It is 40 years since Theodore Roszak published his celebrated book, "The Making of a Counter Culture". One of America's most eloquent moralists, Roszak was a discriminating champion of the revolt of disaffected 1960s youth against technology and his country's emergence as a dangerously overmilitarized corporate state. His critique of American power has lost none of its relevance at a time when, be it in Central Asia or the Middle East, the destabilizing consequences of Washington's drive to establish a unipolar, US-dominated world order are plain to see.
Scornful of the notion that the United States enjoys a monopoly on virtue, Roszak personifies an America that was eclipsed by the neoconservative ideological ascendancy that began when Ronald Reagan became US president in 1980. Under the administration of Reagan's ideological soul mate, President George W. Bush, progressive Americans like Roszak, with their Jeffersonian conviction that it behooves America to show a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind", have been rendered practically irrelevant. Whether they will become less irrelevant if Barack Obama becomes the next president remains to be seen.
While writing "The Making of a Counter Culture" in the mid-1960s, Roszak was living in London, horrified by his country's imperialist foreign policy. A participant in the short-lived 1960s experiment, the "Anti-University of London", where students turned up with guitars, begging bowls and magic mushrooms, he was well aware the counterculture was not confined to the US but believed a special significance attached to the American protest movement. Mindful that protest was disabled in the US by the absence of a developed native tradition of dissent, he felt that the very naivete of the American counterculture was what gave it its unique insight, its potential to make a difference.
Roszak believed that mankind was menaced by a technocratic America committed to an ever-expanding military budget and to ushering in an era of endless conflict. What President Eisenhower dubbed the "military-industrial-complex" had already led America into the protracted debacle of the Vietnam War, and this seemed likely to be the mere harbinger of bloodier wars to come. The most chilling aspect of the US power structure was that, while depending for its very survival on propagating mass paranoia, it yet wore a mask of normality. If the counterculture was pitted against one thing above all, it was the "mad rationality" that informed the inner workings of the American corporate state. Roszak was reminded of the words of Captain Ahab, the demented protagonist of Melville's Moby Dick: "All my means are sane: My motives and object are mad".
Recognizing how much the counterculture was bound up with affluence, Roszak also appreciated how liable it was to being commercialized and trivialized. All the same, it struck him as one of the few social levers that, at a critical historic juncture, radical dissent had to work with. He likened the young rebels of the 1960s to the early Christians, once an inconsequential minority whose own counterculture was a mere "scattering of suggestive ideas". True, the comparison appeared far-fetched, but Roszak pointed out that revolutionary changes were always unthinkable - until they happened. His fear was that if the counterculture failed, there would be nothing to stop the inexorable triumph of corporate America, with its mania for military adventures and plundering the planet while purporting to uphold democracy and human rights.
Because their optimism is legendary, it is often forgotten that the 1960s were also a time of foreboding - witness the doom-laden quality of the music of American rock bands like The Doors. The Making of a Counter Culture was of a piece with this conflicted mood. While Roszak believes the 1960s yielded lasting benefits, not least the environmental movement, he is equally in no doubt that the anxieties he voiced have proved all too well founded. His latest polemic, "World Beware: American Triumphalism in an Age of Terror" (2006), is an indictment of a US rife with ignorance, intolerance and authoritarianism, a country whose extraordinary moral ugliness few Americans can bring themselves to face up to.
"World Beware" is a warning not to underestimate the sheer illiberalism of prevailing American attitudes. Roszak argues that the outpouring of books and films laying bare the chicanery of the Bush regime has created a misleading impression of the residual strength of American decency and rationality. What strikes him is how little impact Bush's critics have made on the Republican Party's core support. The truth, he suspects, is that great numbers of Americans are perfectly aware of the cynicism of the Bush regime - and positively approve of it. They simply do not care if the "war on terror" has been prosecuted, and if many Muslims have been tortured, on the basis of proven lies.
On Roszak's reckoning, the 2008 US presidential race between Barack Obama and Republican candidate John McCain will be played out against the background of the gross "moral asymmetry" that now defines American political culture. Many Vietnam-era American liberals, he writes, repudiated the Democratic Party over the disaster of Vietnam; yet their right-wing counterparts have shown no comparable willingness to break ranks over issues of conscience. The upshot is that "partisan polarization" has lurched of control, with Republicans and Democrats consumed by pathological mutual loathing and American standards of political discourse debased as never before.
Now in his mid-70s, Roszak is frankly bemused by the ominous turn things have taken in America. It is ironic that he sympathized with the otherworldly strain of the hippy culture, for he hardly anticipated what a furious force religiosity - in the guise of ultrarighteous Christian Zionism - was going to become in American life. Roszak considers Bush's America to be little short of a theocracy - a theocracy, moreover, with a brute determination to impose its will on the rest of mankind, even if that means destroying the world in the process.
The fate of the planet, he observes, means little to apocalyptic Christians like Bush; after all, they believe it is destined to be swallowed up in the "Rapture" which, according to biblical prophecy, will portend the End of Days.
"World, Beware!" is explicitly addressed to a global readership, in the belief that the United States has become a menacing aberration among nations which desperately needs to be saved from itself. It is an urgent plea to reflective human beings everywhere to "join forces with embattled American liberals to resist an ideological assault that has at its disposal the most powerful military establishment - and one of the most militarized publics - in the world".
Theodore Roszak has long drawn inspiration from the poet Walt Whitman, with his dream of an America of exuberant variety, a democracy that would become a great human adventure. It says much about how unreceptive America has become to Whitman's vision that Roszak could not find a publisher in the US for his latest book and was obliged to bring it out in Canada. Though he writes with all his old cogency and verve, this valiant American humanist has come close to being gagged.
