I feel like it's tied to the number of young people at a given point. Huge numbers of young people have often led to revolutionary eras.

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Young people have been co-opted with gadgets. Hard to plot violent revolution when you're mesmerized by i-pods and x-box 24/7.

Unless you're black of course. Then you've been defanged by liberal applications of crack and corporate-manufactured gangster rap.

. (I'm sure a lot of people would agree with me that the '80s were a "huge society-wide nightmare").

Actually, I was in my 30s in that decade and didn't find it particularly awful. Lots of bad music but no more than previous decades. I hate to disillusion you, but the 60s were not some wonderful golden era of musical creativity. For every "Axis Bold as Love" there were ten Brian Highlands singing "Oh! Sweet Pea!" and twenty Archies doing "Yummy Yummy Yummy I Got Love in My Tummy."

Hippies and radicals were a very small cohort. Most people my age were exactly like George W. Bush. Take a look at pictures of W. in the 60s. When you walked down the street of any American city in 1968, those were the 20-somethings you saw. Basically, carbon copies of their parents, but with slightly longer sideburns. Those of us 'letting our freak flag fly' with shoulder-lenghth hair, mutton-chop sideburns and bellbottoms or giant afros with dashikis had to either confine ourselves to certain 'hip' neighborhoods or step lively to avoid getting the shit kicked out of us by roving packs of little mini-dubyahs.

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A lot of fucking great music happened between 77 and 84 or so. Things started getting desperately commercial for a while after that.

I can't really vouch for much beyond the music because I turned 10 in 1984. But I gotta figure Vietnam was a bigger nightmare than Punky Brewster.

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Reagan was pretty bad, but his era represented a backlash against more than just the hippie radicalism but also against the Great Society initiatives of Johnson and, more importantly, the progressive tax system put in place by Truman and, of all people, Ike, under whom the marginal tax bracket for the top tier was, like, 90%.

It was practically much more an economic backlash of the rich against the working and middle class, but it was sold to those classes as "taking back" the culture from those selfsame hippie radicals who were now teaching classes at the local U. These so-called "Reagan Democrats" voted themselves out of economic security, of course, bought the prolefeed. The right-wing talk radio echo-chamber of the '90s sealed the deal. I have a brother who still excoriates 'political correctness," which just seems, like, a debate that's sooo 15 years ago.

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Oh, yeah. I was just thinking in terms of youth culture - I shudder to think at the political backlash, especially against feminism and gay rights (both of which, to an extent, have also been co-opted).

For me, though, the most disturbing evidence of a backlash is that we went from being a nation on the brink of following Europe's path in regard to the death penalty to one where being anti-death penalty is, in much of the country, a taboo position. It's almost astonishing.

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I love the SCUM Manifesto. I think it would be awesome at some point to create a kind of Sim or Civilization-type game where the player is tasked with implementing the kind of society she talks about.

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In the 60s and early 70s you had Vietnam to galvanise people into action. Here in Australia we had conscription as well, and so even if you were middle-class you were still likely to be directly affected. That does tend to concentrate the mind somewhat.

The more recent wars haven't done that because nice middle-class kiddies haven't had to fight those wars.

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From the early 60s to around 1974 there was one magic ingredient that made that kind of radicalism possible - optimism. It was possible to only to believe that things were going to improve; it was possible to believe that such improvement was inevitable. That the forces of progressivism represented an unstoppable tide. That optimism started to evaporate with the economic crises of the mid-70s. If you want to scare people out of their radicalism, an economic crisis is a powerful ally. Fear and right-wing politics go together like ham and eggs.

It's easy to get motivated in radical causes when you're convinced you're going to win.

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Make sure that you listen to the Matmos song "Tract for Valerie Solanis." And make sure that you never, ever watch I Shot Andy Warhol.

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I believe we're in a huge society-wide nightmare now.
It's just being spun in certain ways to serve those in power.

I wonder how long most people will be Ok with increasing gas, fuel and food prices until they freak out. In terms of Northern CA, a lot of people are abandoning their houses and it's a big problem.

I wonder what it is going to take.
Plus, people are embroiled with fear in addition to ignorance.

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