liberty or death; and a jar of strained bananas. “It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall” during the dwining of the Age of Aquarius.
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