I moved to New York in 2011 and started hanging out in the Village, not realizing that it was, at that point, largely a fake neighborhood—NYU kids and the wealthy. Enacting the cliché in full, I would write in my journal in Washington Square and do looping walks around downtown, looking for . . . . Continue Reading »
I have grown ever more weary and ever more irritated by the way the sixties have been routinely characterized, mythologized, and marketed. Continue Reading »
Once again, college students are in angry rebellion—against almost everything, it seems. I remember the feeling. But it is more than half a century since I smelled the anger and the tear gas. Here are my best recollections of an earlier time of rage, revolt, and high expectations. It is 1965, . . . . Continue Reading »
No one who welcomed the sixties as a liberation can understand what it has been like to grow up in their wake. Authorities mouth the rhetoric of revolution, shocking slogans have become clichés, and the anthems of Woodstock and Altamont sell sedans to aging Baby Boomers. A banner at the Paris . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter was fishing for my responses on Christianity and its relation to modernitys three stages in America AND on whether or not America is more oligarchic than democratic according to Platos sense of the terms. Well, that first topic is huge, but even as I focus upon the second one . . . . Continue Reading »
Songbook #20 tried to talk about the 9-11 interregnum and how it dealt a blow to rocks radicalism, but in retrospect, it was really more about the nineties revival-of and eventual disenchantment-with such radicalism, with 9-11 seeming to serve as the final nail in the coffin. And Songbook #21 . . . . Continue Reading »
Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixtiesby peter collier and david horowitzsummit books, 352 pages, $19.95 The retroactive glorification of the 1960s has been gathering momentum over the last decade. It reflects and in turn re-enforces what has become the conventional wisdom of a . . . . Continue Reading »