Rating: 
Summary: This isn't argument, this is abuse.
Review: 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:
Summary: This isn't argument, this is abuse.
Review: 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: 
Summary: What the 60s have wrought
Review: As a radical of the 60s, who has since moved on, this volume was a pleasure to read.
The book traces the story of how the 60s cultural revolution happened and why. It examines in some detail the "long march through the institutions" which the radicals took. The phrase, attributed to the Italian Marxist Gramsci, speaks of the need to overthrow societies from within, instead of relying on bloody revolutions from without. The strategy, laments Kimball, had been all too effective.
Indeed, no one could have foreseen how quickly and easily the institutions did crumble before the radical activists. The moral, cultural and social blitzkrieg has been as thorough as it has been all-consuming. And the success of this revolution, Kimball reminds, "can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values".
Values of every kind have been thrown to the wind in this far-reaching revolution. Religious values, cultural values, moral values and social values have all been deeply effected, making this one of the most thorough and successful revolutions to date.
Kimball begins his study with leading figures from the 50s such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. He reminds us that although these characters are idolised by many today, they in fact sought to glorify "madness, drug abuse, criminality, and excess". Not a great footing for the next generation to build upon. But that is exactly what transpired.
Social and cultural nihilism became a hallmark of the hippy generation, with plentiful servings of sex, drugs and rock and roll defining the movement. But it is not just the hedonism and decadence of the 60s that Kimball highlights, but the leading intellectual movers and shakers that undergirded it.
A whole chapter is therefore devoted to leftist novelist Norman Mailer. Susan Sontag, the leftwing feminist and intellectual also gets a whole chapter, as does Charles Reich and his The Greening of America, LSD guru Timothy Leary, and one time Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman, among others, are also covered.
In an intriguing chapter entitled "The Liberal Capitulation" Kimball recounts the days of the violent campus protests. Beginning with the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, he recounts how the campus takeovers and violence spread around the nation. Kimball notes that the radical demands of the university activists were matched by the pathetic surrender of the campus chiefs. Heads of most universities quickly caved in to the demands of the radicals, and the political correctness run amok today is the direct result of this capitulation.
Thus higher education in the US today is mainly about promoting radical political agendas and ideologies, and has very little to do with the idea of the unbiased pursuit of truth and knowledge. (Kimball of course has explored this them in much more detail in his 1990 study, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education.)
Kimball also covers other usual suspects in the cultural revolution: Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale, William Kunstler, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Daniel Berrigan, William Sloane Coffin, and Rap Brown. He notes that most of these radicals were products of the bourgeois, capitalist system: "Whatever else it was, the long march of America's cultural revolution was a capitalist, bourgeois revolution: a revolution of the privileged, by the privileged, and for the privileged."
Kimball concludes by asking where such activists can be found today. The lack of campus activism and social radicalism is mainly due to the success of the 60s revolution. The truth is, "there is little that the radicals demanded that they did not get."
Unfortunately the book ends with no proposals as to how to turn things around. He carefully analyses how the culture war succeeded, but offers no real advice for the way ahead. He does seem to want to eschew complete despair and surrender. He rejects, for example, the advice of culture-warrior Paul Weyrich. In a famous open letter to his friends and supporters in 1999, Weyrich basically raised the white flag, saying we had lost big time, and that perhaps out best response is to head for the hills. But all Kimball can offer instead is a one-line summation: "the answer to a cultural revolution is not counterrevolution but recuperation". He does not tell us what that means, however, nor how to achieve it.
Thus we have to look elsewhere to find strategies for reclaiming the culture. But as a helpful overview of the 60s revolution and the damage it has wrought, this is as good a volume as any, and well worth the read.
Rating:
Summary: Intellectual Clarity
Review: 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 pædophilic, 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 Græco-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 ætiology of the disease which is here viewed in a more specific and farther advanced condition.
Rating:
Summary: Dude, Where is My Birthright?
Review: 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:
Summary: Dude, Where is My Birthright?
Review: 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:
Summary: The Greatest Book I've Ever Read.
Review: In my entire life, this is the only book that I've read three times. Upon each perusal it becomes more endearing. The Long March is the most powerful indict of the 1960s and the counterculture that has ever been written. More than any other publication, it is capable of convincing moderates of the need to CONSERVE America and our western tradition as well. Although, I am politically of the same bend as Mr. Kimball, I must admit that this book was not a simple sermon to the parishioners. In my youth, I idolized the beat poets but only knew the true story of their lives after reading his second chapter. The same is true of Marcuse, whose Eros and Civilization along with One-Dimensional Man I devoured and appreciated years ago.
