In the early years of an Upswing, life is beautiful and anything is possible.
ME |
If you look at the history of youth cultural movements, they tend to go one of two ways. One is in the direction of individual expression and creativity; the best example is the ’60s. The other way is to lose themselves in the collective, binding themselves into a gang. |
Figure 12.1 The first half of the upswing to “ME.”
Rita Mae Brown was born November 28, 1944, so she was eighteen when the big ball fell in New York’s Times Square and 1963 began. A clear “Me” voice crying out for individuality, Rita Mae said, “The reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.” She then went on to say,
ME Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself. Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.
A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.
About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won’t like you at all.
What’s the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man?
Welcome to the Upswing of “Me,” when individualism is the holy grail of human existence and everyone asks, “Who am I?” and wonders, “Am I being true to myself?” Bob Dylan calmly assured us that “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.”
Figure 12.2 Characteristics of “ME.”
| CHARACTERISTICS OF “ME” | ME |
1. Freedom of expression 2. Personal liberty 3. One man is wiser than a million men. 4. Wants to achieve a better life—“I came, I saw, I conquered.” 5. Big dreams 6. Wants to be number one 7. Individual confidence and decisive persons 8. Leadership is “Look at me. Admire me. Emulate me if you can.” 9. Elevates attractive heroes to strengthen society’s sense of identity |
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ME The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes “Awww!”
We told you Eeyore the Donkey from Disney’s Winnie-the-Pooh would be the perfect spokesperson for a “We.” Eeyore sighs deeply and, effectively, says, “Somebody’s got to do it, and it’s probably me. Oh, well. Let’s get started.”
But the spokesperson for “Me” is Tigger. When Tigger introduces himself, he makes sure you understand that he is spontaneous, lighthearted, carefree, and reckless,
ME |
But the most wonderful thing about tiggers is . . . I’m the only one! |
A “Me” is all about individuality. Right on schedule at the tipping point, the Corvette got a whole new look. The ’63 Stingray “split-window coupe” is the most rare and exotic Corvette of them all.
A woman from L’Oréal looked out from our televisions and told us that she colors her hair “Because I’m worth it.”
“Me” looks for pleasure and status: identify beauty, focus on it, celebrate the moment and experience joy.
“Me” anticipates future pleasures and ignores the long-term consequences of present actions. “Me” is about sensation by every definition of the word.
1963: “Louie, Louie,” The Kingsmen |
MESSAGE |
A fine little girl, she waits for me. |
I’m looking forward to being with the girl I love. |
| “ME” MINDSET | ME | |
| LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL AND ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE IN THE EARLY YEARS OF AN UPSWING | ||
Individuality Spontaneous Lighthearted |
Carefree Reckless Sensation |
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| WE SPOKESPERSON | ME SPOKESPERSON | |
| Eeyore Somebody’s got to do it. And it’s probably me. Oh well. Let’s get started. |
Tigger But the most wonderful thing about Tiggers is . . . I’m the only one! |
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Written in the style of a Jamaican ballad, “Louie, Louie” feels as though it were written by someone who had just read the thirty essential tips of Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.
Because this was only the first year following the tipping point, society still had plenty of uptight people clinging to the comfort of legalism. In February, 1964, an outraged parent wrote to the US Attorney General alleging that the lyrics of “Louie, Louie” were obscene,2 claiming that the lyrics said,
ME |
A fine little bitch, she waits for me; |
In response, J. Edgar Hoover instructed the FBI to obtain a copy of the recording and, after a thirty-one-month investigation, they concluded that the lyrics were “unintelligible at any speed” and, therefore, the recording could not be obscene.
Robert Stone, author of Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, remembers sitting and talking with Ken Kesey, the author who made his name with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and would later become the central character in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).
