TALK

TALK

How everything good in the 60’s got reversed in the ‘06’s


I. THEN

In the 60’s, talk was therapeutic.

It “cleared the air”. The times opened up several new venues:

-stone rap sessions
-open mics at rallies
-getting together in groups to talk everything out
-in conversation: listening to another speaking in their own way until finished;
-and, perhaps most importantly, learning not to interrupt the near sacred silence in the air after everything that needs saying has been.

This last is perhaps most important because it preserves continuity of relatedness. There is nothing to go back to, get out, or get over later.

This deepens the veins of communication. Books with names like “Deep Subjectivity” appeared on tables at the American Philosophical Association the last time I went. Confessional poetry and explain-it-all literature abounded. Talk of various drug highs abounded, with LSD trippers always getting the last word on the far out. Ecstatic states, re-birthing trauma, peak experiences, parapsychology, channeling, cults, revival of ancient gnostic and esoteric traditions ...all new head-spaces calling for communication. As a totality, what was opened up from the psychic depths of human experience went far beyond the ability of any single person to master, everyone was totally a part of it in their way. No doubt much was lost in what was only there, then. Each his his thing, his way, and that was also a new dimension of privacy the World (speaking esoterically) would be jealous of.

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-This phenomenon repeats the mechanism of Freud’s “talking therapy” at the generational group level, but wasn’t carried through. The very term “baby boomers” (in-joke for post WWII brats who protested Vietnam) is a belittling self-image condescension they have worn to hel

In opening up new lines of communication with each other, the youth were acting out what was necessary to reclaim their humanity under the conditions the times imposed. The act of talking, itself, with free, unjudged associations, has the effect of integration and healing.

This goes with the idea that communication is sublimated sexual intercourse. “Cutting off talk” is sealing the libido barrier; also, coitus interruptus. “Suunis Suspend Talks” with Shiites in Iraq cuts the bonds of a unity government, and was therefore reversed, it was announced next day. “Unity government” is a libido-token now backed by force of the U.S. military. The message: “You will get along (whether you like each other or not)”. Such a policy predicates on a conjunction of internalized opposites that stand no chance of ever getting worked through by open, full, honest talk. This is another illustration of the self-defeating logic of this policy.

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II. NOW

Far from Therapeutic, Talk can be poisonous

There are mechanisms involved in the neuro-psychological processing apparatus, according to Freud, that can convert libido into substances toxic to the healthy system. The effect of carrying reverse-text-token dichotomies by group value-identification terms, I think it can be shown, is one of them.

This being the hypothesis, the task of tracing what happened between the 60’s and the ‘06’s can be narrowed to the focus on how the anti-liberal forces hi-jacked group communication using such terms.

There were three major components, or ‘moments’ of the right-wing reclamation project: Talk Radio as style; Right-wing themes as content(e.g., “Feminazi”); take-out of content tokened at a displaced textual level.

These can be succinctly illustrated by: Rush Limbaugh; his trademark double reverse put-down token “Feminazi” (reverses the charge of “nazi” from him to them, based on joking reversal of cruelty toward Jews); and, the attempt to impose democracy (oxymoronic conjunct) on Iraq.

For over two decades now, the dulcet tones of Rush Limbaugh have rippled through the radiowaves of the south, his “feminazis” shtick coined from back when the feminist movement briefly had its day. Radio itself, reviving old currents of imagination of subject matter, was re-emerging somewhat as urban sub-culture rival to soap-opera TV communication.

Children of the conservative counter movement to the ultra-liberal 60’s inherited its gains of deeper subjectivity, on-campus freedoms, accessibility to its media stars’ human side – along with the unreconstructed group-Father attitudes. This allowed them to process generational sibling-rivalry bonds latent in the “baby boomers” in moralistic terms. Those who could regard themselves as having kept faith with the Fathers who foisted off Vietnam could grammatize their reactions to the rebellious ones as having defied not only the law, but principles of duty and God. In short, of having gone to the devil; become “sinful”. Thus they gave themselves permission to appropriate all the quips, gestures, slang words, insights of the “lost” psychedelic sub-culture; thinking to redeem, and to renew them and themselves through youth church ties. Thus all America could be brought closer to God by the next generation or two, the thinking likely went.

Reversal of “liberal” as positive token for permissiveness, for which the 60’s was most noted, to negative token carrying latent judgment of The Almighty, was accomplished, in talk, by Ronald Reagan, using the “abortion issue” as content. What is most ecstatically positive, organically speaking, is the sexual climax, the involuntary orgasmic release response, in W. Reich’s terms. This, the most powerful dynamic motivational component in the instinctual drive to reproduce the species, is not grammatized in the public forum where the Father’s presence has dominated parental group discourse. Preventing women in general from sharing volupuosities of the orgasm reflex may, indeed, have been one of the deeper unconscious motives of male God religion. In any case, the Return of the Repressor, Reagan, survivor of the bullet thrown at him by readers of Pierre Salinzer, is able to smear the entire Woodstock generation experience with blows from the bully pulpit. “Liberals”. The way he said it. The greata communicator. “Support the abortion industry,” Archbishop John O’Connor adds, comparing the slaughter of the unborn to the Nazi holocaust of Jews.

This is only one, though a major one, of the reversals in sign-use brought by Reagan. Another was use of “Contras” for “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua. As something we were supposed to be for, if we supported Reagan, this text reversed that, even as events on the ground reversed the token of democracy. (These were hired killers of Somaza’s old regime defeated by the Sandanistas.)

The pivot of the reversal is always attachment of something judgmental and punitive, associated with a sexual matter, to some necessary, would-be-positive element in the group dynamic situation. The conjunction suffocates the would-be-positive element; blackens it; makes it poisonous. To love “The Contras”?


The ’06 terminus of TALK TAKEOVER is in the oxymoron of “imposed democracy”: Overthrowing the head of state of a foreign government – “regime change” – on the pretext of imminent threat to U.S. security; ….

With a pre-arranged plan of setting up an international corporate bazzar for the helping nations and industries afterward, rubber stamped by a politics claiming to represent ‘the Iraqi people’, but actually manipulated behind the scenes. And a foreign policy pre-scripted by the neocons to attack Iran next.

The deep connection is this. “Democracy”, as a form of government, is based on the same instinct of a group of people to “talk it out”, as emerged full force in the 60’s. Such it was on Athens’ podium in Socrates trial. There are accusations, charges, and a response. After both sides are heard, they vote. But this can only manifest at the high peak that Greek civilization had reached at the time. Where there is a built-in systematic bias, the requirement of hearing both sides before impartial judges, essential to justice in the objective sense, is defeated. One defense of democracy as a form of government is that it makes for an inherently more peaceful nation. Whether true or not, this idea is a repetition of the 60’ talking revolution, exported to Iraq, where the conditions for it working do not exist, by those who picked up on the external “that” (the text of democracy) without knowing its “what” (feeling toward the tokens that make it work)

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In sum. The good functions of talk, per se -- cleansing attitude, emptying emotion, balancing judgment – reverse into their opposite when used in the right-wing political reaction. Instead, it conjoins what is highest with a neutralizing bring-down, anti-ecstatic opposite; biases attitudes; and unbalances judgment. All because the deep motive for talk as public activity has shifted from positive purposes – freedom and creativity – to reactive control. The latter is not always negative and is of course so regarded by those who are pro-Bush and the “war on terror”, but if these arguments are correct, in today’s context, they have been spun in opposition to true liberalism to sustain an entirely illusional reality.

When the text does not square with its token’s context, it does liberate but enslaves.