The Anatomy of the Corporate State (The Greening of America 35 Years Later)

[Mark Kohut]

I did not read this book when I was young....by hearsay thinking it superficial...
but I have read it within the last few years.....and it is good....as said.....

From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, July 9, 2013 6:34 AM
Subject: The Anatomy of the Corporate State (The Greening of America 35 Years Later)


"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all
theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...secretly, it was
being dictated instead by the needs of technology...by a conspiracy
between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the
energy-burst of war [...] The real crises were crises of allocation
and priority, not among firms [...] but among the different
Technologies [...] Yes but Technology only responds [...] Go ahead,
capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it'll make you feel less
responsible--but it puts you in with the neutered, brother [...]" 521

But among the overheated, overreaching, radical books of the late ’60s
and early ’70s, The Greening of America stands out, not only for its
sweeping ambition and meteoric popularity, but also for its winning,
energetic style. Greening distilled much of the radical literature
that preceded it, from Karl Marx to the beatniks and the alienated New
York intellectuals, with a naive joy and earnestness all its own.

And it had this interesting angle: Reich was no overgrown hippie, but
a former Supreme Court clerk, an Ivy League professor, a presumptively
serious person. He was also an adult, 42 when the book was published,
which reinforced his credibility with adult readers to whom he
ventured to explain the behavior of the young–in many cases, the
readers’ own children. With the young themselves, Reich had less
credibility, for he chronicled the new generation and its
psycho-social-sexual-political revelations not as an insider, but as a
self-appointed spokesman and enthusiast. He was a fan of the
long-haired, dungareed kids he met on campus, and he believed they
were onto something big.

THE GREENING OF AMERICA argued that the United States was in the midst
of an all-consuming spiritual and political crisis, for which the only
cure was a new kind of revolution, “a revolution by consciousness.”
War and poverty, uncontrolled technology and the destruction of the
environment, the Corporate State and bureaucracy, the artificiality of
work and culture, the absence of community–all had conspired to
produce the most “devastating” impoverishment of all, the “loss of
self, or death in life.” Yet there was hope, for the crisis was
calling forth its own antidote: a movement to reclaim “a higher
reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual.”
That movement–which Reich predicted would eventually grow to include
all Americans–was none other than the youth culture of the 1960s.



http://davidskinner.org/2012/07/25/oldie-from-the-dec-19-2005-weekly-standard/
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