What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy

By Edward P. Morgan, University Press of Kansas
Posted on March 27, 2011, Printed on March 28, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149866/

The following is an excerpt from What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy by Edward P. Morgan (University Press of Kansas).

The Past as Prologue: Distorted History— Declining Democracy

History always constitutes the relation between a present and a past. Consequently fear of the present leads to a mystification of the past....If we “saw” the...past, we would situate ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us. —John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1977

With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media’s professionals to give an answer. —Guy De Bord, Comments on the Society of Spectacle, 1988

The democratic ideal...is that the people are capable of and ought to be making their own history....The reason that democracy persists as an ideal at all is that people at times have transcended their everyday lives in order to make history. —Richard Flacks, Making History, 1988

Forty years after the tumultuous year of 1968 ushered in an era of political backlash and market liberalization, Americans turned out in record numbers and elected Barack Obama as the first African American president. At the precise moment the national networks could officially declare Obama the winner, NBC anchor Brian Williams observed, “We have news. There will be young children in the White House for the first time since the Kennedy generation. An African American has broken the barrier as old as the republic; an astonishing candidate, an astonishing campaign. A seismic shift in American politics.” As Williams continued, viewers watched campaign supporters’ jubilant celebration in, of all places, Chicago’s Grant Park, where forty years earlier a phalanx of Chicago policemen, with billy clubs flailing, charged into a crowd of antiwar protesters in one of the sixties era’s pivotal events.