Coming to Grips with White Knuckles Part 2

Amid a crescendo of killing only a year and one half of the present decade duplicates the a.s.sa.s.sinations of the "violent sixties."

Even the cop troupe withered, crooned Eric Burton at Monterrey.

I think not.

DASH INTO REALISM: ESCAPE PAD FROM THE SIXTIES

For one, street argot became tougher.

You had to distinguish between what you meant by calling someone a mother.

The Black Panther influence, no doubt, but a rejuvenation of the language. Street fighting man. Butchery at My Lai.

House arrest for Lieutenant Calley so strangely appropriate for the times.

So middle cla.s.s and a tribute to "doing one's own thing": Rampant, militant individualism, the hallmarks of expression.

Sit-ins, love-ins, peace-ins. The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, anyone? The sixties were the highwater meritocracy from the foremost "me decade".

Getting right on target for the narcissism of the seventies.

Or so it was rumoured.

What's next in the social roller derby?

Cutbacks, retrenchments, accountability.

Even uglier, this new argot of the eighties.

WHAT COLOUR IS LOVE?

Sixties idols were built to last.

A 70's idol is shoddy and throwaway by comparison.

Whatever became of Carnaby Street or bell bottoms?

The mentality is alive and well (another dreadful anachronism) in smart up-town boutiques.

The proprietors, though, don't sell little bells to freaks anymore.

Luxurious Persian rugs, instead, are all the vogue.

And bail money for vendors hawking copies of Guerrilla on the streets of Toronto or Black Panther leaflets in US cities isn't needed anymore.

Who was Bobby Seale? Who remembers?

The first generation in history, a new consciousness...

Remember the Greening of America?

Escape From Freedom?

The futuristic think tankers?

consciousness III?

Bombers turning into b.u.t.terflies?

Today's B-52's are punk rockers.

I like my memories, retreat-like, hazy in myopic seclusion.

I suspect social historians for the pleasant dribble they write about the age.

The age, like it spanned a thousand years, opened new epochs.

More like Adolf's remark about his millennial Reich.

Some doubt the authenticity of the Holocaust. I doubt the sixties.

It, too, lasted what seemed twelve years.

CHAIN LETTER

I'm sitting in a "sixties bar." No put-on.

All around old Rolling Stones music is playing.

I can tell it's a sixties bar by the spiffy waiter recycling sheets for tablecloths. The sixties was "into," environment.

It's the eighties now as Heineken was un.o.btainable in 1969.

Someone reminds me in order to run a tab a credit card is needed.

This seems logical but very out of sorts with the people power complex I'm nurturing.

Even the jokes above the bar are old hat.

This confirms with certainty that Madcaps is Nostalgia.

It's too built up for Sha-Na-Na, fintails or Nancy Sinatra's, These Boots Are Made For Walking.

In my sensible decade that tune is considered s.a.d.i.s.tic. Obviously, the effect is too sophisticated to imagine I'm even a temporary time traveller. Still, poetry is a communicable disease invented in the 1920's by a snooty degenerate named Pound.

I bide my time. It's an oasis for waiting. Old time experiences seem strangely current in this campy pub.

Occasionally, someone in a zoot suit comes in but realizes he's missed the last act of Grease.

Old Blue Eyes might make it here if he looked like Bogart in drag.

Like them, Presley was by-pa.s.sed by the theme of this decade.

There's a fleshy table and chairs with a knock out chick that looks like my Bridge Over Troubled Waters.

The waiter scowls like vintage Ben Casey.

Beehive hairdos mingle casually with early "Mod."

Rockers wis.h.i.+ng Cherry Reds are served drinks instead.

Comfortable sleaze.

The window is up on the future now and New Wave is out to spray paint graffiti artists all the way.

"Either you are part of the solution or you are part of the problem." Now there's a sixties homily that still delivers.

Nice to think the social history of three decades is indistinguishable and that silence comes as its own reward.

SLAUGHTERHOUSE

You're the aggressor and your pa.s.sion exceeds mine but we're in this slaughterhouse together and it's near closing.

Vats of p.r.i.c.kly ointment destined to repattern animal skin and tubs of steaming formaldehyde rest casually with the more antiseptic thrill of green sawdust.

Blood is a chameleon, here, changing colours en route to sausage and Pram but my hotdogs and donuts are holding better to the cuttlefish in this unnatural forest.

The stars are a jangle of planets in a world where wood became noise; each ceiling beam, incidentally, is the wrenched out spine of a Longhorn steer, doork.n.o.bs pig knuckles bound for Octoberfest fear.

Even the kindly attendant is an ogre spying out porkers' throats; will sit under a bridge then capsize crates of young chickens knife ready at hand.

The squeal of this bovine camp is recycled on 40 watt amps through more than decibels of rage; is a fishly contest designed to trade off gruel for fresher prospects.

One armed forklift drivers, for instance, with realistic Captain Hook hands jab instructions to lifeless walls where underlings the colour of grey slate form a human paste.

Sound is the monetary exchange, rabbit dung the troll's own currency-- each scrawl of the pen confirmed by the work order upends living things bent over in pain.