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Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty
The San Francisco Chronicle published one of the most famous phrases of the 1960's free speech student protest in 1964. The Chronicle has pay-walled their entire digital collection dating back to 1865. People who are interested in this historical topic are unable to see it in context. This is not the optimal way for a paper to maintain it's traditional historiographical role.
There are four articles in the Chronicle archive which include "Jack Weinberg" from November 1964 (15, 18, 23, 26). One of these quote's Weinberg, "Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty." This piece of 60's rhetoric was contested by student leftists and conservative reactionaries. It is the lead in to Timothy Leary's "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Leary's 1966 album explaining the quote is available on youtube. Leary advises adults "over 40" that it isn't for them. This is the context that is being pay-walled by the Chronicle vis a vis Weinberg. The other texts that would define the generation--like Do It by Jerry Rubin and The Fall of America by Allen Ginsberg are freely available on the Internet Archive. Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book is available in multiple pirated versions from multiple locations (and can be checked out on the Internet Archive). Try to avoid Crosby, Stills and Nash--or any Woodstock oldie--heard over a speaker at the gas station, grocery store or public house.
Weinberg is usually quoted with citations that point to a pay-wall. The adults have taken the agency of his language. This is important because Weinberg disagreed with the de-contextualized statement as it became weaponized by right-wingers. Apparently, he meant the free-speech movement was comprised of student-youth and not controlled by 'adult' outsiders in the COMINTERN or CPUSA. This information, from the The Berkeley Daily Planet (06 April 2000) [1], is a historical secondary source that would be aided by the Chronicle's primary source.[2] Reporters are paid for their daily coverage but the old news is for everybody. Day old newspapers have historically lined bird cages, blanketed the homeless and been left in public bathrooms. The paper's success was ubiquity but it's profit was always the fresh publishing of new news. This formula changed--probably due to digitization--and now a newspaper's past runs have become commodities.
There is probably not much of a democratic role for a newspaper that actively hides it's records. Pay-walls are modern digital censorship just like age-gates and geo-fences. Activists of the present need to learn from the censorship of Weinberg by the Chronicle and break news with democratic organizations unaffiliated with oligarchy. Who controls the past, etc...
Lasting historical impact is stored by sources with different ethics even if they have smaller press runs over a shorter lifetime. Liberals were shocked when an oligarch (predictably) bought their Washignton Post and the coverage became more fascistic and censorious. The past "Democracy Dies In Darkness" era will now be parsed by the amazon.com machine to fit a different historical frame. This memory might be irretrievable.
Surely, Jeff Bezos will never own the historical rights to The Militant, The Alarm or World Socialist Web Site. Because of this, these archives will outlast the pay-walled and censored legacy papers currently on the pyre behind the the memory hole. Under these conditions, future Anarchists and Trotskyists might define history for more of the the population (who don't pay for the news or their archives) than those legacy papers overrun by sponsored content and capitalist apologia. Legacy papers will only be real for those who wade through the ads and subscriptions and arrive at a soulless oligarchic narrative--historically curated propaganda on behalf of the ruling class. Who is going to pay for that?
"Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty" is a phrase that can be parsed. Weinberg unsuccessfully tried to reclaim it. To it, Rubin devotes a chapter in Do It!. [3] There is a fundamental problem with the sentiment, described by Weinberg in the Daily Planet. It is the same problem with most generational politics concerning heritage and legacy. This compounded in a student movement. There is no student without the professor (teaching Marx). Also, there is no (middle-class) youth movement without the parents (paying the bills). Students inherit America's chauvinist exceptionalism and liberal Enlightenment. The New Left of the 60's also inherited America's Old Left from John Brown, EV Debs and C. Wright Mills. Without this historical continuity, there is no counterculture, disaffiliation or dropping-out.
By the Human Be-In (14 January 1967) the New Left was made up of more than Berkeley students. The 30,000 people were Buddhists (like Ginsberg) and new age practitioners (dropouts like Leary), organized labor, non-student youth (like Rubin), free speech, anti-war and civil rights including the Black Panther Party. It was also a rock concert with Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Of this coalition there are none without an outspoken relationship with--and sometimes reverence for--the previous generation. Even the bands were riffing on old time Robert Johnson-Leadbelly songs with Woody Guthrie-Pete Seeger sentiments. The BPP was applying Marx, DuBois and X to school lunch programs. The anti-war and labor left were of the Debs-ian tradition driven underground by the Palmer Raids. The Buddhists were studying thousand year old Sutras. To claim this rebellion was distrustful of people over 30 is absurd.
They distrusted adults. There was another segment of the 30,000 at the Golden Gate Park Be-In colloquially described as The Man. Some were still developing class consciousness and others were ought right feds. The later include the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1950-67) and MKUltra agents who experimented on the crowd. The CIA was trying to influence the movement surreptitiously and infiltrated much of the New Left in order to preempt subversion. The state funded avant-guard art, jazz and abstract expressionism to counter Soviet realism in an ideological art arms race. The Man surveilled dissidents and executed radicals like Fred Hampton in a domestic crackdown that mirrored anti-communist coups abroad. They even dosed Ken Kesey with LSD. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb was able to test LSD and mind control on the American left population as if they were Soviets and not some middle class kids from suburbia.
