The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America.(Review)

The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, by Roger Kimball; Encounter, 2000, $50.

ONCE IN A WHILE a book is published which seems to provide a genuine landmark in the way we understand ourselves and our world. To his considerable credit, the American Roger Kimball has performed this singular feat not once but twice: first with Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education and now with The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America. Although both books were written specifically about the United States their messages are no less relevant to other Western countries such as Australia.

As a cultural commentator myself, it has been quite a rare experience for me to encounter views with which I am in almost total agreement. Indeed, if I were obliged to nominate five relatively recent books which have caused me to cheer out loud, thank God or punch the air with pleasure, Kimball's aforementioned volumes would be two of them. The remaining three would be Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, Roger Scruton's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture and Hilton Kramer's Twilight of the Intellectuals. Is it a coincidence, you may ask, that three of the five have been written by Catholics and all five by political conservatives?

Naturally, I do not imply for a moment that a great deal of other excellent material has not been published in the same period. Evidently it has, although much of such material has appeared solely in the pages of intelligent periodicals such as the one you are enjoying at this moment. Sadly, though, too little of the worthy material which appears in such journals ever gets collected and published in book form. The ephemerality of journals tends to defeat the best efforts of us all. Metaphorically, while newspapers and periodicals provide excellent tools for swatting flies and cockroaches, it generally takes a weighty hardback to flatten a troublesome rodent or reptile.

Roger Kimball's The Long March provides, within its 284 pages, all the heavy ammunition we need to refute just about every foolish claim which has been made for the 1960s. Other books or articles may expose Norman Mailer, as Kimball does, as a "moral cretin" but few deal with equal severity with such other icons of the era as Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Wilhelm Reich, Jerry Rubin, Susan Sontag, Daniel Berrigan, Herbert Marcuse, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver. While the mere reciting of these names may send a shudder down the spines of many who experienced the varied forms of civic madness and distortions of truth the doctrines of these people helped engender, many others exist who had little or no personal experience of the decade in question yet still insist on viewing it via some rosy, phantasmagoric or hallucinogenic glow. Part of the continuing, toxic appeal of the 1960s lies in the way the era has managed to help perpetuate adolescent ideas into adulthood.

However, as the cover of The Long March explains:

 
   The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged 
   at Woodstock. The 1960s continue to reverberate in our national life today. 
   This decade transformed high culture as well as everyday life in terms of 
   our attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and 
   morality.