ME [I]t was good to be alive and to be young was even better. More than the inhabitants of any decade before us, we believed ourselves in a time of our own making. The dim winter day in 1963 when I first drove up to the La Honda house, truant from my attempts at writing a novel, I knew that the future lay before us and I was certain that we owned it. When Kesey came out, we sat on the little bridge over the creek in the last of the light and smoked what was left of the day’s clean weed. Ken said something runic about books never being finished and tales remaining forever untold.3
Then, Ron Popeil’s Veg-O-Matic made its debut at Chicago’s International Housewares Show in 1963, right at the tipping point into “Me.” The TV ads that introduced this new appliance to America would also introduce new levels of overstatement and hype:
ME This is Veg-O-Matic, the world famous food-appliance! Slice a whole potato in uniform slices with one motion. Bulk cheese costs less. Look how easy Veg-O-Matic, makes many slices at once! Imagine slicing all these radishes in just seconds. This is the only appliance in the world that slices whole firm tomatoes in one stroke, with every seed in place. Hamburger lovers feed whole onions into Veg-O-Matic, and make these tempting thin slices. Simply turn the dial and change from thin to thick slices. Now, you can slice a whole can of prepared meat at one time. Isn’t that amazing? Like magic, dial from slicing to dicing.4
Library of Congress
The year 1963 was also when Beatlemania swept England like a prairie fire and opened the door for the “British Invasion” of ’64 to the remainder of the Western world. Then Dusty Springfield became the second Brit to have a major hit that year. Her first one, “I Only Want to Be with You,” rode the charts for the first quarter of ’64 before she followed it up with several others. During the next two years Herman’s Hermits, the Rolling Stones, Donovan, the Troggs, the Animals, Chad & Jeremy, Peter and Gordon, Petula Clark, Freddie and the Dreamers, Wayne Fontana and the Mind-benders, and Manfred Mann would also have hit singles. And let’s not forget the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five. Here are a few of the number-one songs of that period:
Figure 12.4 Music themes from an upswing into “ME.”
| POPULAR MUSIC THEMES: FIRST HALF OF AN UPSWING INTO “ME” (1963–1973) | ME |
| LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL AND ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE | |
| 1964: “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” The Beatles | MESSAGE |
And when I touch you I feel happy inside. 1965: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” The Rolling Stones |
I want to touch you. Right now. |
And I’m doin’ this and I’m signing that 1966: “Good Vibrations,” The Beach Boys |
Life is all about satisfying your urges. |
I’m pickin’ up good vibrations. She’s giving me excitations. ”I Want to Hold Your Hand’” The Beatles ”A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Procol Harum ”Hey Jude,” The Beatles ”Imagine,” John Lennon ”American Pie,” Don McLean |
My girlfriend makes me feel good. She turns me on. I want to touch you. Right now. Life is all about satisfying your urges. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. Don’t be down—be happy! If only . . . Goodbye, good ol’ days. |
CC Image © Wonker on Flickr
John Steinbeck had hung on to the Upswing of a “We” until it reached its Zenith in 1943 and then rode the Downswing like a little boy sliding down the banister of a stairway. In 1966, three years after the tipping point into “Me,” Steinbeck wrote,
ME One of the generalities most often noted about Americans is that we are a restless, a dissatisfied, a searching people. We spend our time searching for security, and hate it when we get it. For the most part we are an intemperate people: We eat too much when we can, drink too much, indulge our senses too much. Even in our so-called virtues we are intemperate: a teetotaler is not content not to drink—he must stop all the drinking in the world; a vegetarian among us would outlaw the eating of meat. We work too hard, and many die under the strain; and then to make up for that we play with a violence as suicidal.5
By 1967, the fifth year of the six-year transitionary cycle into “Me,” the Beatles were no longer singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” but rather,
ME |
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess, |
Mysticism and symbolism shimmer in a “Me,” and we are strongly attracted to them. Song lyrics that mean nothing at all suddenly seem deep and mysterious to us. The mysterious predictions of Nostradamus beckon us, and we believe in the magic of pyramids and crystals. We can find profound meaning in virtually anything—“It’s all just so meaningful!”
| 1967: “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Procol Harum |
MESSAGE |
| When we called out for another drink, And the waiter brought a tray. |
Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. |
| 1968: “Hey Jude,” The Beatles | |
| And any time you feel the pain, hey Jude, refrain. Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders. |
Don’t be down—be happy! |
I’m OK, You’re OK appeared in 1967, hit the New York Times Best-Seller List in 1972, and sold more than fifteen million copies. The title refers to the fourth of four “life positions” that each of us may take:
1. I’m not OK, you’re OK.
2. I’m not OK, you’re not OK.
3. I’m OK, you’re not OK.
4. I’m OK, you’re OK.
iStockphoto / lefyt: Lockie Currie, right: johavel
The message of the book is essentially, “Feel good about yourself, and let other people do their own thing,” so it should come as no surprise that the book appeared in the latter part of a six-year transitionary window into “Me.” The reason it sold fifteen million copies is because it reinforced a popular opinion.
