VLVL2 (1): Zoyd and the Sixties (part 2)

[Tim Strzechowski]

continuing . . .
 
"The social upheavals of the 1960s -- centering around rapid changes in thinking about race, gender relations, sexuality, nationalism and the American military, the power of corporate technocracy and marketing -- constituted America's central trauma for the New Right. All the Reaganist themes return to the 60s and attempt in some way to undo the incomplete changes of that decade. As the feminist historian Rosalind Pollack Petchesky describes it, the New Right is in large part "a movement to turn back the tide of the major social movements of the 1960s and 1970s" (450). And this view from the Left no more than reinforces the Right's own self-description. Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966 largely by campaigning against student radicals. A hippie, Reagan said, was someone who "dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah" (Cannon, 148), and he promised to "clean up the mess at Berkeley," in particular the "sexual orgies so vile I cannot describe them to you" (Gitlin, 217). Richard Viguerie, the right wing fund raiser, claimed in the early 80s, 
  It was the social issues that got us this far, and that's what will take us into the future. We never really won until we began stressing issues like busing, abortion, school prayer and gun control. We talked about the communist onslaught until we were blue in the face. But we didn't start winning majorities in elections until we got down to gut level issues. (Quoted in Davis, 171)

"These "gut level issues," which revolve primarily around race, sexuality, and violence, point directly back to the social conflicts of the 1960s and define that decade as the central site of trauma in recent American history."

[...]
 
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_berger.html
 

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20030715/0ecf8fab/attachment.html>