VLVL: the Movement and the War WAS Re: Absences in VL

[Doug Millison]

At 9:36 PM -0500 12/6/98, Scott Badger wrote:
[snip
< And instead, maybe it's the structures
>that lead us to war and those that rise from its ashes that Pynchon finds
>more notable.

That would be what makes VL of a piece with his other novels.

>Questions for those just a little bit older than I; what
>would the 60's and early 70's have been like if the US had not gotten
>involved in Vietnam?  How much was the Movement about the war or was it
>simply triggered by the war?  And if the latter, would the Movement have
>come together without the war?

That's a real mind-bender, trying to imagine the 60s without the war -- a
proper subject for an alternative-history novelist like Harry Turtledove,
perhaps.  The War is such an integrated part of what it was to grow up
during that time -- in my dreams, in my gut; I watched it on the Tube when
I was playing Little League and a few years later found myself facing the
draft.  The crowd a decade older than me (I'm 46) knows better about causes
and early history, but it seems to me that the precursor to the Movement of
the 60s was, in the 50s, limping along, barely stoking its fires with
budding anti-nuke sentiments, still reeling from the wrenching split the
left endured over Stalin and McCarthyism, buried deep in Ike's America.
First, civil rights expanded the struggle and provided some real
barricades, then the draft brought the struggle home to virtually every
family (500,000 soldiers in Vietnam meant that everybody knew somebody
involved or had that somebody in the family).

-Doug