VLVL"the Movement"

[jbor]

on 9/4/04 10:36 PM, Malignd at malignd at yahoo.com wrote:

>> <<By 1968-9, the time depicted in the novel, the
>> counterculture had forgotten all about civil rights
>> and the Vietnam War, and this is something which *is*
>> referred to and depicted in the text.
> 
> the above statement is certainly not true and a
> rather astonishing comment.
> 
> Nixon's elelction, the Chicago riots, the murders of
> Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King--all occured in
> 1968; the draft was still in effect, the bombing raids
> into Cambodia were still to come ...
> 
> Drugs do play havoc with memory, but the collective
> mind of the "counterculture" (another catch-all term
> that should be rubbished for its meaninglessness)
> wasn't quite so addled as that.

I think it's fair enough to say that by the end of '68 and into 1969 and
beyond things were starting to fall apart pretty badly for the
counterculture, in terms of it having once been a more or less unified and
potent sociocultural entity and political lobby. Internal bickering and
fragmentation, Nixon in Washington, Altamont, the Manson murders, the slow
disintegration of SDS, Kent State, the failure of the campus strikes, the
Weathermen Underground and the New York apartment bombing -- all these
things and more were sounding the death knell of "the Movement". Radical
social action had turned ugly and was looking more and more like violence
for its own sake. Civil rights issues and protesting the war were
increasingly taking a back seat to the in-fighting that was going on (OK,
"forgotten all about" is too extreme, and obviously it was meant
metaphorically rather than literally, but after the campus strikes and the
march on Washington in 1970 there were no more protests of note).

At the close of the decade the public image had turned, parodies and
self-parody abounded, and it had become a spent force politically. Whatever
the hoi poloi and wannabes might still have been thinking or pretending to
think, the anti-War and civil rights demonstrations soon dwindled away. Sure
the War in Vietnam was still raging and persecution of African-Americans and
violence against their communities hadn't abated; the counterculture, or
whatever was left of it, was in disarray, however, and it had achieved very
little.

It's easy to deride generalisations for their generality, and more often
than not there will be specific exceptions and valid demurs. However, to
imply that an opposite situation was prevailing -- that everything with "the
Movement" was as vibrant and idealistic and hunky dory in 1969 as it had
been earlier in the '60s, at Berkeley say -- simply isn't on.

best