[.ca] The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s ... (ISBN 1893554309)

From Amazon.com:
The 1960s, writes Roger Kimball, "has become less the name of a decade than a provocation." This incisive critique of that turbulent time won't calm the debate. The Long March will enthrall conservatives who think of themselves as culture warriors and infuriate liberals who still celebrate "the purple decade." Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and author of Tenured Radicals, is one of the Right's most articulate writers. He argues forcefully that the pernicious influence of the 1960s can still be felt: "The success of America's recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. If we often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake, that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive the extent of our transformation." The Long March proceeds as a series of stimulating essays on important cultural figures and movements, beginning with the Beats. Norman Mailer comes in for an eloquent trashing ("From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania"), as do any number of counterculture icons. I.F. Stone's articles, writes Kimball, "read like neo-Stalinist equivalents of those multipart articles on staple crops with which The New Yorker used to anesthetize its readers." And of The New York Review of Books, that bastion of elite liberal opinion, Kimball says: "Quite apart from the irresponsibility of the politics, there was an intellectual irresponsibility at work here, a preening, ineradicable frivolousness toward the cultural values that the journal was supposedly created to nurture." There's a distinctly conservative crankiness to Kimball's writing; the jazz of Miles Davis is inevitably "drug-inspired" and rock music "was not only an aesthetic disaster of gigantic proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive." Yet this inclination can lead to fascinating, if arguable, insights about modern American culture: "Everywhere one looks one sees the elevation of youth--that is to say, of immaturity--over experience. It may seem like a small thing that nearly everyone of whatever age dresses in blue jeans now; but the universalization of that sartorial badge of the counterculture speaks volumes." Kimball's writing is at once highbrow and accessible. Fans of Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind--or readers who have never quite believed all the English professors proclaiming Allen Ginsberg a poetic genius--will find The Long March engrossing and indispensable. --John J. Miller

Intellectual Clarity:
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.

How the Culture War Was Lost:
By the time Pat Buchanan suggested that the United States was embroiled in a cultural war, the forces of social conservatism that he represented had already lost. No better demonstration of the truth of this exists than Buchanan's subsequent fate: once a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination, then a third-party candidate exhibiting derisory electoral performance, and now a gadfly easily dismissed as a right-wing extremist. The left won the cultural war because its leaders understood at an early point that success in its struggle, which sought no less than an utter change in the character of society, entailed much more than winning elections. It involved making "the long march through the institutions" - academia, the news media, entertainment and the arts - as well. The scruffy adolescents who burnt their draft cards and defecated in the filing cabinets of their college deans' offices are now forty- and fifty-something tenured professors, journalists, and television producers. Conservatives, concentrating on how many precincts they could carry, either regarded cultural institutions as secondary to their concerns, or completely dismissed them out of philistine disregard. This is how, despite conservative electoral successes, American society remains vulgarized, sexualized, and consumerized, with Marxian economic and social analysis and Freudian psychology underlying many of its prejudices and assumptions. Few feminists may be aware of Marx's scathing remarks about "the claptrap of the bourgeois family" in the "Communist Manifesto," or Engels's argument that the only difference between marriage and prostitution was the duration of the contract, but such beliefs are the commonplaces of modern feminism. Much of "The Long March" is devoted to quotations from the writings of radical leftists. Some are so hysterically laughable as to defy parody. Others will inspire anger, and still others, disgust (the praise of paedophilic, sadomasochistic homosexuality quoted from Ginsberg and Burroughs is not for the weak of stomach). This isn't a long book, and some interesting questions are left untreated. For example, why did such "establishment" figures in academia as Kingman Brewster and Grayson Kirk supinely accept the destruction of order in their institutions? The answer has to be found in their own philosophical deficiencies. It is a matter of record that many of the academic generation previous to that of the victorious 'sixties radicals were themselves profoundly unconvinced of the order they should have been resolute in defending. Few of them really were convinced of the virtue of the European humanist tradition based in the blending of Judeo-Christian religious faith with classical Graeco-Roman philosophy, history, and literature. Much less did they value the system of private property, free enterprise, and the rule of law which we still designate by the epithet Marx applied to it - capitalism. Many hearkened back to beliefs expressed by their own predecessors, such figures as Dewey and Conant, that some sort of socialism was inevitable. Finally, Kimball does not devote enough attention to how the bourgeois values the passing of which he laments were subverted not by radical academics, poisonous journalists, and nihilistic, vulgar entertainers, but by entrepreneurs who found it a lucrative business. The rôle of such cynical promoters in foisting meretricious pop culture with its nostalgie de la boue off as fashionable youthful rebellion has yet fully to be explored. At a level once removed from this, the modern world of corporate business and the manufactured suburban environment have created a sense of rootlessness and spiritual vacuum contributing much to the effective "proletarianization" of what once was a solid middle class. For a more expansive view, see Richard Weaver's "Ideas Have Consequences." There may be found a general aetiology of the disease which is here viewed in a more specific and farther advanced condition.

This isn't argument, this is abuse.:
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 \oWilliam\c 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.

Short of greatness, but still well worth reading.:
This book is an intriguing mix of 3 parts literary criticism, and 1 part history. The blend is perhaps the best method of tracing the philosophical history of a movement that I have ever encountered. However, I must confess that since I was expecting a more traditional history it did take a little getting used to. Like another commentator, I was forced to read (or more often read about) much of the tripe Kimball expertly takes apart in this book. As damning as his criticism is, the direct quotes from the works in question were what really nailed it for me. I now understand the political motivation behind the outrageously idealized view of these authors currently pushed in universities, as well as why most students are taught how great the authors were without ever being assigned the works! Where the book falls short is on the actual history side. Kimball only traces the roots of 60s radicalism back to the end of WW II, and in my opinion misses essential historical context. No mention is made of the well organized and often extremely effective effort by Lenin and Stalin et al in the years leading up to and continuing beyond WWII to create a hard left (communist) mindset throughout the industrialized world. Whittaker Chambers' "Witness" and Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley's "Hollywood Party" (each corroborated recently by Soviet archives and the declassified Venona decrypts) both show that while there wasn't "a red under every bed", the CPUSA backed by the Soviet Union was often amazingly effective at influencing US policy as well as popular culture as early as the late 1920s. The authors he reviews may well have been the seed of the 60s movement, but they were planted in a soil that had already been well fertilized. Kimball mentions none of this, even to argue the contrary. Lastly, the book fails entirely to live up to the title. Instead of wrapping up this powerful book by demonstrating how the cultural revolution changed America (or the West in general), he spends his energy criticizing another author's poorly thought out thesis on the subject. The literary criticism angle was great for the rest of the book, but the final chapter was a terrible let down! I can't understand why he chose to do this, because the impact of the 60s philosophy on our nation and culture today is such fertile territory. I was hoping for an analysis of statistics showing the interrelationship between 60s philosophy and present day divorce, violent crime, drug use, etc. I'd say maybe in another book, but given the title of this one I suspect it isn't in the works. If he does do such a book, he might title it "How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (for real this time)". The above criticisms notwithstanding, this is an excellent book for gaining an understanding of the thought, writings, and some of the history of the 60s. For that alone, I wouldn't pass this book up!

Dude, Where is My Birthright?:
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.