Interestingly, those same four “life positions” summarize the collective feelings of society’s majority at four different positions of the Pendulum.
1. I’m not OK, you’re OK:
In the second half of the Upswing into “Me” and in the first half of the Downswing from it (1973–1993) hero worship and a struggle against self-doubt define us. Envy and anxiousness cause us to overcompensate, leading to costumes, posing, and big hair.
2. I’m not OK, you’re not OK:
The second half of the Downswing of “Me” and the first half of an Upswing into “We” bring us self-doubt and a general awareness of brokenness (1993–2013). This often becomes a cause for communion and fellowship, as broken persons are transparent to one another. Interestingly, during the six-year transitionary window into “We” the mutual brokenness of “I’m not OK, you’re not OK” often translates into a feeling of mutual acceptance: “I’m OK, you’re OK.” The last time this happened was when Gen-X passed the torch to Gen-Y during the 2003–2008 transitionary window.
3. I’m OK, you’re not OK:
The second half of the Upswing of “We” and the first half of the Downswing from it (2013–2023) bring an ideological “righteousness” that seems to spring from any group gathered around a cause. The inevitable result is judgmental legalism and witch hunts. The origin of the term witch hunt was the Salem witch trials, a series of hearings before county court officials to prosecute people accused of witchcraft in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693,6 exactly at the beginning of the second half of the Upswing toward the “We” Zenith of 1703.
Senator Joseph McCarthy was an American promoter of this witch-hunt attitude at America’s most recent “We” Zenith of 1943 (see the “House Un-American Activities Committee,” 1937–1953); Adolph Hitler was the German promoter (see the Holocaust, 1933–1945); and Joseph Stalin was the Soviet promoter (see the Great Purge, 1936–1938). Our hope is that we might collectively choose to skip this development as we approach the “We” Zenith of 2023. If enough of us are aware of this trend toward judgmental self-righteousness, perhaps we can resist demonizing those who disagree with us and avoid the societal polarization that results from it. A truly great society is one in which being unpopular can be safe.
4. I’m OK, you’re OK:
The second half of the Downswing from “We” brings us the happy message of the Alpha Voices, “Hey, everybody! We’re ALL okay!” and the resulting glow of confidence that follows during the first half of the Upswing into “Me” as we elevate sparkling cultural heroes we admire. During the second half of the Upswing into “Me” is when envy and self-doubt begin to plague us, and then everything becomes a competition as we move back into “I’m not OK, you’re OK”—and the cycle begins anew.
The six years of magic we remember as “the ’60s” began in 1963 and continued through the end of 1968. Just as 1960 to 1962 weren’t part of “the ’60s,” 1969 wasn’t part of that magic either. Look in the rearview mirror and you’ll see that 1969 was the first year of the ’70s, the seventh year of an Upswing, when the most sensitive among us began to notice that we were taking a good thing too far. What began as a beautiful dream of individuality and freedom of expression was devolving into plastic, hollow, phony posing.
In 1971, Hunter S. Thompson remembered the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago in late August of 1968:
iStockphoto / CreativeArchetype
ME There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.7
I still have trouble when I think about Chicago. That week at the Convention changed everything I’d ever taken for granted about this country and my place in it. . . . Every time I tried to tell somebody what happened in Chicago I began crying, and it took me years to understand why . . . Chicago was the End of the Sixties, for me.8
He also wrote that
ME The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. The thrust is no longer for ‘change’ or ‘progress’ or ‘revolution,’ but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been.9
The six-year transitionary window is always a beautiful time of change for the better. But for the perceptive person, the seventh year gives pause as he or she sees the momentum of society carrying a good thing too far. These people, like Hunter S. Thompson before them, see the once-bright dream of a better world begin to yellow and crumble at the edges like an old poster on a bedroom wall.
The year 1971 was also when John Lennon wrote what is perhaps the definitive song of that era. “Imagine” speaks dreamily of what could be—“if only.” In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked “Imagine” as number three in the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. (The song rated number one was “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan and number two was “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. If we discount their top two choices due to the magazine’s obvious self-interest, John Lennon’s “Imagine” suddenly becomes the number-one song of the forty-year “Me”:
ME |
You may say I’m a |
Remember: A “Me” is about big dreams; a “We” is about small actions. The glowing dream of John Lennon’s “Imagine” began to shimmer and fade at the end of the six-year transitionary window.
