Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America by Roger Kimball ISBN: 1-893554-30-9 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: July, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.6 (25 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Dude, Where is My Birthright?
Comment: I'm frankly offended that my lassitude and general unemployability are not recognized as self-made, the result of my own exuberant misperception of everything brass as gold. Do I not deserve credit for embracing music that is simply a keyboard noodle on a loop and an electronic voice repeating, "Around the world, around the world. Around the world, around the world"? Instead Momma Cass and David Crosby get the credit, and Crosby got a liver that should have gone to the selfless, sedulous social worker whom none of us had ever met. Perhaps Kimball could have staged an intervention at the transplant pre-op, insisting that the liver was deserved by the hardworking-but-undermined-by-liberals Socio-political conservative, who merely wanted to suggest a simple, commonsense idea: "Let's transport nuclear waste by train." The production team of 'Murphy Brown' made short work of this proud, principled man, though. And as the figurative choppy waters of liberal bias carried him to the white sea, he turned to the bottle as the only comfort in this cold, cold world, a world bent only on sending subliminal pro-Stalin messages during reruns of Barney Miller. He also supplemented the bottle with subsidized tobacco products, geared toward educated adults who enjoyed cartoon camels.
I'm starting to wonder if perhaps Jerry Rubin devised a time machine, and was in fact personally responsible for tempting Eve. At the very least, he seems to have gone back and corrupted Piltdown Man. As an honorable Stock Trader now, I wonder why Rubin doesn't make amends and undo the damage of the only era responsible for anything, damage he helped cause, until the check clears.
If Miles Davis is dismissed because his art was influenced by drugs, does that mean that the Louvre should be a homeless shelter?
Should I be worried for my soul if I publicly rend my garments over Wm. S. Burroughes' dismissive attitude toward Christianity? Would that be an effective means to deploy my imperative to proselytize? Did Burroughes really do as much damage to our nation as he did to his wife? What do we make of the probability that many unaware and untouched by the '60s would take Burroughes to be the model for the American Gothic painting?
It seems more certain that the cultural value of Susan Sontag, as well as the cultural service value of refuting her, is measured in fractions of a single grain of sand.
Kimball's prose entertains, but to claim that the effects of rock music cannot be measured because of rock music's pervasiveness is to enter H.P. Lovecraft territory. The Lovecraftian monster is, of course, the beast "sore horrible that I cannot describe it to you." Also, anyone who thinks this lowly of Rock clearly has never spent the weekend with Shuggie Otis, or at least a Shuggie Otis record.
It seems that anti-60s movements do not punish fairly. Most '60's Radicals' now reside in the 'burbs. One even thinks that a long period of suburban living, which in and of itself confers cultural accomplishment, is a sufficient reason for avoiding jail time. Those who had had little impact on 'the 60's' see things disappear, and yet they have never witnessed either the appearence of a '60s radical or a '60s critic.
Did 'Free Love' bring about the original, accept no subtitutes 'Long March', the 'trail of tears'?
Finally, did 'free love' spike Fred Hampton's Kool-Aid? What are the further significances of this question and its answer.
Rating: 2
Summary: This isn't argument, this is abuse.
Comment: According to this book there was once a wonderful country that was attacked by a group of nasty malcontents. Although their ideas were without merit, although their philosophies were immoral and although their private lives contemptible, they successfully perpetrated a cultural revolution whose entirely negative effects last to the present day. As an analysis this book is irredeemably flawed in several crucial ways.
1) Let's look at Kimball's subjects: The Beats, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, the Campus rebellions, the Berrigan Brothers, sex theorists, Charles Reich, Eldridge Cleaver, and the New York Review of Books. "The Sixties" stands or fall on the merit of these people. What is missing? Well, I don't care for the Beats, but what about Joseph Heller and Catch-22? Since Kimball mentions various noxious foreign influences, what about Gunter Grass, Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez? There is no mention of E.P. Thompson and the revolution he helped launched in history. There is no mention of feminism at all, or the environmental movement. Kimball moans endlessly about cultural decline, but there is no discussion of American cinema, which in the seventies showed distinct signs of improvement. Most people would agree that "The Conversation" or "Chinatown" are better movies than "The Sound of Music." Other "Sixties" figures get cheap, inaccurate asides: Miles Davis' jazz is dismissed as "drug inspired", while I.F. Stone's articles are "interminable" and are "neo-Stalinist."
2) This book gets two stars because, after all, Timothy Leary was an idiot and Eldridge Cleaver was a nasty thug. But even people who, like me, do not care for the Beats will be put off by Kimball's chapter on them. Detailing the aesthetic flaws in their works takes a back seat to ad hominem criticism about their homosexuality and drug abuse. "It would be difficult to overstate the loathsomeness of [William] Burroughs's opinion." The first one Kimball gives is that Burroughs strongly dislikes Christianity, a not especially rare opinion in western civilization, at least since they stopped executing people for holding it. Meanwhile Kimball's two pages (89-91) on Susan Sontag's essay on pornography is a travesty of her argument, while he sneers at her support for Bosnia, presumably because it is wrong to support a democratic, multicultural state against the quasi-genocidal aggression of an ex-Communist state.
