Cultural Revolution

[degringolade]

Post-Impressionism / Santiago Rusinol/ Jardín de las Elegías, Son Moragues

Godamnn covid coupled with a serious lack of willpower on my part has caused me to regain about 75% of what I lost a while back.  So today and into the rest of 2021 I am afraid that I will be eating healthy, low calorie foods and not too much of any of them.  The thought is soul crushing.

Anyway, I've been thinking about the last year and then trying to find a historical precedent.  Doing such a thing is a chancy thing, something about not being able to dip your foot into the same river twice.  The world flows on, history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.

I am drawn back to the sixties for examples.  Hippies and the cultural revolution come to mind.  Now hippies were the ones that we are most familiar with.  A lot of the time all that is remembered is drugs and sport-fucking.  The truth be told, those to things and a profound revulsion of the idea of going off to war by middle class white boys and their mothers were the only real roots of this phenomenon here in the US.  As soon as the draft was ended (and Kent State taught the lesson that this shit just wasn’t appreciated) the white boy draft-dodgers buckled down and joined the establishment.

The cultural revolution happened hand in hand with the hippies, we just didn’t pay that much attention to it as we were licking out wounds from getting our asses handed to us by Charlie and we didn’t want to actually address the fact that going into Vietnam was a bad idea.  So we glossed over the Cultural revolution in the reportage of the day.

I spent a lot of time in China in the 00’s and drank a lot of Yanjing beer in back alleys by housing suites where the workers in our factory lived.  Their english was great and once you bought them two or three bottles of beer, they started talking.   None of them were old enough to actually have been there, but they all talked in hushed tones about what their parents and grandparent told them.

What I got out of these conversations is that the government didn’t know what to do with them.  Mao got the whole thing started when he tried to purge the government of rivals and continue the “revolution”.  But it got out of control and folks throughout the country started acting on their own volition to support what they thought Mao wanted.  Things apparently got pretty ugly.

I think that we are looking at a rhyming of the hippie/cultural revolution period.  I am guessing here in the US we will try (or are already trying) to kick off the fun and games of the cultural revolution.  But I really don’t think that we have it in us.  

Time will tell.