VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement

[jbor]

on 24/2/04 8:45 AM, jbor wrote:

    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)

> This is, of course, a narrator's voice. Zoyd and the other hippies of the
> "Mellow Sixties" weren't much concerned about any of these things in the
> first place, except in the abstract. Frenesi, however, supposedly right in
> the forefront of the Youth Movement, was, or should have been. But after
> she, and other betrayers like her, had brought it crashing down, these
> causes were also lost. The '60s Youth Movement achieved nothing, or very
> little, of its original agenda.

And, if any more proof were needed of the way the absence of the Holocaust
functions in _GR_ ...

In the late '60s scenes in _Vineland_ the Vietnam War, the spate of
political assassinations, and the state's assault on African-American
communities, have all been forgotten amidst all the squabbling and betrayals
and drug deals and hot fudge sundaes with which the hippies on the one hand
(Zoyd, Van Meter, Scott Oof and the rest), and the putative Youth Movement
on the other (24fps, PR3), are preoccupied. In _GR_ the characters are
likewise self-involved -- they don't know or don't want to know or think
about what was going on in the death camps (or on the battlefields for that
matter). In _Vineland_ the characters are similarly self-involved --
complacent, apathetic, arrogant, debauched -- and they couldn't care less
about the Vietnam War (apart from Rex) or Civil Rights. Part of the fault
rests with Brock, and less directly, the regime; the bigger component of it,
and what Brock recognises, is just how easily and readily the hippies and
revolutionaries allow themselves to be exploited, and how quickly they turn.

best