3) Kimball is addicted to double standards. He is outraged that Richard Poirier could compare the Beatles to Schumann. He is infuriated that the New York Review of Books could include angry pieces by Andrew Kopkind and even serve as a forum for Jerry Rubin. But such lapses don't concern him about the National Review, where he occasionally contributes, even though it was there that Guy Davenport said that the Lord of the Rings was the greatest novel of the 20th century, and whose hallowed contributors include Antonio Salazar and Ferdinand Marcos. In condemning the decline of the university he does not bother to mention that in 1965 Richard Nixon sought to improve the life of the mind by calling for the firing of Eugene Genovese, later one of America's finest historians. Although Kimball, as a conservative, prides himself for his pessimistic view of sin and the persistence of evil, three hundred years of slavery, Jim Crow and racism just apparently vanish after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The blame for a "new segregationism" falls on African-American activists; supposedly the fact that in 1993 90% of suburban whites lived in communities which were less than 1% black is somehow all Susan Sontag's fault.
4) Kimball is, quite frankly, a demagogue. Like all conservatives he mentions class only to criticize liberals and leftists for being well-healed and prosperous: "a revolution of the privileged, by the privileged, and for the privileged." To the extent that social problems exist, it is the result of the pernicious effects of the "establishment" and decadent intellectuals. This is demagogic for two reasons. First, one thing Kimball does NOT object to is the fact that from 1975 to 1995 the top 1% of the United States doubled their share of the national income from 20% to 40% (Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, p. 322). Nor with the Republican Party holding the House, the Presidency, most governorships, seven out of nine seats on the Supreme Court, and with Wall Street, the Army and much of the country's largest religious denominations, is it really accurate for Kimball to pretend that he and his colleagues represent a tiny, courageous, embattled minority. Second, Kimball never really discusses such phenomenon as divorce, illegitimacy, poverty, drug addiction in any kind of coherent way. So he never notes that teenage pregnancy has fallen from the fifties, and that it lower in most other OECD countries, most of which are noticeably more liberal than the United States. Abortion was a common practice before Roe vs. Wade, and divorce does not spare the Republicans or the evangelicals. But then Kimball writes for Commentary, a journal which could be defined as believing that it is other people's divorces that are ruining America.
Ultimately, Kimball is a rather shallow conservative. The Left is condemned for its "abstractions" and its "utopianism," as if historically conservative views on race and gender had been models of nuanced empirical analysis, while sole superpower status was a minor and moderate demand. When Kimball quotes Tom Wolfe's comments about the New York Review of Books, he does not point out that the NYRB had written a couple of articles previously showing what a shoddy journalist Wolfe was. All in all, what we have is a book which confuses moral courage with histronics, aims at wit but achieves only sarcasm, and praises Western Civilization for its tolerance and brillance, but shows only spite and a deep mediocrity.
Rating: 5
Summary: Intellectual Clarity
Comment: Roger Kimball's indictment of Mailer, Sontag, and other gurus of the Sixties is powerful; indeed, inarguable. How can anyone answer Mr. Kimball's contention that our culture is awash in sewage; that the source of that sewage was the cultural revolution of the 1960s; and that Mailer and others of his ilk facilitated the toxic flow? In my opinion, no one can -- at least not effectively or with honesty.
Erudite, and well-written, researched, reasoned, and argued, there is little with which to find fault. I must say, though, that I don't fully agree with Mr. Kimball's contention that traditional values "are rooted deeply in a God-fearing Protestant ethic...." Perhaps. I would argue, however, that mainstream Protestantism has been absolutely corrupted by secularism, and that Christian Fundamentalism is intellectually and theologically hopeless. It is, rather, the Catholic Church that has been the most standfast moral bastion, which is why she is perceived as the last formidable foe by the extreme Left.
I congratulate Mr. Kimball on a worthy effort. But is he not wasting his time? Who reads him, Bork, Buchanan, except for those who already agree with them? Not many. And that is a tragedy, for I suspect that there is little time remaining.
 |
Title: Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education by Roger Kimball ISBN: 1566631955 Publisher: Ivan R Dee, Inc. Pub. Date: July, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
 |
Title: Experiments Against Reality by Roger Kimball ISBN: 1566633354 Publisher: Ivan R Dee, Inc. Pub. Date: October, 2000 List Price(USD): $28.50 |
 |
Title: Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse by Roger Kimball ISBN: 1566634792 Publisher: Ivan R Dee, Inc. Pub. Date: November, 2002 List Price(USD): $28.95 |
 |
Title: The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control by Hilton Kramer, Roger Kimball ISBN: 1566632587 Publisher: Ivan R Dee, Inc. Pub. Date: December, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.90 |
 |
Title: The Future of the European Past by Hilton Kramer, Roger Kimball ISBN: 1566631785 Publisher: Ivan R Dee, Inc. Pub. Date: October, 1997 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
