The 'sons of Tricky-Dicky' and the soft soaping of history.(Critical essay)(Decade overview)

'No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of Tricky-Dicky Is gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me With just a pocketful of hope'

John Lennon, 'Gimme some truth', 1971

Sung in defiant rage at a time when numerous institutions of political authority faced serious challenges to their legitimacy, Lennon's words might now seem dated, if not histrionic and a little precious--especially for those who might want to treat 'the Sixties' with dismissive disdain. In 1971 Lennon was announcing his refusal to go along with those who routinely presented hypocrisy and lies as political truths. Hence the recurring refrain of the title within the song: 'All I want is some truth, just gimme some truth'. (1) But Lennon's concern extended beyond fulminating against the obvious forms of political dishonesty. He was declaring (and inviting his audience to share) his opposition to a specific way of imagining and engaging with one's world. He refused to accept that those in positions of authority, especially those wielding political power, could be trusted any longer to act in the public interest for the general good. And to drive the point home he personified such authority as the 'short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of Tricky-Dicky'. While this was an obvious allusion to the then-President of the USA, Richard Nixon, it also named an ascendant world-view. This was an outlook that was conservative in its social values but radically sleazy in its contempt for longstanding legal principles, social justice and political equality. (2)

Little did Lennon realise that the 'Tricky-Dicky' values he railed against were only the beginning, or that the pedlars of those values would have 'heirs' occupying positions of political influence and power some thirty years later. (3) William Greider interpreted the neo-liberal rollback of the broad social reforms of the twentieth century, largely exemplified by the development of the welfare state in the period from 1945 to 1975, as an attempt to 'invalidate the twentieth century'. (4) In this respect he was pointing to the economic dynamics that were intimately linked to an ongoing range of cultural contradictions (5) that, as Frankel has argued, are part of the 'structural and cultural transformations in contemporary capitalist societies during the past few decades'. (6) These are the transformations that have come to be referred to as the 'culture wars', at least in the USA; in Australia they have taken the label 'history wars'. (7) While these two 'wars' might appear to be different, their centres of gravity are very much shaped by the same concerns. Both are deep-seated manifestations of ongoing attempts to 'invalidate the twentieth century'. Both resonate with hostility to a range of values that John Lennon, as a cultural figurehead of the Sixties, might be thought to symbolise.

The object of hostility is broadened further to the years that are presumed to have given rise to these values, namely the 'decade' of the Sixties, a period with equal parts of turbulence and great expectations (the latter often inspiring the former). As Marcus wrote in 1975, despite the 'smug, self-righteous, or naive' pronouncements of the participants of those times, the Sixties remains (at least in some historical depictions) 'a time of greater cultural and political freedom than most of us will likely know again'. (8) While this is probably an exaggeration on Marcus's part (other periods might also lay claim, however briefly, to the mantle of great cultural and political freedom), the point to be stressed is that the Sixties represented a peaking of attempts to make real various political freedoms--attempts that had been waged in various forms over many years preceding the Sixties. What is at issue in the culture wars goes beyond contesting particular individual values. For critics of the Sixties, two issues are fundamental. One is the concern to contest the sensibility, a particular way of imagining and engaging with the world, that reached a peak in the 1960s and which could be said to characterise the period. (9) The other issue is with ensuring that this sensibility is soft-soaped or blurred, if not erased from the historical memory.

Consequently, the meanings of the Sixties have become heavily contested. Through various discursive strategies sometimes involving benevolent patronising, ridicule, or denigration, the view of many scholars (10) has been to reinterpret or dismiss the ideas and values associated with the Sixties. (11) Even those who would place themselves on the progressive side of politics have produced mixed judgments as to the period's worth and significance. (12) Other scholars have produced works that appear to offer no obvious partisan position. (13) Whatever the position though, most of these accounts remain unsatisfactory because, with the possible exception of Sayres et al. and Anderson, they have been unable to take seriously the political ramifications of the sensibility noted by Bromell and Marcus. Within the bounds of academic scholarship, only Stephens appears to have provided a fully nuanced analysis that pays due heed to these issues as well as refusing to be co-opted by the dominant, largely negative narratives of the Sixties. (14) The overwhelmingly negative message of much of this scholarship is reinforced further by the cultural representations of the Sixties in film, television and other popular media which, almost without exception, caricature it as a time of youthful excess, hedonistic abandon, and mindless disdain for authority. (15)

This paper takes as its point of departure the sensibilities described by Bromell, Marcus, and Stephens. (16) It is argued that the culture wars/history wars, in their various guises, are attempts to contain and neutralise a way of imagining or envisioning the world that is most commonly associated with the Sixties. The particular ideas and values that informed these visions were many and varied. Of central importance, however, was the idea that the future did not have to reproduce the present (or the past): that the past was not the tyrant of the present. Equally important was the idea that social change, in a positive sense, was desirable and possible. That these ideas often found expression in grandiose or naive or even misguided formulations was not the point. The point was that a better, more equal world could be imagined and, just as importantly, that it was possible to bring it into being. This is what I take to be the heart and soul of the Sixties. However, this does not mean that these values and ways of being were uniformly shared or upheld, only that they were central to the animus of those years.