But then we'll be alright, won't we?

Not unless we rekindle an interest in meaning

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I’m in the process of finishing up another semester as adjunct lecturer in rock & roll history at the local campus of our largest state university. I have to grade final exams, and then it’s a wrap.

This was my twenty-third year. I had rethink the pace and structure this time around. For the past several years, the. class had met once a week on Wednesday evening. With twice-weekly afternoon class sessions, with a little overall weekly time lopped off in the process, I had to rethink how much to bite off per lecture.

There’s also the matter of greater frequency of student mental fragility that showed up in the form of requests for special test-taking accommodations. The COVID-driven interruption of their educational journeys is surely a major factor, but I daresay education generally had been on the path leading to the present state of affairs for some time. I’m not making any kind of original observation when I ascribe some of the problem to phones and social media. It was more obvious than ever this semester that today’s college student generally is not given to reading long essays, let alone books.

Which is a shame, because the course textbook, as I wrote in an April 2022 piece for Ordinary Times titled “Confessions of a Rock & Roll History Teacher,” is a treasure for understanding rock’s role in the transformation of our culture and society over the last seventy years:

For a textbook, I use Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947 – 1977 by James Miller. In the early years of Rolling Stone magazine, Miller wrote record reviews, and he edited the first edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll in 1976. He went on to write for myriad other publications on a broad array of subjects, and did some teaching. In the 1990s, he realized his take on the subject of rock history had undergone some changes, which prompted him to write Flowers.

It’s not the kind of book most rock-history teachers would use as a text. It doesn’t claim to be comprehensive. Each chapter is a vignette about a specific instance that is fraught with implications about the subject at hand. There’s one about the circumstances under which Little Richard recorded “Tutti Fruiti” at Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans in 1955, one about Brian Epstein wandering into the Cavern Club in Liverpool in 1961 and seeing The Beatles, and so on. He also only takes it through 1977, as he feels that everything that’s come along in rock since then is a derivation of some sort of what developed before then.

One semester about fifteen years ago, two ladies sat in the back of the classroom every week. I assume them to have been friends outside of class. They did pretty well on tests and papers. On the last night of class, one of them raised her hand and said, “We’ve read Miller’s book, and we’ve concluded that he doesn’t like rock and roll,” which led to an interesting discussion about whether one has to like something to become a historian of it.

So we didn’t get anywhere close to the present by the end of the semester. I could see that coming about midterm time, so I made my peace with it.

That meant that we were looking at the New Left academic movement and the student radical movement, with particular focus on the events of 1968, just about the time the current unrest at Columbia University commenced.

Here at Precipice, in June 2022, I wrote about 1968 in an essay titled “On Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift.” It was a year of nonstop tumult:

1968. The sunny vibes of the above-mentioned Summer of Love were giving way to New Left radicalism, manifested in such occurrences as the shutdown of classes and administrative-offices takeover at Columbia University the week before finals, and the riots outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August. With Martin Luther King's assassination, the integrationist chapter of the civil rights movement came to a close and the rise of the Black Panthers filled the vacuum. CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite took the occasion of the Tet Offensive to opine to the public that America was bogged down in a quagmire in Vietnam.

I showed them vintage CBS News video footage of that Columbia situation, but how much power to shock is there when they can see the same thing happening on that same campus in 2024, this time with the added angle of Jew-hatred?

And today’s disrupters are setting sights on this year’s DNC convention once again.

What’s different this time around is that our institutions are far less able to absorb the blows from antinomian forces than they were then. To begin with, there’s far less trust in them. For another, they don’t look much like they did in days of greater resilience.

Yes, we had all the upheaval and threat enumerated in the excerpt above, but we had a preponderance of stable, two-parent households, church attendance was the norm, humanities study was not yet infected with identity politics, elections occurred in an orderly fashion, and there were commonly held notions of appropriate dress, speech and conduct. 1968’s rabble rouser could smoke a joint while a Jimi Hendrix album played in his or her dorm room, go out to the demonstration, and return confident that he or she had not jeopardized his or her eventual acceptance into the broad and bustling marketplace of opportunity.

As I say, an ugly new element has been added to this year’s version of that fabled spring. Actually, there is a bit of a parallel. It was pretty obscene to see the Vietnam War’s objective - halting the spread of Marxism-Leninism - obscured and mocked in the name of of some disingenuously clamored-for “peace.” But this time around, we’re looking at raw bigotry against a group that can be defined either by faith or ethnicity, but in any event, has a thousands-years’ claim on the homeland it has called its country since 1948.

Anyway, we’re definitely in a season of disorder. The fraying of the cord that binds us is palpable.

But let’s not act as though this popped up unexpectedly for the first time in 56 years.

There is, of course, the summer of 2020, which mainstreamed the call for defunding police departments. Ditto these encampments that declare their sovereignty, even as they ask for food and hygiene products.

Five years earlier, there were thuggish outbursts at the University of Missouri and Dartmouth, among other schools.

Here’s a question: Do you have any confidence in either US political party, either of their presidential candidates, in our educational system, our courts, our infrastructure of civic organizations , our schools, or even our churches, to return us to some kind of a stability, a broad definition for which we could agree on?

We don’t have the absorbency and resilience we did when the prototype for today’s chaos was established.

Yes, day-to-day life proceeds apace. We all have obligations to tend to, and anticipate the small joys that life affords. But it behooves each of us to remember that we really are on our own.

The best way to deal with that, it seems to me, is for each of us to cultivate a radar for those we might encounter in whom we sense some reverence, or at least awe, for a transcendent order. For some, that means deepening involvement in one’s local church. For others, it may mean occasionally meeting for coffee with those who understand that that which is outside time and space is where the reality that looses forces on earth and also looses things in heaven lies.

If you understand that events happening right now in time and space have eternal implications, connect with others who understand.

What’s going on means something. That’s our lodestar.