The Long March : How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

In The Long March, Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, shows how the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s and '70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change "cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals," he intersperses his argument with incisive portraits of the life and thought of Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and other "cultural revolutionaries" who made their mark. For all that has been written about the counterculture, until now there has not been a chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped provoke today's "culture wars." The Long March fills this gap with a compelling and well-informed narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and debate. "How did we get from there to here? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, after fantasies of immediate political revolution faded, many student radicals urged their followers to begin "the long march through the institutions." Radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse characterized this approach as working in the institutions of American life while also working against them. Kimball says that to see how well this strategy succeeded, "you need look no further than your local museum, your children's school, your church (if you still go to church) and your workplace."" "The Long March is organized around incisive portraits of the architects of America's cultural revolution - among them, Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated or once-celebrated gurus like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and Charles Reich. In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Kimball finds a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guide-book of wrong turns, dead ends, and blind alleys that, tragically, became the roadmap to the present."--Jacket "Others may think of the 1960s as The Last Good Time, but Kimball has no patience with such nostalgia. He sees this decade as a seedbed of excess and moral breakdown. He argues that the radical assaults on "the System" that took place then still define the way we live now - with intellectually debased schools and colleges, morally chaotic sexual relations and family life, and a degraded media and popular culture."