Janis Joplin: Bye, Bye Baby
For those who were paying attention, Janis Joplin would have celebrated her 75th birthday at the turn of this year. Can you imagine Janis at 75? I can't. A grandma? Hilarious. Doing post-career autobiographical gigs at regional theaters packed with graying groupies, pacemakers keeping their hippie hearts under control? Laughable. That devilish young rocker who prayed for a Mercedes Benz and for her lover to "take a piece of my heart" went away long, long ago in a haze of weed and a river of Southern Comfort. But her verve, energy and free-spiritedness live on in an age turned sour with rage, cynicism and mass derangement. She remains one of the top-selling musicians in the United States.
For those of a certain age, Janis was a cultural freebooter, one who marauded the calm shores of post-'50s staidness to project her anything-goes, soul-baring persona, capturing the hearts of America's youth and turning them into fellow freebooters in an era marked by a falling away of traditional moral norms and respect for the shibboleths of their parents. Of course, there were others engaged in this societal subversion - the Stones, Beatles, Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, who died a couple of weeks before Janis. Both, at 27, did themselves in with the rockers' hemlock of choice: recreational drugs.
Janis, et al. stood as much for self-destructive hedonism as for personal "liberation." The era they helped define was marked by riots, assassinations, drugs, a decline in law and order, stagflation and a breakdown in values, traditional and otherwise. The '60s and early '70's saw the rise of radical movements ranging from the Black Panthers to the Weather Underground to the Simbionese Liberation Army (SLA), which engaged in bank robberies, murders, shootouts with police and bombings. Of the twelve founding members of the SLA, six were killed in shootouts and four were imprisoned. According to FBI statistics, the United States experienced more than 2,500 domestic bombings in just eighteen months in 1971 and 1972. For those who lived those times, it felt like the nation was coming apart at the seams. As a student in Washington, DC, I went to my bank one morning to make a withdrawal to find it closed off by police tape. It had been bombed. Those were crazy times.
And so are these.
We have been witnessing a swing to far-right extremism. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2017," neo-Nazi groups saw the greatest growth – from 99 groups to 121. Anti-Muslim groups rose for a third straight year...from 101 chapters to 114 in 2017 – growth that comes after the groups tripled in number a year earlier."
The SPLC identified 689 active antigovernment groups of the “Patriot” movement in 2017, up from 623, of which 273 were armed militias. "Historically, these groups rise during Democratic presidencies out of fear of gun control measures and federal law enforcement action against them. They typically decline under GOP presidencies. This has not been the case under Trump."
But armed right-wing groups started gaining ascendancy in the 1990s with the growth of the militia movement. While more bark than bite, these groups feed on anti-government conspiracy theories and both inspire and gain inspiration from armed standoffs such as Ruby Ridge, Waco and the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation. They provide ideological inspiration to freelancers such as Timothy McVeigh as well.
A recent study shows that between 2008 and 2016, there were 115 terrorist acts carried out by right-wing groups, 63 by Islamist groups, and 19 by left-wing groups. These pale in comparison to the 2500 bombings during a year-and-a-half, mostly carried out by the far-left, some four decades previously. But given the right political, economic and social circumstances, who is to say the country couldn't sink back into such chaos again?
In a recent article I wrote,
While history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it does often rhyme. What happened to interwar Germany may provide a looking glass into what is now befalling America.
Rather than plunging into a rematch of the War Between the States, we are more likely sliding into a morass of political paralysis and civil strife that resembles Weimar Germany.
Germany, under the Weimar Republic, slid into fourteen years of political gridlock, civil unrest and social and economic chaos. In the spring of 1919, some 15,000 Germans died in nine days of street fighting in Berlin, with another 12,000 wounded. Political violence spread across Germany. In Munich alone, 10,000 communists were killed.
Given the political dysfunction today, misgovernance will eventually open the gates to the barbarians of inflation, overspending, more war and joblessness - further feeding political extremism and violence. Just like in the 1960s and 1970s.
Which is why we need to pay heed to Janis Joplin:
"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose."