Still having it their way.

"Immediate disqualification because of its involvement with the Big Chill."

- Jack Black’s character, Barry, from the 1990 movie High Fidelity.



We caught a little of “The Boomer Century: 1946-2046” (we’ve still got 38 more years to go?) on PBS last week. The largely self-congratulatory and self-gratifying nature of the program rendered “little” very operative in this context. We flipped over there 3 times and in two separate occasions we were treated to the following:

Noted filmmaker, Oliver Stone, giving us a look at his formative political sensibilities: “I was a conformist… I voted for Barry Goldwater.”

It would appear that some of the license that Ollie has taken with the facts in his movies applies as well to his own life as Stone, born in September of 1946 would’ve been 18 years old when he “voted” for Goldwater in 1964. Unfortunately, the voting age was not lowered to 18 (from 21) until 1971 and the passage of the 26 amendment. Bummer, dude.

And this notion of equating conformity with Goldwater is equally incongruous. Goldwater’s nomination to the Republican presidential candidacy represented a revolt within the G.O.P. that was a bold and risky gambit to wrest control of the party away from the gray fannel suit-wearing, Northeastern, Rockefeller establishment (read: “conformist”) base of the Party. There was nothing remotely conformist about this rebellion that paved the way for a confederacy of social conservatives, libertarians, anti-communist foreign policy hawks, etc. that would become the new identity of the Party.

And then we have this. The famous diner scene from Five Easy Pieces that was to illustrate the youthful anti-authoritarian attitude of the times in the face of the old-world establishment.



Can’t you feel it? Can’t you just feel the righteous indignation and the demand for justice in Nicholson’s character, Bobby DuPea, as he and his friends gang-up on and completely humiliate the poor short-order diner waitress, the symbol of the crushing oppression of authority and the establishment?

For us, the real message is at the end of the scene when Bobby acknowleges that despite all the theatrics, appeals to reason and generally boorish tactics, he didn’t get what he wanted, afterall.