ebb and flow ... The age of Camelot is long gone
  from: Offshore Engineer
  by: Michael J Economides
  Tuesday, July 08, 2008

He is an idealist and necessarily naïve. Barack Obama believes that a society and its government must create the conditions of egalitarian living, he takes literally ‘all men are created equal’ and that it transcends borders. That’s a far cry from the conservative market-driven differentiation, ‘free enterprise’ and the necessary competition among nations and cultures.

Obama is young and fresh, a Kennedy-esque literal and metaphorical embodiment of futuristic interracial and cross-cultural world bliss. He is also a throwback to exactly 30 years ago.

I went to college in Kansas with many ideological Obama-likes, along with his father and mother-likes. I was one of them, a foreign student that came to America because of all the good things, even if I did not really think about them, not unlike my US born counterparts: a much better material life, education, freedom and, especially, the ability to criticize the society and its government. This last one we take for granted but in many other countries it could be the kiss of death.

A lot of things shaped the 1960s and 1970s: the struggle for racial equality and Martin Luther King; the Vietnam War and the opposition to it; women’s liberation. John Kennedy, a product of the elite, managed to veil that issue, something that has been repeated by others since. Downplaying his own oligarchy he presented himself as a populist, a departure from the sclerotic establishment of old. A visual proof was his youth and cultivated image of vigor (along with a young and attractive wife).

Anti-establishment rhetoric and ‘change’ became the calls among the motivated young and educated of the day. The idealism of ‘think not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country’ was facilitated by the Peace Corps and similar.

Personal emancipation among us college students at the time involved drugs, sex for all, the breakdown of taboos, environmentalism, vegetarianism, exotic religions and cults. Some went through all. That’s when a Kansas female student, from the most Waspish background, would marry an African graduate student, officiated by a tribal shaman, and then proudly display her trophy of liberated sophistication: a bi-racial baby.

Ideology got in the way of reality and government actions created a culture of welfare dependence, expectations and government spending. To this day, many Americans nurtured in demanding from an abstract version of government, still do not really appreciate what they have and how much better they live than practically any society on earth. For dissatisfaction at its nastiest one can listen to Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s rantings.

Internationally, it was not just the war in Vietnam that brought demonstrations and strife on American campuses. Many other countries and their governments came to the fore: the Philippines under Marcos, Chile under Pinochet, Greece and Argentina under military juntas and of course, Iran under the Shah. The CIA and the ‘militaryindustrial establishment’ were blamed for all and Henry Kissinger was supposed to be their main lackey. If only those bad guys – all installed by bad guys in the US – were abandoned, the logic went, then democracy and societal harmony would reign in those lands and the rest of the world.

But government spending was not to continue unchecked. On 6 June 1978, Proposition 13 was passed in California and although it was supposed to limit property taxes it became a watershed event against big government and the welfare state that it embodied. A washed out, mediocre actor, championing the movement from the nether land of right wing conservatism, became a national figure and eventually President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.

Seventeen months later on 4 November 1979 ‘students’ in Tehran stormed the American Embassy and kept its personnel hostage for 444 days. Iran had been governed since early February of that year by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after the Shah fled the country. The Embassy seizure was an unprecedented action that signaled that the ‘Islamic Republic’ was not going to play by rules such as diplomatic niceties.

But Iranian Islamic civics and the tragedy of the hostages were of little consequence compared to the effect from the destruction of the second pillar of American 1960s and 1970s idealism. The substitutes of the flawed Shah and leaders like him could be far more undesirable. It was a devastating realization for campus ideologues.

Budding opinion page columnist of the Stanford Daily, graduate student Michael Economides, after two years of several anti-Shah pieces, wrote on 28 November 1979 in an editorial titled ‘Khomeini is the Iranian Crisis’: ‘It is a sad prospect that the seemingly monumental struggle of the Iranian people against the hated Shah has degenerated into the twisted theocracy of Khomeini.’ Georges Clemenceau, France’s Prime Minister during the First World War, is often credited with saying ‘if my son is not a communist by the age of 20, I will disown him; and if he is still a communist by the age of 40, I will disown him,’ with communism in pre-Soviet Union serving as the idealism of the era. Unlike me and most of my friends who changed, not necessarily becoming Republicans, still mostly social liberals but fiscal conservatives and certainly not with the religious right, Obama still feels like campus sloganeering before 1978. He is like the unchanged Clemenceau son. He is going to have a tough time capturing the votes of many of those that changed in the last 30 years. OE

Michael J Economides is a professor at the Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston, and editor-in-chief of the Energy Tribune. The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect OE’s position.

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