For What It's Worth (Part I)

It starts when you’re always afraid—Buffalo Springfield

“Step out of line,” warned Stephen Stills in For What It’s Worth, “the Man comes and takes you away.” Back then we all knew who the Man was, or at least most of his shape-shifting forms: he was the Chicago Police Department, or the draft board, or the Military-Industrial Complex, or the Nixon administration, or the parents who were paying for your university educations and then wouldn’t let your girlfriend sleep over on Thanksgiving.

Almost all of us stepped out of line, but somehow none of us ever managed to get taken away to any Gulags, except a tiny fraction who had it coming, and they weren't in jail long. Meanwhile, a lot of the clever stage managers of all the sit-ins, love-ins, teach-ins, be-ins, f***-ins, and campus riots of those days stayed in school, got their PhDs, and took over the universities they once accused of irrelevance. And then they became the Man themselves. Or worse than the Man, with a multifold increase in lust to repress, silence, and punish that made the 60s Man seem like a Boy. Instead of the Chicago PD, who wielded their nightsticks on unprotected heads and handcuffed wrists with no real driving ideas behind their violence, the new Man knew how to bash heads from the inside, with poisonous lies about multiculturalism, moral equivalence, self-hatred, and diversity.

And then they taught the rest of us what it really means to be afraid.

Any dictator will tell you that the most effective program to imprison a population is to convince the inmates to voluntarily lock themselves into their own cells. Just think of the savings on turnkeys’ salaries and guard towers! Better yet, if you can get people, in the privacy of their own homes, to be so afraid to say aloud certain words, to express, or even to think certain ideas, because they’re so scared of provoking the incessant voice inside their heads that shrieks, “Say that, or even think it, and it makes you a racist, a homophobe, a sexist, an Islamophobe.”

This is the power that makes it seem normal to hear professional liars compare Israeli and American heroes to Hitler on national television, but forbids you to use the word “colored” in your own basement workroom without first looking over your own shoulder.

Now this shriek you hear is not the voice of conscience, which doesn’t shriek, nor the voice of the Holy Ghost, Who doesn’t either shriek or lie, nor the voice of whomever taught you basic manners, if you were lucky enough to be taught any, because any well-mannered person would have more sense.

That shrieking is none other than the Man. We're learning to recognize him inside our heads because we can match his voice against all the recordings we have of him shrieking outside our heads: in his college lectures, in his opinion pieces, in his phony documentaries, and in his insane legal opinions. His voice has that unmistakeable rising pitch, the outrage and intolerance that spits when you try not to listen, and that never wants to reason with your brain--instead always just threatening your soul with the horrible punishment of being called a name.

And being called any kind of bigot is the primal fear of most 21st-Century Americans.