VLVL "the Movement"

[jbor]

> 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.

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m2005/1_33/56027322/p1/article.jhtml

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/riseandfall.html

And meanwhile, as depicted in _Vineland_:

    War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American
    politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and
    death, all must have been off on some other planet. (38)

    Rex Snuvvle, a graduate student in the Southeast Asian
    Studies Department, who while being indoctrinated into
    the government's version of the war in Vietnam had,
    despite his own best efforts, been at last as unable
    avoid the truth as, once knowing it, to speak it, out
    of what he easily admitted was fear of reprisal. (207)

    Carefully they exchanged updates on their broken
    collectivity, Krishna stepping away out of the red-
    orange light from a disabled VW with its battery
    failing into an unreconnoitered darkness, toward a
    voice she thought was calling her name . . . Mirage
    shocked into silence, gone back to Arkansas after
    giving away all her ephemerides, reference books,
    worksheets, even her black-light zodiac posters . . .
    Zipi and Ditzah off boisterously to a bomb-making
    commune up in central Oregon, calling, "Goodbye to
    the land of make-believe," and hollering, "Reality
    Time!" and "Powder to the People!" (258-9)

    "Whole problem 'th you folks's generation," Isaiah
    opined, "nothin' personal, is you believed in your
    Revolution, put your lives right out there for it --
    but you sure didn't understand much about the Tube.
    Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it,
    that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just
    like th' Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and
    even in 1970 dollars -- it was way too cheap. . . . "
                                                    (373)

best