Ray can be fully appreciated only by those of us who were young during the Vietnam War. He wrote for the anti-war underground as one of those intellectuals LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover wanted incarcerated—and many were, more than in today's Russia where Russians have been brainwashed to think Putin is their Savior sent to them by Jesus Christ. America’s counterculture generation was one of a kind never to be seen again. To quote Wordsworth: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” They were free thinking rebels who read books and watched movies from Europe. Philosophy classes were packed with students looking for answers since they concluded that the thinking of adults who could go along with LBJ’s war and accept police dogs being turned loose on black people was as primitive as that of the Puritans who hanged women for witchcraft.
Unlike today the young were free thinkers because religious and secular ideologies had not yet imprisoned their minds. It was an age that celebrated love unlike today when Hollywood has demoted love to sex. The Golden Age of Hollywood had come to an end but a few intellectual, aesthetic golden nuggets were produced. It was a time before Hollywood became America’s Pravda. The great movie stars and directors were departing leaving a void where once there was inspired creativity. When Ray was writing young people were reading, not comic books and graphic novels (as fascinating as they can be; I’ve read plenty) but weighty philosophical tombs by Paul Tillich, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and novels by Albert Camus, Ralph Ellison, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy (who lived before Russia was lobotomized by Marx). That glorious time came to an end of course, and was replaced by mediocrity. (Simply consider America’s last two presidents.)
Free thinking existentialism succumbed to the hive-mind thinking of religious and secular ideologies or to the no-thinking of nihilistic anarchism. Today America lives in an age defined by social media communication via Facebook, Twitter, Tik Toc, etc. Very different from the age of the rebellious Transcendentalism, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain. Or even Fenimore Cooper who had given up on the American enterprise and escape with Natty Bumppo into the world of the Noble Savage for whom freedom and spirituality was more important than the dollar. The 1920s were anything but boring, as were the 1930s that gave birth to America’s Greatest Generation, and 1940s when that generation fought the greatest evildoer history has known (though Putin might catch up with his nukes). Even the 1950s had hot rods and the most glorious music that celebrated—not sex—but teenage love. Then there were the sixties, the apex of American culture for young people. LBJ and the Cold Warriors tried to destroy their love of life but failed. Thousands were drafted from their lives to die over there. Over here they were imprisoned or shot dead on campus by National Guard (guarding whom?) for their rejection of LBJ’s evil war, a war America started unlike WWI, WWII, and Putin’s war. Refusing to surrender, America’s youth celebrated love and life and created music that was heartbreakingly sublime.
And Ray and I were there. I was there as an observing participant, he as an anti-war activist who fought against evil men and their evil war not with a tank but with a typewriter. That is who Ray Mungo was.
My favorite books by Ray Mungo:
