Slouching Towards Gomorrah Read Online Free Page A

transcendental conviction that there was something apocalyptic lurking behind the veil of the ordinary, and that just a little more pressure was needed to pierce the last remaining membrane—of civility, bourgeois consciousness, corporate liberalism, sexual uptightness, or whatever else prevented us all from breaking through to the other side. 1
    T hat was the authentic voice of adolescent Sixties radicalism…impatient, destructive, nihilistic. Modern liberalism is its mature stage. The temporary abeyance of the Sixties temper was due to the radicals graduating from the universities and becoming invisible until they reached positions of power and influence, as they now have, across the breadth of the culture. They no longer have need for violence or confrontation: since the radicals control the institutions they formerly attacked, the Sixties temper manifests itself in subtler but no less destructive ways.
    What the radicals did in the Sixties illuminates their mood and goals today. How the besieged “Establishment” responded tells a great deal about the softness and self-doubt that had come to afflict American cultural leaders even before they were assailed. We are currently being fed revisionist histories that paint student rebellion and hedonism of that time as idealism and excitement. No doubt that is partly due to the nostalgia of the Sixties generation for atime when everything seemed possible. But the revisionism also serves to consolidate the Left’s cultural victories of that decade. Rewritten history has always been a weapon in the struggle for control of the present and the future. The true version of what took place is to be consigned to the memory hole. The radicalism of those times, we are informed, was a reaction against the cold war culture of the Fifties by idealistic students who sought to break free of the deadening intellectual conformity, spiritual emptiness, and social injustices of their parents’ generation. The truth, as any accurate account of the times makes plain, is otherwise.
    One of the more egregious pieces of revisionism appeared, appropriately enough, in a
New York Times
editorial, “In Praise of the Counterculture.” 2 The
Times
, whose editorial page and some of its regular columns seem to have been handed over to a group of unregenerate Sixties radicals, remarks of that decade: “Only a few periods in American history have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of the American intellectual tradition.” If that statement is accurate, and it may well be, then, as the state of our current culture attests, the American intellectual tradition has a lot to answer for. The
Times
even manages to say that the decade’s “summery, hedonistic ethos then and now reduced modern puritans to fits of twisting discomfort. America is still close enough to the frontier experience of relentless work and danger to view any kind of fun with suspicion.” That is an exceedingly odd description of a society positively addicted to fun: television sitcoms, sensational motion pictures, rock and rap music, recreational sex and drugs, spectator and participatory sports, Disneyland vacations. The “fun” viewed with suspicion then and now involved such “summery” pastimes as hard drug use and sexual anarchy. To cap this litany of Sixties-era fatuities, the editorial solemnly pronounces that the counterculture is “part of us, a legacy around which Americans can now unite, rather than allow themselves to be divided.” There is no possibility that Americans will unite around that legacy. Those of us who regard the Sixties as a disaster are not “allowing” ourselves to be divided; we
insist
on it. Opposition to the counterculture, the culture that became today’s liberalism, is precisely what our culture war is about.
    Perhaps more books have been written about the Sixties thanany other decade in American history with the