Passionate Detachments by Amy Rust

Author:Amy Rust
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.4. Rock music: one of the era’s many rituals of authentication (Gimme Shelter, 1970).

Still, the rebellion that joined dominant to counterculture—the latter increasingly and contradictorily mainstream—also exacerbated distinctions between the two spheres, particularly as ecstasy turned violent in the popular imaginary. It is the case, of course, that small segments of American youth did participate in acts of physical violence as the 1960s came to a close. Protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the Weather Underground’s 1969 Days of Rage were, like the Stones concert at Altamont, only the most prominent examples. It is also the case, however, that American media increasingly covered only the most violent youth actions, cleaving them from “nonviolent”—though certainly confrontational—activities such as marches, strikes, and sit-ins. “Even when events were virtually violence-free,” writes historian Melvin Small, “journalists pointed that out at the beginning of their stories or in headlines, … reinforcing the notion that demonstrations meant violence” and—I would add—that nonviolent tactics somehow evaded coercion (162). Thus fracturing the youth movement, popular accounts gave prominence to its most immoderate factions, the participants of which answered the press in kind.

As a result, young people seemed to stand more and more outside the confines of conventional culture, consolidating fantasies of extremism among those who supported and opposed it. For one side, marginality promised authentic rebellion, or so people of color, especially African Americans—from Harlem hipsters to civil rights activists to Black Power militants—appeared to attest. At odds with the “silent majority,” young radicals believed themselves similarly subjugated. To respond to violence with violence was, therefore, to generate a repressive, and thereby revelatory, response. For the other side, violent provocations disclosed nothing, however, except perhaps a generation bent on apocalypticism for its own sake.

And yet, because each side saw only the other’s self-serving brutality, they misrecognized the visions of violence—popular, apocalyptic, and articulated in otherness—that, in fact, entwined them both. In particular, they missed the way in which people of color—and African Americans in particular—defined their cultural differences. According to Rossinow, urban riots between 1965 and 1968 “left a deep imprint on many conservative Americans, driving them further to the political right. They associated violence,” he continues, “with black Americans, not whites” (271). Leftist radicals made similar assumptions, though they admired rather than maligned the brutality in question. Notes former Weatherman Jeff Jones:

People like the Vietnamese and, in this country, people in the black community, especially people like the Black Panther Party, were in a state of revolutionary warfare. The question was: Were we going to join that war on terms equal to what black people or Vietnamese people were doing, or were we going to continue to use our privilege as white people as an excuse for not accepting the same level of risk? (311)

Here, overcoming alienation means emulating those whose lives are on the line. Doing so may challenge middle-class banality, but it also contributes to fantasies of violence as authentically “other” at the same time.

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