The Long March depicts the full story of the way in which our society was softened up by the likes of Brown, Reich, and Goodman to allow it to blossom into the permanent immaturity of the sixties. An immaturity and a selfishness that still binds us. The pseudo-compassionate hippies brought us multiculturalism and political correctness and currently are the cause of 18 year olds mortgaging their futures by borrowing fortunes in exchange for a Philistine's college education.
As a cultural commentator, Kimball is resolute, spirited, witty, and as observant as an eagle peering down from Mount Rushmore. This is, quite simply, the finest and most important work whose spine I ever cracked.
Rating: 
Summary: Addresses the Symptoms, Not the Cause
Review: Roger Kimball has written a very entertaining book tracing the roots of our current cultural malaise from the faux posturings of the Beats, Susan Sontag and Charles Reich, among others, to the present day, where radical thought and politics have become the norm, not only at our universities, museums, and other centers of higher learning, but also in our culture, morays, and seemingly every part of our everyday life. Kimball is correct in his assessment of the situation. All one need do is to but look around to see the climatic change the 60s has wrought in our culture. Feeling has replaced thought; hedonism has replaced the sense of duty a citizen felt to his or her country or community; tribalism has replaced the sense of unity, as reflected in the current multicultural craze; and the concept of Original Sin has given way to the notion of inner perfectibility. Of course, as Kimball notes, it didn't just come about because of the radicalism of the 60s; no, the 60s were merely the catalyst for a change that had been building up since the end of World War II. He compares it with the Rousseauian fervor that tore France apart in 1789, and there is some solid justification here, as both Robespierre,the Beats and Sontag alike are children of the Enlightenment, for it was the Enlightenment that stressed the role of reason over that of faith in determining the course of humankind. In other words, man was perfectible, if he would only use his reason. The last World War shook our faith in reason and saw its replacement with a self-fulfilling postmodern philosophy of perfection through feeling. Marxist thought filtered through Freud, with a solid mixture of mysticism, both East and West, thrown into the mix. The Counter-Culture, far from being the antipode to Western culture, instead was absorbed into Western culture, changing it in the process. But while Kimball gives many fine examples of the intellectual silliness that has engulfed us, including an excellent exposition on the influence of Norman O. Brown (who was way more influential on people I knew than either Sontag or Marcuse, who were too obtuse), he falls woefully short on the "whys" of the matter. How could a philosophy, spawned by people so outside the mainstream, not only triumph, but become the dominant mose of thinking? Can we simply blame it on the anti-Vietnam 60s radicals permeating society? Or is there something else, without which the radicals would come to a complete halt? Why would a culture permit the musical stylings of the last thirty years to set the musical standard? The same for television and movies asx well. The answer is quite simple and can be found in the amorality that is capitalism. If these stylings were not profitable, they would not exist, while legitimate voices are drowned out as being of little or no commercial potential. The roots of the Counter-Culture can be found in the product of Madison Avenue in the late 50s and early 60s. It is no accident that Allen Ginsburg toiled for Madison Ave. or that Jerry Rubin turned to Wall Street. The Hippie and the Establishmentarian are closer than we think. Witness Bill Clinton. It is the paradox that stops Kimball from reaching the conclusion he is leading us to.
Rating:
Summary: deeply superficial
Review: Roger Kimball's polemic against the 1960s purports to find the roots of our social and cultural shortcomings in the ideology of that famously turbulent decade. Kimball is an unapologetic social conservative and it is not much of a stretch to say that he views the 50s as Paradise, the 60s as the Fall and the time since as a wandering in the wilderness. This view is detailed in the introduction and conclusion. Most of the rest of the book is an examination of the careers of the various Pied Pipers who led a nation astray. First the Beats - Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs - then Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver and Herbert Marcuse are hauled over the coals, along with lesser figures such as the Berrigans, William Sloane Coffin, Wilhelm Reich, Paul Goodman, Norman O Brown, Charles Reich and the editors of the New York of Books. Kimball comes up with a good deal of interesting (and unflattering) material on his subjects. But mostly he lets them incriminate themselves through their opinions. Norman Mailer famously spouts forth about the hipster having absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro or how bashing in the skull of a candy store owner would be a liberating experience. Mailer's theorizing along these lines was put into disastrous practice around 1980 when he campaigned for the release of jailbird genius Jack Abbott, who promptly murdered a young Cuban-American, Richard Adan, during his first weeks of freedom. Among Mailer's other off-the-wall gems: Abortion must be very painful for a woman because it is "killing the memory of a beautiful [act of sexual congress]." Susan Sontag declares variously that the white race is the cancer of human history; that her own sense of "the moral" began at age three; that AIDS is the perfect vehicle for First World political paranoia; that no American PoWs were tortured in Vietnam and no Cuban writers were put in jail. She once conceded that communism equalled fascism, but later qualified this by saying it was fascism with a human face (better or worse, one wonders?). Herbert Marcuse, who coined the famous phrase "repressive tolerance," pronounced that liberating tolerance meant tolerating the excesses of the left but not those of the right. He was also an active propagandist for the equally phony notion of false consciousness. Wilhelm Reich propounded the magical virtues of orgone and orgone accumulators. Timothy Leary ("Tune in, turn on, drop out") was a leading advocate of consciousness-raising through drugs.
