Those of us who nourished ourselves on the luxurious radicalism of theremote are finally obliged to grow up, writes John Waters
I doubt if there will come a time when we will need to reinstate the year, for only a greater hurt could dilute the power of that date, and such a thing is unimaginable. I almost wrote "almost unimaginable" but shy away from tempting evil.
These autumn days used to be associated with the return to school, a sufficiency of horror in itself for those who had not yet lost their innocence.
But no more. These days of low clouds, stolen sunshine and blackberry jam will, for those whose lives were transfixed by the unspeakable calamity of a year ago, forever carry this new moroseness as its dominant shade. And in that number is included, surely, anyone with a human heart.
The moment has not yet passed. Maybe on Thursday morning it can begin to.
Today it remains, a dull ache in the gut, even for those who watched from afar and, having watched, could still hold their loved ones to them. It was the day the music died. Such days had been identified, promised, dreaded in the past, but this was surely one we feared beyond imagining.
The era since the 1960s could be characterised as the age of peace, love and understanding. For all the conflict and bloodshed of those years, there had been, underlying it all, an undercurrent of hope, a belief that reason and positivity might help to usher in a new dispensation. This optimism emerged from the pop revolution of the 1960s, the All-You-Need-Is-Love revolution, which at the time seemed like an irrefutable and rather nice idea. This youth-driven utopianism grew and was nurtured and grew still more in the art schools and campuses of London, Paris and New York, and was carried on the airwaves to the furthermost recesses of the Western world.
It was also, strangely and paradoxically, a rather aggressive idea, a renunciation, a repudiation, a refusal. It rejected the authority of the past, of the Father, of the Leader, of the imperfectly human, and suggested in its place the authority of fellow feeling, of belief in the essential goodness of all humanity.
The problem was that it rarely engaged with its quarry other than in an abstract way. It was detached, luxuriously so. It rested blithely on the soft upholstery of Western civilisation, the entity it attacked with such scorn and sanctity, assuming peace and safety to be natural states of affairs.
And strangely, too, it took on almost the precise colours and contours of the paternalism exhibited by the discredited and fallen elders it condemned. Thus, the moral dilemmas of the world, not to mention their consequences, were all happening somewhere else, in places where the flow of peace, love and understanding had been curtailed by the venality and vested interests of the failed elders. The passion of this new politics was born of, above all, distance from the war zone.
In this new politics, too, there was a redefinition of heroism, in the valorisation of draft-dodging and the sexualisation of refusal, the girls who said Yes to the guys who said No.
ALMOST all our present-day Western political cultures are products of the fusion of this 1960s utopianism with the hard-headedness of established power. In recent times, every Western country has aspired to being run by a coalition between student politics and the permanent government.
These arrangements are propelled by a woolly positivism based on the belief that human beings really are basically good if unprovoked, a fallacy sustained by the absence of real danger. And although representing an undoubtedly sincere pursuit of idealism, the nature of the coalitions enables reactionism to be held in reserve.
It has been startling and strangely reassuring to observe the recent subsuming of popular utopianism by the natural bellicosity of power, but also intriguing to observe that this has met with almost total public approval. It was noticeable how, in the immediate wake of September 11th, the initial sense of absolute horror seemed to buckle slightly in the public arena, mainly as a result of the what-aboutery of America's enemies. But, other than in the hearts of the professional oppositionists, this attempt to accommodate the new frontier of outrage failed to gain a foothold in the hearts of real people.
Among the many deaths of September 11th then, was the death of 1960s utopianism. Even casual encounters now between the erstwhile adherents of this pseudo-radicalism are visited by an uncertainty that rarely troubled them in the past. There is such a significant possibility that one or other party will have been transformed by the events of a year ago that it is unsafe to make assumptions about anything.
There remains the shadow of the old iconoclasm, but it usually lacks either conviction or sincerity, and what occurs is a variation on the standard dance between two people unsure of each other's intentions until one of them comes clean and enables a new commonality to reveal itself.
I have such encounters all the time now, characterised above all by the realisation that the dream is indeed over, that those of us who nourished ourselves on the luxurious radicalism of the remote are finally obliged to grow up. Once you have watched the end of the world with someone you love, it is impossible to return to humbug.