As usual when it comes to time past, humans have already forgotten a lot of the recently departed 20th century. No surprise there. Such is the way of the world.

In addition to that passive forgetting, there’s been a lot of active forgetting going on as well. Some call this "writing history." Others call it "re-writing history."

Hop in my time machine for a moment, and let me take you back to the late 1960s, a time of some political, social, sexual, cultural, and religious ferment.

Upheavals, everywhere you turned. In music (Beatles, etc.), art (Warhol, etc.), rights (Selma, Stonewall, Houston, etc.), politics (Kennedys, etc.), war (Vietnam, etc.), "reality" even (Leary, etc.)

A fertile time for the incurably curious and the compulsively creative. A terrible time for the less curious and the less creative.

In re-writing the 20th century, we have, alas, often thrown out the baby with the bathwater (stick with me, and you’ll get a lot more than two metaphors for the price of one).

For one example, take Freud. Poor Freud. The French have de-fanged him. The Americans have simply castrated him and then burned him at the stake (I gave you fair warning about metaphors).

For his sins—and they were of course many, Freud unearthed and saw stuff in the human past and in humans present that lots of people didn’t like. At all. "The excremental vision," one of his most gifted acolytes would term it.

"Pfui! Even if the king has no new clothes, if we drop the pretense that he does," many screamed, "how are we going to get on with the business of running our lives, much less the world?"

Out went Freud.

And other stuff:
For America now, Vietnam is a couple of beautiful, moving, half-buried walls of names—never mind what we did there and what we, briefly, learned from what we did.
With the collapse of the communist experiments, America conveniently forgot the lessons once learned from the robber barons about unbridled greed.
With the electoral triumph of ideological Christians, America forget about the hard lessons of tolerance learned from wave after wave of immigrants.
Etc.

So much forgotten. So much—pace, Freud—repressed.

For it is in fact repression—Freud’s great discovery—that we are talking about here, the massive repression in which America and the world are now living.

How did we get to this solemn, super-patriotic, super-pious, neo-puritan place?

Like this:

The spice of the 1960s, mixed quite nicely in with the turmoil and confusion, was very simple and straightforward:

Fun.

Lots of people had lots of fun, some legal, some illegal.

It was an open party, no invitation necessary. Let your hair down and you could join in the fun for as long as you could stand it.

One of the dangerous aspects of 1960s reality that we’ve forgotten, at great cost, is the many, many people who stood around watching, who either didn’t want to have fun or were so repressed they couldn’t have fun and who really, really resented those who were having fun.

We may have forgotten, but those people didn’t.

Angry, frustrated, insulted, repressed, unquestioningly "patriotic," proudly pious, those people not only remembered, they created lives based on the grudges they held, the resentment they felt toward all that fun. Revenge, revenge, revenge.

Focused and nurtured with endless money from their rich mentors, their repressions took root and grew. And grew. And grew.

I knew a lot of George W. Bush’s in the 1960s. I watched them standing at the edge of the fun. I looked at their faces (they weren’t laughing), faces of, first, confusion, then resentment, then anger, and finally, tragically often, faces of hatred. "Some of my best friends are ______."

Those people, and their well-trained children, have now gained the world. They came to feel it was their mission to make the world safe for America, safe for "decency," safe for their very narrow, very strict definition of "freedom."

Though they could never admit it (self-knowledge is not one of their fortes), the driving energy behind that mission is much simpler:

Stamp out fun.

Hippies were bad enough (Woodstock!). But now the Karl Rove’s of the world—and their number today is legion—see their children threatened by other, incomprehensible Woodstocks. Raves, gay pride parades, gigabytes of freely available pornography, pagan religions, jewel-like wee cars that DON’T EVEN BURN GASOLINE. And so on.

They have gained not THE world, but A world, a world of their own repressed and repressive devising. They’ve gained it and they strut and preen and prevaricate daily to remind us what they’ve got (power and money)—but naively and dangerously unaware that in gaining this world, they have truly, truly lost their souls in a bottomless quagmire of self-hate and other-hate.

They will not rest till they’ve pulled us all in after them.

One unstated motto of this cowardly new world is: Whatever you do, don’t have fun.