Other nonsense from the lesser lights: Puritanism led America into Vietnam (Jerry Rubin); Time is the product of neurosis (Norman O Brown); A test or examination is a form of violence (Charles Reich); Rape is an insurrectionary act (Eldridge Cleaver). But Kimball's purpose is more than to let the little emperors of countercultural theory parade around in the buff, entertaining though that may be. He alleges that 60s radicalism, while not especially successful in the narrow regime of politics, brought about far-reaching changes in American culture, resulting in changes in sex and family life, the vulgarization of popular culture, the decline of respect for authority and religion and the rise of political correctness and multiculturalism. But while these may be agreed to have occurred their significance is much more a matter of opinion. And here some of Kimball's views are a little wild: "It is . . . impossible to overstate [rock music's] soul-deadening destructiveness." That's a little hard on Paul McCartney, say. Or Moby, or even dear old Ozzy Osbourne. Or: "It would be difficult to overstate the loathsomeness of Burrough's opinions," in response to the latter's by no means exceptionable claim that religious fundamentalists are dangerous lunatics. Or: "[T]he cultural revolution has had a devastating effect on everything from private morality to social policy." In fact the US looks like a pretty well-run society compared to, say, Russia, Iran, Haiti, Pakistan, China, Nigeria, Brazil, . . . indeed almost anywhere. Surely its store of social capital cannot have been entirely "devastated."
But leaving aside Kimball's somewhat jaundiced view of our culture today, his view of history is also questionable. He seems to believe that the figures he discusses spearheaded the changes in society since then. But the 60s were not just a period of intellectual ferment but also of changes in the wider culture - in mood, in sensibility, in music, dress and personal style - which Kimball's approach glosses over altogether. To view the 60s as the creation of theoreticians and writers is a distortion. How much influence did a few radical articles in the New York Review of Books in 1963 really have? Compared to, say, the Beatles or the Pill. Most of the figures quoted in this book, incidentally, were over the magic age of 30 for most of the 60s, some by quite a wide margin. To discuss this period with barely a mention of youth culture is really to miss the point. One could argue that the various burblings of the sundry authors Kimball quotes in fact represented just so much froth on the socio-cultural wave. The Mailers and Sontags - and much more so the Cleavers, Reichs and Browns - were epiphenomena. What is striking about most of the "far out" quotes from the oracles of the day is how badly they have aged. It is hard to see how these flaky and marginal utterances could have had the long and lasting influence Kimball attributes to them. Many 60s ideals - free love, communes, hippiedom, back-to-the-land, crime as a political act, pacifism, revolution, etc - have been so completely repudiated that they are all but forgotten. Granted, the 60s did have some effects on culture, and perhaps people are a little more liberal and hedonistic than fifty years ago, but in many ways society today is quite as bourgeois as it has ever been. Overall this tract is little more than a catalog of wacky quotations from the intellectualoid celebrities of yesteryear, moderately entertaining to read but lacking any substantive argument.