The generational schism that Weinberg describes and Rubin refines is a dialectic between the student coalition of progressives and adventurists and The Man of status quo liberals and conservative reactionaries. This is an ideological cleavage not a chronological one. The authority of the student coalition is a multi-generational and multi-disciplinary application of scientific socialist (and sometimes Utopian romantic) ideals which centers class, race, peace and love. This is a performative, individual and public act.
In contrast, The Man is undemocratic, totalitarian and covert. It is an extension of Cold War realpolitik where imperative to be preserved is American state capitalism (and the British empire inherited after the war). The Man treated San Francisco and other college towns like non-domestic places (East Berlin, Biafra and Phnom Penh) and their leaders like non-domestic people (Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung). It is impossible to say which came first--the student's reverence for internationalist leaders or their treatment as domestic terrorists. But the two are linked. The Man wants to maintain America's post-WWII status quo hegemony and the students want something else (too many elses)--internationalism, communism, anarchism, syndicalism. This makes one set progressive and the other conservative.
Unlike the caricature which was born from Weinberg's quote, the students don't have a beef with the previous generation. They archildren of asynchronous generations whose confluence overflowed the banks of the movement. Somehow Marxist class consciousness turned into Jungian self-realization into Maslow's self-actualization and beached itself as Regan-era rugged American individualism. Rubin's second book Did It: From Yippie to Yuppie is an example of how too much democracy and an unstructured anarchy can turn an Amerikan (or Hoffman's Amerikkkan) back into an American (or even a 100% American). A Yippie replaces the communal identity of Be-In with a capitalist narcissism made possible by the ridiculous spoils of empire and neoliberal free money.
The New Left's failure on their first attempt at revolution turned some from Chairman Mao into Gordon Gecko; from Che Guevara into Patrick Bateman; from a merry prankster guerrilla acting for the third world into a gorilla in a suit acting on behalf of a corporation. Marxists should expect to fail at their first revolution. Praxis is the experimental part of scientific socialism that informs theory, changes the self and revolutionizes society. The splintering of the New Left was encouraged by right-wingers who misquoted Weinberg to stoke generational conflict between the ages. This de-emphasized the actual generational critique of status quo hegemony, imperialism, the draft, segregation, sexism, Et al.
In this context, a person's age has nothing to do with chronology. Take the iconic phrase "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now" written by Bob Dylan appearing in "My Back Pages" in 1964. This was the end of revolutionary Dylan who channeled Woody Guthrie and the start of a decades-long commercially successful career of less political music. Three years later The Byrds reclaimed the phrase to signify the exact opposite impulse (and returned it to the garden). Chronological age is not historical generations. Apolitical Dylan and Rubin (the Yuppie) prove there is no individual progression and backsliding is possible. This is why Ginsberg suggested he could get Dylan to appear at the Golden Gate Park Be-In if everyone promised to replace their protest signs with pictures of fruit. Rubin (the Yippie) explained how ninety year old Bertrand Russell was a member of the Youth International because h joined a sit in. The pacifist AJ Muste was a revered old man in 1968 during the march on Washington and as much a flower child as any other young activist. Nikita Kruschev's "childish temper tantrum" with the shoe was evidence of his youth. The Yippies believe asking someone's age is counter-revolutionary, long hairs can be bald and "you can't use physical age as a cop-out." [4]
Rubin's chapter "Don't Trust Anyone Over 40" is preceded by "Our Leaders are Seven-Year-Olds" and neither should be taken literally or quantitatively. Rubin claims Weinberg invented the "generation gap" at a free speech rally in Berkeley. He then clarifies that adulthood is the liberal belief in capitalism. Adults (over 30) "were in a leaky rowboat on a stormy sea" and jettisoned their youthful idealism for the market status quo. These adults thought students were in "an adolescent stage..." on their "...way to the suburbs." Rubin argued radicals were a third group of "permanent adolescents" who knew each other by their first names and acted like fifteen-year-olds because "age is in your head." This confounded liberals who believed the students were in a phase being co-opted by communism instead of signing mortgages and draft cards. The state's response to this upheaval was infiltration and clandestine operations.
When Rubin states "the most important conflict is generational conflict" he is speaking in historical generations and not about a person's age. The untrustworthy people are not elders. They are those who pretend reality is different from the guerrilla stage, protest march and classroom. Yippie Praxis is similar to the BPP. This made them cross-racial allies. That's one reason Eldridge Cleaver chose Rubin as his running mate for president in 1968. Also, Rubin wasn't in prison. As allies to black militants, the Yippies became targets of the repressive American regime of racial superiority. Part of postcolonialialism was part of the New Left. This disaffiliated from America's middle class and affiliated with a global underclass. [5] They sacrifice (temporarily) their middle class protections in this alliance which bloomed into the Cleaver/Rubin ticket in 1968. This experiment came in second--evenin the unofficial New Left primary and stepped aside for the people's champion: Pigasus. By this point the movement and theory were detached and the absurdist, drugged-out and adventurist elements took over. The music, Phil Ochs, got better.