Hunter S. Thompson could feel that the purity of our dreams had somehow slipped through our fingers. Everyone could feel it, apparently, because all of Western society indulged in a moment of nostalgic reflection in 1971 before plunging headlong toward 1983, the pinnacle of “Me.”
Mix individuality with freedom of expression, and the result will always be symbolic and mystical. The perfect example of this is the top song of 1972, right at the halfway point of “Me”:
1972: “American Pie,” Don McLean
In the lyrics of this song Don McLean recalled the music of the Alpha Voices from when he was a boy in the late 1950s. He sung symbolically of Buddy Holly’s death in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, and how Buddy’s pregnant wife, now a widow after barely six months of marriage, miscarried the baby soon after the plane crash. McLean then made a backhanded reference to “The Book of Love,” a hit song by the Monotones at the time of the crash. He sung of Bob Dylan, “the jester,” who sang “in a coat he borrowed from James Dean,” referring to the jacket Dylan wore on the cover of his album Freewheelin’, which made him look very much like James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. McLean then sung of “the jester,” Bob Dylan, stealing the crown of “the king,” Elvis Presley, while Elvis was in the Army.
McLean then sung cryptically about how the Warren Commission failed to resolve the Kennedy assassination due to Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald: “No verdict was returned.”
The song then moved on to speak of Lennon reading a book of Marx while “the quartet practiced in the park.”
For those familiar with the lyrics of the song, “Helter Skelter” is a song written by Paul McCartney and recorded by the Beatles in 1968. Rehab facilities were sometimes called “fallout shelters.” The Byrds recorded “Eight Miles High” in 1966. “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was a 1967 album by the Beatles.
“Jack Flash sat on a candlestick” referred to Jumpin’ Jack Flash, a hit by the Rolling Stones in 1968.
“No angel born in hell” referred to the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, which functioned as security for the Rolling Stones. In Altamont, California, on December 6, 1969, Alan Passaro, one of the Hell’s Angels, stabbed to death an eighteen-year-old girl, Meredith Hunter, who was armed with a revolver and trying to climb on stage.
The “girl who sang the blues” is likely Janis Joplin, a rock-and-roll blues singer who had just died of an overdose in 1970. Rolling Stone ranked Janis Joplin as number twenty-eight on its 2008 list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. Her death was recent news when McLean wrote American Pie.
iStockphoto / DNY59
According to McLean,
ME American Pie really was . . . an idea in my head after I thought about the death of Buddy Holly . . . and that whole period of my life when I was a teenager . . . and from that, I developed an idea which I was going to turn into a parable . . . a story with a moral . . . which originally had nothing to do with Bob Dylan, The Beatles, or The Stones . . . It was a story about America. And the fact that people were drawn into the song as a result of symbols that I chose to use, was the reason I chose to use those symbols in the first place.10
Further, if Asia is indeed headed into a “Me” while the Americas, Australia, and western Europe are headed into a “We,” right now China should have its own Jack Kerouac/Holden Caulfield/James Dean “Rebel without a Cause” antiestablishment hero, correct?
Meet Han Han, the Chinese James Dean. Just as Kerouac, Caulfield, and Dean embodied the Alpha Voice teen angst seven years before our 1963 tipping point into “Me,” Han Han embodied the teen angst of China when he published his first novel, Triple Door, and dropped out of the tenth grade in 1999, just four years before China reached the “Me” tipping point of 2003.
Han Han has since become the preeminent voice inspiring youthful rebellion and the rejection of traditional values in China. Evan Osnos, writing for the July 4, 2011 New Yorker, called Han Han’s first book “a scathingly realistic satire of education and authority, written by a nobody.”
The first edition of thirty thousand copies of Han Han’s Triple Door sold out in just three days. The second edition of thirty thousand sold out even faster. When China Central Television tried to calm the frenzy with an hour-long interrogation of Han Han on its national broadcast, the insolent and defiant Han Han became China’s national symbol of individuality and freedom of expression. His novels about teenagers, girls, and cars continue to sell millions of copies to the baling hou, the “post ’80s generation” of China who came of age as that nation was approaching 2003, the tipping point into the current Eastern “Me.” According to Osnos, “the baling hou serve as a reference point in discussions of values and the national character much the way that baby boomers do for Americans.”