And the leaves that are green turn to brown,
And they wither with the wind,
And they crumble in your hand.
---Simon and Garfunkel, 1966
by CKR
Green we were, young people marching for civil rights, working out relations between women and men as though we had discovered them, facing a war that didn’t seem right, building our own world that would be better than our parents’. The new ideas grew like green leaves, some well, some poorly.
It’s been forty years and more since we and our ideas were so green. Forty years before that, the 1929 stock market crash and the depression were in the future, as were World War II and the Korean War, all part of our parents’ generation. The fears of nuclear destruction, the inevitability of conflict that became Vietnam, those were ours.
Green fears and ideas turn to brown. They become the compost out of which new green grows: part forgotten, part unrecognizable, indigestible bits still sticking out.
Tony Judt chronicles the greening and browning of what he calls “The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe.” The attempted genocide of the Jews was first ignored, then recognized in the sixties, then incorporated into everyone’s history, and now seems to be moving toward an overemphasis that will drain it of its meaning.
The greening:
Everything started to change after the Sixties, for many reasons: the passage of time, the curiosity of a new generation, and perhaps, too, a slackening of international tension. West Germany above all, the nation primarily responsible for the horrors of Hitler's war, was transformed in the course of a generation into a people uniquely conscious of the enormity of its crimes and the scale of its accountability. By the 1980s the story of the destruction of the Jews of Europe was becoming increasingly familiar in books, in cinema, and on television. Since the 1990s and the end of the division of Europe, official apologies, national commemoration sites, memorials, and museums have become commonplace; even in post-Communist Eastern Europe the suffering of the Jews has begun to take its place in official memory.There is an element of chance to the greening; we can’t be sure what factors led to the ability to recognize this horror, although we can name many.
And the browning:
Moreover, if Hitler, Auschwitz, and the genocide of the Jews incarnated a unique evil, why are we constantly warned that they and their like could happen anywhere, or are about to happen again? Every time someone smears anti-Semitic graffiti on a synagogue wall in France we are warned that "the unique evil" is with us once more, that it is 1938 all over again. We are losing the capacity to distinguish between the normal sins and follies of mankind—stupidity, prejudice, opportunism, demagogy, and fanaticism —and genuine evil. We have lost sight of what it was about twentieth-century political religions of the extreme left and extreme right that was so seductive, so commonplace, so modern, and thus so truly diabolical. After all, if we see evil everywhere, how can we be expected to recognize the real thing? …The question is what other evils we shall neglect—or create—by focusing exclusively upon a single enemy and using it to justify a hundred lesser crimes of our own.It seems that ideas have their own lifespans. It may be the fertile conjunction of historical circumstances that allow particular ideas to grow and prosper, but those circumstances change, frequently by the actions inspired by those ideas, or the ideas themselves degrade as they are used and used again.
For some reason, the world was uniquely positioned to recognize a variety of evils in the sixties, or perhaps that is my browning arrogance. The value of all human beings, not just white northern European men, was being recognized, including the subset I belonged to, women. We’ve been reminded this past week or so of one of the manifestos of that time. Much of it is tied too closely to its time to be understandable today. It greened and crumpled quickly. So its author, Robin Morgan, wrote a version for today. I suspect that the time-bound references in this version will also brown quickly.
Morgan speaks of things that have marked my life too, but the form and even some of the content has turned to brown already. It is a memory, not new growth.
That’s not to say that women don’t still experience injustices. But, as Judt does, I wonder what evils this thinking neglects—or creates—that may be more important for this time, for the now that we live in. Perhaps we need to turn to those whose lives are greening for that insight.
Helmut, as usual, puts it well:
…anecdotally-speaking, you should see my students. I haven't seen this before. Obama is a rock star. Actually, more than that. It's near-religious. I know this theme is not new, but it's interesting to see it in the concrete. Look, in the majority of their adult life, they have known only the Bush administration. They know only policy disaster and political dismay. Obama in many ways represents their multicultural, hopeful world. The excitement is clear.These are policy graduate students. They're not unaware of concrete policy issues and political machinations. In fact, many of them are already close to being experts who will eventually take leadership roles on policy issues. Our school has many connections in government and the policy world, but this isn't Harvard or Yale where the students are already themselves anointed into well-connected positions of leadership whether merited or not. This means that the future is less certain for them. After experiencing years of an administration that has closed off much of the government to smart, motivated, and right-intentioned people, where some - such as at the State Department - explicitly state that they've been biding their time until the next administration, and others have simply turned towards other career paths, Obama represents in his very person - regardless of campaign policy pledges - a promising, open future. Shouldn't any of us be voting for those future generations as well as ourselves?
Morgan’s manifesto ends this way:
Me? I support Hillary Rodham because she’s the best qualified of all candidates running in both parties. I support her because her progressive politics are as strong as her proven ability to withstand what will be a massive right-wing assault in the general election. I support her because she knows how to get us out of Iraq. I support her because she’s refreshingly thoughtful, and I’m bloodied from eight years of a jolly “uniter” with ejaculatory politics. I needn’t agree with her on every point. I agree with the 97 percent of her positions that are identical with Obama’s—and the few where hers are both more practical and to the left of his (like health care). I support her because she’s already smashed the first-lady stereotype and made history as a fine senator, because I believe she will continue to make history not only as the first US woman president, but as a great US president.That reason worked when Morgan wrote that first manifesto; I would not deny it to her now. But it does not address the future. I have to wonder if the viral spreading of the link to this manifesto, supposedly begun by Chelsea Clinton, supposedly a new generation of feminist, was in fact a calculated move by the Clinton campaign to remind women of Morgan’s generation of our affinities with her.As for the “woman thing”?
Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.
It looks withered in the wind to me. As a woman, I’m in a good position now. Younger women have many more opportunities than I had at their age. Their circumstances could be improved, but that will have to come from them, because they have both the energy and a much better understanding than I do of what their goals need to be.
Our country faces other issues now, dare I say more important than the Women’s Movement. Excessive presidential power. The idea that war can prevent war. The insane distribution of our wealth. And I’ll bet helmut’s students could come up with some I can’t even think of.
Hello, hello, hello, hello,
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye,
Thats all there is.
And the leaves that are green turn to brown.