Where has all the hope for peace and fulfilment gone?

Driving to work on Saturday morning, I was listening to the soundtrack of Milos Forman’s film, Hair, based on the 1967 Broadway hit musical, and I was swept away by the sheer force of the first track, Aquarius, sung by a woman with an unbelievably powerful, yet melodious voice.

The beat, the rhythms and the lyrics carried by the voices of the singers conveyed to me, more than forty years after it was first staged, the utopian impulses born at the time of resistance against the Vietnam War and the perceived hypocrisy and empty materialism of the “older” generation in America, coupled with hope for a future without conflict.

Almost inevitably, it struck me that the world of today is no less suffused with hypocrisy and materialism, except that one might add pervasive cynicism to the list of things to be deplored and resisted, and not only on the part of the “older generation”.

Today it is the yuppies who, more than anyone else, embody the cynical materialism that has taken the place of the widespread hope for peace and fulfillment that accompanied the counter-cultural movements of the late 1960s. Jack Kroll of NewsWeek has described Hair aptly as a “myth of our popular consciousness, no more dated than your last dream of happiness after a bad day in the real world”. Small wonder that Hair can still today be experienced as a vehicle for expressing one’s own desire for a just, humane society.

The fact that Kroll characterises it as a “myth” is significant, though — myths are stories which capture deep-seated human needs and desires, and this explains why Hair still resonates with our collective consciousness today.

After all, although it is one of the most powerful anti-war films of the 20th century, it harnesses the age-old motifs of love, conflict and the redemptive power of self-sacrifice: Berger, the carefree hippie, rescuing the Vietnam draftee, Claude, from the perils of the war by (perhaps inadvertently) taking his place and perishing, so that Claude could live and be happy with Sheila. It is instructive to compare another classic from the same year, 1967, with Hair — Mike Nichols’s noir masterpiece, The Graduate, which made Dustin Hoffman’s reputation as an actor.

Unlike Hair, it does not target the war in Vietnam directly, but focuses relentlessly on the generation gap between college students and their superficial, cynical, corrupt, materialistic parents. Who could forget the affair between the newly graduated Benjamin, desperate for something to impart some meaning to his life — amid a sea of shallowness epitomised by the advice one of his father’s friends gives him: “Plastics, Benjamin, plastics!” — and the jaded, but sexy femme fatale, Mrs Robinson (“And here’s to you, Mrs Robinson …”)? And who could blame Benjamin for falling in love with his mistress’s forbidden daughter, who represents precisely the other side of a territory that simultaneously frightens and alienates Benjamin?

Unlike Hair, however, which ends on a hopeful note, The Graduate gives one an open ending, where the young lovers, having alienated themselves from their parents, face an uncertain future together, but one that they prefer to the cynicism of their parents’ world. It is quite telling that young people today seem to find The Graduate puzzling, if not incomprehensible — in my experience, they (students) prefer the kitschy Hollywood revisionist soap film, Rumour Has It, which re-inscribes The Graduate retrospectively in precisely those mainstream American values that Nichols’s film subverts so powerfully. This is not surprising, though.

The world in which today’s young people have grown up is one of unmitigated materialism where financial “losers” are despised — the world of the yuppie executive, so mercilessly exposed by Brett Easton Ellis in American Psycho, a novel that does not pull its punches as far as the endlessly boring world of upmarket consumer goods and designer clothes is concerned. But there is a sting in the tail of American Psycho.

The last words in the novel are a stark reminder that, when one puts it down, you have not left the world constructed by it behind: “This is not an exit”.

Is it at all surprising that the hopefulness embodied in Hair, and in a different manner in The Graduate, has made way for the relentlessly exposed, virtually pathological, self-centred materialism of American Psycho? Look around you. Everywhere one looks, you see the cynical manipulation of those without power by those who occupy positions of power in the currently dominant system of so-called (neo-) liberal democracy, which seems to me to consist of new oligarchies disguised as democracies.

After all, democracy is the rule of the people by the people, not by so-called “representatives” who increasingly represent only their own interests; where an appeal to “the people” — especially the poor, whose plight is so often invoked by those in power — turns out, more often than not, to be merely a necessary ruse to ensure the re-election of the current elites.

To be sure, this is not the case to the same degree everywhere in the world, but the recent pronouncement by Ralph Nader in the US that both of the candidates for the Democratic nomination represent the dominant interests of corporate America is a reminder that even there, whatever the expectations on the part of voters may be — and many appear to anticipate change in the event of Obama’s nomination and (possible) election as president — nothing fundamental would really change if either of them is elected.

Here in South Africa the evidence of a growing oligarchic rule is even more abundant, and the question is whether ordinary voters will tolerate it, or whether they will be suckered into falling for mere assurances (instead of significant actions) to the contrary. Unless ordinary voters resist these tendencies, our much-vaunted democracy in South Africa will continue being eroded. And as Hair shows, hope may still be a potent source of democratic resistance.