Rating:
Summary: deeply superficial
Review: Roger Kimball's polemic against the 1960s purports to find the roots of our social and cultural shortcomings in the ideology of that famously turbulent decade. Kimball is an unapologetic social conservative and it is not much of a stretch to say that he views the 50s as Paradise, the 60s as the Fall and the time since as a wandering in the wilderness. This view is detailed in the introduction and conclusion. Most of the rest of the book is an examination of the careers of the various Pied Pipers who led a nation astray. First the Beats - Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs - then Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver and Herbert Marcuse are hauled over the coals, along with lesser figures such as the Berrigans, William Sloane Coffin, Wilhelm Reich, Paul Goodman, Norman O Brown, Charles Reich and the editors of the New York of Books. Kimball comes up with a good deal of interesting (and unflattering) material on his subjects. But mostly he lets them incriminate themselves through their opinions. Norman Mailer famously spouts forth about the hipster having absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro or how bashing in the skull of a candy store owner would be a liberating experience. Mailer's theorizing along these lines was put into disastrous practice around 1980 when he campaigned for the release of jailbird genius Jack Abbott, who promptly murdered a young Cuban-American, Richard Adan, during his first weeks of freedom. Among Mailer's other off-the-wall gems: Abortion must be very painful for a woman because it is "killing the memory of a beautiful [act of sexual congress]." Susan Sontag declares variously that the white race is the cancer of human history; that her own sense of "the moral" began at age three; that AIDS is the perfect vehicle for First World political paranoia; that no American PoWs were tortured in Vietnam and no Cuban writers were put in jail. She once conceded that communism equalled fascism, but later qualified this by saying it was fascism with a human face (better or worse, one wonders?). Herbert Marcuse, who coined the famous phrase "repressive tolerance," pronounced that liberating tolerance meant tolerating the excesses of the left but not those of the right. He was also an active propagandist for the equally phony notion of false consciousness. Wilhelm Reich propounded the magical virtues of orgone and orgone accumulators. Timothy Leary ("Tune in, turn on, drop out") was a leading advocate of consciousness-raising through drugs.
Other nonsense from the lesser lights: Puritanism led America into Vietnam (Jerry Rubin); Time is the product of neurosis (Norman O Brown); A test or examination is a form of violence (Charles Reich); Rape is an insurrectionary act (Eldridge Cleaver). But Kimball's purpose is more than to let the little emperors of countercultural theory parade around in the buff, entertaining though that may be. He alleges that 60s radicalism, while not especially successful in the narrow regime of politics, brought about far-reaching changes in American culture, resulting in changes in sex and family life, the vulgarization of popular culture, the decline of respect for authority and religion and the rise of political correctness and multiculturalism. But while these may be agreed to have occurred their significance is much more a matter of opinion. And here some of Kimball's views are a little wild: "It is . . . impossible to overstate [rock music's] soul-deadening destructiveness." That's a little hard on Paul McCartney, say. Or Moby, or even dear old Ozzy Osbourne. Or: "It would be difficult to overstate the loathsomeness of Burrough's opinions," in response to the latter's by no means exceptionable claim that religious fundamentalists are dangerous lunatics. Or: "[T]he cultural revolution has had a devastating effect on everything from private morality to social policy." In fact the US looks like a pretty well-run society compared to, say, Russia, Iran, Haiti, Pakistan, China, Nigeria, Brazil, . . . indeed almost anywhere. Surely its store of social capital cannot have been entirely "devastated."
But leaving aside Kimball's somewhat jaundiced view of our culture today, his view of history is also questionable. He seems to believe that the figures he discusses spearheaded the changes in society since then. But the 60s were not just a period of intellectual ferment but also of changes in the wider culture - in mood, in sensibility, in music, dress and personal style - which Kimball's approach glosses over altogether. To view the 60s as the creation of theoreticians and writers is a distortion. How much influence did a few radical articles in the New York Review of Books in 1963 really have? Compared to, say, the Beatles or the Pill. Most of the figures quoted in this book, incidentally, were over the magic age of 30 for most of the 60s, some by quite a wide margin. To discuss this period with barely a mention of youth culture is really to miss the point. One could argue that the various burblings of the sundry authors Kimball quotes in fact represented just so much froth on the socio-cultural wave. The Mailers and Sontags - and much more so the Cleavers, Reichs and Browns - were epiphenomena. What is striking about most of the "far out" quotes from the oracles of the day is how badly they have aged. It is hard to see how these flaky and marginal utterances could have had the long and lasting influence Kimball attributes to them. Many 60s ideals - free love, communes, hippiedom, back-to-the-land, crime as a political act, pacifism, revolution, etc - have been so completely repudiated that they are all but forgotten. Granted, the 60s did have some effects on culture, and perhaps people are a little more liberal and hedonistic than fifty years ago, but in many ways society today is quite as bourgeois as it has ever been. Overall this tract is little more than a catalog of wacky quotations from the intellectualoid celebrities of yesteryear, moderately entertaining to read but lacking any substantive argument.
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