Two Yippie legacies populate my elder millennial's childhood memory. The first is the Norm Macdonald joke. "Yippie! Jerry Rubin has died... excuse me... Yippie, Jerry Rubin has died," which is a genius fuck-eulogy [6] from a master at his peak. The crowd loved it every time in syndication and I didn't get it until I became trustworthy at nearly thirty years old.
The second reference, I didn't get until reading Do It for this article. The iconic RATM music video directed by Michael Moore is a 99%er era homage to the Yippie invasion of Wall Street. These gaps in my cultural education as a leftist are due to personal incuriousness and corporate censorship. One of these conditions can be addressed by personal growth, study and reverence of the masters. But censorship is only going to get worse as late stage capitalism commodifies everything from newspaper articles to the internet archive.
That is where amplification of leftist sources like the Daily Planet over sources like the Chronicle is imperative for moral and functional reasons. The first--profitable--reason to run a newspaper is because social movements organize through media coverage. The second--unprofitable--reason to run a newspaper is because historical memory is defined by media coverage. Pay-walling the first reason stifles the movement. Pay-walling the second reason creates dementia within the body politic. Neither is great for a progressive society.
Decontextualizing "Don't Trust Anybody Over 30" severs the coalition from it's constituents. A student who doesn't trust anyone over 30 won't respect professors or parents. A citizen can't vote for a senator under thirty or president under thirty five by law. There is no electoral coalition that could exclude tax-paying grown-ups and win. To not trust anyone over thirty is a rejection of American liberalism during its most successful period. And there was no singular entity to fill the vacuum. This and the individualist turn splintered the movement.
In the end it seems the Yippies were more Anarchist than Communist and their political platform devolved into support for a literal pig following the Democratic Convention in 1968. This absurdism took over the movement in America and the left became an emotional, artistic beast with too many heads. In successful revolutions a smaller vanguard was better managed by more authoritarian methods. Lenin's, Mao and Stalin were strict as any railroad bull or shift boss in the states. The New Left didn't inherit, consciously rebelled against and were sub-consciously programmed to disdain this type of discipline.
The modern left in America is internationalist in communion with the world but born of many generations of revolutionaries--abolitionists, anarchists, socialists, communists (M-L), Trotskyites, Larouchites, yippies, greens. We are born in the imperial core with all this baggage, knowledge and opportunity. The individualist American exceptionalism is disproved by integrated supply chains, immigration and the internet. And the predictable implosion of the Neoliberal order. The next step in the American form of generational politics adopts the missing pieces of our internationalist heritage: state socialism with national characteristics.
At this point in American history, it is the only way to get any younger.
sources:
[1] Daily Planet Staff "Don't trust anyone over 30, unless it's Jack Weinberg" 06 April 2000 The Berkeley Daily Planet.
The article is a celebration of Weinberg's 60th birthday. The article is a tongue-in-cheek refutation of the right wing characature. The DP staff describe it as "one of the most memorable expressions of the turbulent 1960s era" uttered during a Free Speech rally at Berkeley. The movement promoted freedom of "political speech on campus...[which] helped to catalyze broader political activism on campuses around the country over student rights, civil rights and the Vietnam War."
Later Weinberg described "Don't trust anyone over 30" as a way to "get rid of a reporter who was bothering him" and it isn't "the most important thing he’s ever said." Unfortunately, there is no follow up to explain what the most important thing he said was. Weinberg's statement continues, "I was being interviewed by a newspaper reporter and he kept asking me who was ‘really’ behind the actions of students, implying that we were being directed behind the scenes by the Communists or some other sinister group...I told him we had a saying in the movement that we don’t trust anybody over 30. It was a way of telling the guy to back off, that nobody was pulling our strings."
It is unclear if the reporter Weinberg was talking to worked for the San Francisco Chronicle. But the Chronicle printed it followed by national outlets. From there, the quote was beyond Weinberg's control. Some "leaders in the movement" started using the quote "because they saw the extent it shook up the older generation," according to Weinberg's statement.
Outside of the movement Weinberg had a similar trajectory to Hoffman. They used legal action to protect the environment against things like water pollution and nuclear power.
[2] San Francisco Chronicle issues from: [Oct 2, 3, 6, 11, 13, 15, 17; Nov 15, 18, 23, 26; Dec 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 18, 21].
[3] Jerry Rubin Do It: Scenarios of the Revolution Simon & Schuster, 1970.
[4] ibid. pg. 89-91, 250-1.
[5] Conceptualized by DuBois as the color-line, and Fanon as lupenproletariat (which was an an activation of mud-stuck Marxist Lumpenproles) and Gramsci as Subaltern. The Yippies observed a line separating the suburbs from radical college campuses, oppressed urban centers and idyllic rural towns in addition to the class, race, culture and state lines which are challenged by other post colonialists.
[6] This phrase was popularized by The Bugle podcast inverting the eulogy and roasting the recently deceased.