Padraic P. McGuinness, The Australian, April 25, 1989, p. 2.

Despite the fact that my mother always cherished the photo of her favourite uncle, moustachioed and uniformed, who was killed in World War I, I never had strong feelings about Anzac Day until I actually saw some of those fields of crosses.

Until then I was fairly critical, growing up in the days when our community was dominated by the veterans of World War II with their stuffy conservatism, as seen by the revolting young, and their trading upon the great days. Too many of the hopeless timeservers of the teaching profession and the bureaucracy fell back on the RSL as a sacred cow. With age, I became more tolerant.

The RSL, of course, soldiers on and despite the quaint comments often to be heard from its spokesmen, is no longer an organisation whose social influence is so great as to need to be challenged. Those who need it as a target these days are really those who have formed their own version of it.

For the role of the RSL in the 60s and 70s has now been taken over by another kind of organised nostalgia, what might be called the Anti-Vietnam War RSL. These are the stuffy conservatives who still look back on their great days in the Anti-Vietnam war movement of the 60s and 70s and who cling desperately to their youthful verities in an attempt to retain their social influence.

Just as the boring left-overs of World War II, through the simple process of getting older, rose to occupy most of the strategic middle-level positions in the bureaucracy and teaching — where they were given special preference — so too have the AVRSL of today.

It is to a considerable degree a simple matter of age. The AVRSL comprises mostly those who were in the 15 to 24 age group in the decade 1966-75. That, of course, was the “great” period of the counterculture, the hippies and the Moratorium. These people now, taking into account those entering it and those leaving it, span the age ranges 29 to 47.

It is interesting to note many who were at the time 15 to 24 were not particularly active or “radical”; but they have, with age, succumbed to the impact of their peer group members who were and they have adopted retrospectively many of the values they were too timid to espouse at the time.

Inevitably, it is this 29 to 47 age cohort that occupies most of the important and crucial jobs in our society, which are not directly dependent on market performance. That is, they dominate the white-collar administrative class in its various guises, from teachers through bureaucrats to journalists.

They share a core of notions, not coherent enough to be described as an ideology, which they like to think of as “progressive”.

Equality of opportunity is equated to equality of outcomes; feminism denies any inherent differences between men and women (when it does not want to set up a kind of sexual apartheid); antipathy to racism denies the possibility of racial differences of any kind; the belief in human improvability denies any hereditary element in the determination of intelligence; sexual liberty denies the possibility of any morality; education of children denies the desirability of inculcating specific knowledge and testing is rejected.

There is also a dislike, even a fear, of technology and a willingness to play with superstition and “alternatives” — alternative medicine, alternative technology, alternative lifestyles and so on. These days this is shading over into all the nonsense about New Age lifestyles.

(It is in these attitudes of the middle-aged and those verging on middle age that the real problems of sensible science and technology policy in Australia originate, as also the downgrading of science at the tertiary level.)

The generation of the AVRSL is deeply conservative, indeed reactionary, determined to cling to the values and mindsets it acquired in its youth. Inevitably, of course, it is being challenged by the young.

Just as the young of the 60s and 70s challenged the RSL, the young of today are challenging the AVRSL. And that group, of course, reacts just as did the RSL in its heyday — it complains about the lack of respect of the young for its values, it espies a deterioration in morality (only interested in making money, careers, etc, as if any generation of young people were ever not interested in the future) and it does its best to smear the leaders of the generation which is challenging its ascendancy.

It was okay at the beginning of the 60s if you were respectful to your elders; then you were clearly a young man of great promise. But if you said they were full of ordure, as most of them were, you were on the outer. You got smeared as being a commo or a troublemaker.

The same is true today. The respectful young are lionised, the real innovators are part of the New Right, or the selfish careerists, or indeed they are just troublemakers. It was ever thus.

The RSL of the anti-Vietnam war movement dominates the universities and colleges to a much greater degree than the old RSL ever did. Despite the very healthy influx of mature age students into the professional intelligentsia after World War II as a result of the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scholarship scheme, it was only a minor addition. After that came the huge expansion of the 60s and 70s.

The great achievement of the Whitlam government was to open the floodgates of funding for these people — as a former minister for education once said, the standards were so low we were recruiting teachers off the streets.

The bonanza could not last. But it did create a whole generation of intellectuals of no great intellectual quality who were committed to the values of the 60s and 70s and were bitterly resentful when the cornucopia of funding dried up. Like the RSL which justified its existence for many years by campaigning for more and more privileges for veterans, the veterans of the AVRSL are fighting for the standard of living to which they feel they ought to be accustomed.

They have become largely alienated from what the mainstream of Australian society is about. Because they are vocal, their interpretation of what is going on tends to be taken at face value by outsiders. Thus when there is an overseas literary conference, the Australian representatives tend to be those who see their role as denigrating their own society.

This comes as something of a shock to foreigners, who do not realise how deeply the Australian intellectuals of the AVRSL are alienated from Australian society.

***
2.
P. P. McGuinness, “Protestors fighting the phoney war,”
The Sun-Herald, May 31, 1987, p. 43.

New York: I never did have much time for the pop heroes of the 60s, like whining Bob Dylan or the Beatles, so it hardly shocked me when the Beatles song Revolution was sold as the music for a sports shoe advertisement.

After all, the Beatles only produced low-grade jingles (although they seemed a lot more original than Dylan’s songs, which bear a close resemblance to certain folk songs). It is far more shocking when the music of a truly great musician like J.S. Bach is pinched for advertising purposes.

However, I have long since learnt to laugh at this, so it is even more amusing when the waves of shock-horror at the commercialisation (as if it was not already commercial) of the Beatles song should drive various old troopers of the 60s to distraction.

When the US weekly, New Republic, recently reported the indignation of a “rock critic” at the Nike sports shoe company’s purchase of the Beatles song, it seemed a good reason to guffaw.

These were the words of this “critic” — “When Revolution came out in 1968 I was getting tear-gassed in the streets of Madison, and that song is part of the political soundtrack of my life. It bugs the hell out of me that it has been turned into a shoe ad.”

It did not occur to this “critic” that the “political soundtrack” of his life might have had no more merit — possibly less — than a shoe ad.

But this kind of absurd over-reaction is typical of the attitude of many of the veterans of the protest movements of the 60s, who never seem to have realised that the orgy of political sloganising, street theatre and self-indulgence that they lived through in their youth really looks pretty threadbare now.

Not that it would matter much, except that the veterans of the 60s are now adults, indeed middle-aged adults, and many of them are teachers, university lecturers, bureaucrats, educational administrators, welfare workers, hack writers or, indeed in some cases, journalists.

These are the people who are berating the young people who are just now going through the schools, colleges and universities for not sharing their values. They seem to think the kids are somehow worth less than they were, because the kids don’t share their system of prejudices.

They remind me of the RSL when I was a student. These dreary middle-aged types were stuck in the days of their youth, days of war, and they could talk of little else. They used to reproach the kids who said, “the war’s over, dad, things have changed”. They tried to denounce the dissidents, suppress our writings, stop us having a say. They couldn’t stand Alan Seymour’s play, The One Day Of The Year, which pointed to the lack of acceptance of the RSL myth.

What we have now all over the developed world, but particularly in countries like the United States, Britain and Australia, is another RSL generation just as full of prejudice and nonsense as the old RSL generation. If possible, the old RSL is better — at least they fought a real war.

But just as the RSL of World War II often turned into boozy and lazy occupants of guaranteed jobs, the RSL of the anti-Vietnam war movement has done the same thing.

There are plenty of academics in Australian universities, particularly those with World War II records but fourth-rate qualifications, who got jobs on the strength of what they did in the war. The teaching professions used to be full of the RSL types, as did the public service (I met a few in my first public service job after I left school — they used to start drinking in the early morning pubs and were sozzled by lunchtime).

Nowadays the AVRSL, the anti-Vietnam war RSL, although it has not quite the same formal basis but is much more prevalent in the educational system, is cluttering up the teaching and administrative jobs in Australia, like America. They are just now at the peak of their influence, and doing their best to put down original thought from the kids.

A couple of pieces of evidence from Australia came my way quite recently. One was a report in The Sydney Morning Herald of April 30 of a study of old anti-Vietnam activists.

According to the report, the study showed that “today, 15 years after the last Australian troops were pulled out of Vietnam, the activists were still more Left-leaning, were more likely to be involved in political activity, were more likely to have a negative view of modern technology, and tended to be more idealistic and less concerned about personal and financial security”.

The lack of concern about security simply means, of course, that they have safe jobs in teaching or similar occupations. They have learned nothing, and are still peddling their musty 60s fashions, especially in the educational system, to the detriment of the young.

A book review of an anthology of young writers, published in an Australian journal recently, reproached the contributors for not subscribing to the same slogans as the reviewer, and for “individualism”. (Imagine criticising young writers for being individualistic!)

These are the people who criticise the kids who are coming up now for being “materialistic”, and for being interested in personal achievement and success.

What they really mean, of course, is that the kids are bored by the AVRSL’s nostalgic whingeing, and are able to see through the hypocrisy of tired veterans, time-servers and placemen (and placewomen, let us not be sexist) who justify their position in terms of a set of beliefs which is shallow and vulgar — as shallow and vulgar as Bob Dylan, John Lennon or Paul McCartney.

These were the people who provided the “political soundtrack” of the 60s. What an image — as if politics and protest were merely the miming of a pop song!

The erosion of the moral authority of the AVRSL, such as it ever was, is now as clear in the United States as elsewhere, although we are witnessing a farcical re-run of it.

Just as it took years for the lies of the American communists of the 40s, like the totally dishonest Lilian Hellman (who tried to use her considerable wealth before she died to suppress exposure), to be documented, so too are the lies of the anti-Vietnam war movement being defended by the middle-aged “left” equivalent of the RSL.

But at least the soldiers fought a real war, without a “political soundtrack”. The veterans of the 60s protest movement in America and Australia fought a phoney propaganda war, and they are still fighting it.