Tag: The Sixties

Empires and Shadows.

A couple of NYT book reviews of local interest: Columbia’s Eric Foner peruses the first transcribed volume of the LBJ tapes, Johann Hari reviews Irresistible Empire by Columbia historian Victoria de Grazia, and college acquaintance Nell Freudenberger takes a gander at Stewart O’Nan’s The Good Wife.

Weapon X.

“It’s time for you and me to stop sitting in this country, letting some cracker senators, Northern crackers and Southern crackers, sit there in Washington, D.C., and come to a conclusion in their mind that you and I are supposed to have civil rights. There’s no white man going to tell me anything about my rights. Brothers and sisters, always remember, if it doesn’t take senators and congressmen and presidential proclamations to give freedom to the white man, it is not necessary for legislation or proclamation or Supreme Court decisions to give freedom to the black man.” Along with the world taking stock of Hunter’s sad fate, yesterday was also tragic and memorable for being the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X. (In recognition of the occasion, a special edition of Spike Lee’s underrated biopic will be released today on DVD.)

So Help Me God.

As the Bushies warm up the teleprompter, the Washington Post attempts to explain why most inaugural addresses are boring, Chris Suellentrop surveys some of the lousier efforts over the years (with help from this Library of Congress exhibit), and David Greenberg looks back at the last great one (Kennedy, 1961). Somehow, I have a sneaking suspicion that Dubya’s evocation tomorrow of “The Ownership Society” isn’t going to make the A-list.

MLK 2K5.


“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. The chain reaction of evil…must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.“
— Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968)

A Man of Constant Sorrow.

“It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain. It was especially important, therefore, to avoid if possible focusing on the dead.”

A quick literary shout-out: Hard to read and harder to put down, Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, which I read on my plane ride back from Norfolk, is arguably the best anti/war novel I’ve read in over a decade. (I’ll always have a soft spot for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but the surrealism and absurdity of those two seem a world apart from the brutality of Ninh’s book.) Graphic and harrowing to the last, Sorrow tells the story of Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier full of youth and promise in the heady days of 1964. Unlike virtually everyone he knows, however, Kien actually manages to survive the Vietnam War to its conclusion in 1975, only to discover that peace remains an elusive ideal, and memory a cruel mistress.

A kindred spirit to All Quiet on the Western Front, Ninh’s book doesn’t pull any punches — There are dark moments and harsh visions herein that will remain with me for some time to come. Still, it’s a very powerful book, and one worth reading if you have the strength for it.

Back to the Grassy Knoll.

Forty years after publication of the Warren Report, Salon editor-in-chief David Talbot makes the case (again) for a conspiracy that felled Kennedy. A somewhat shrill and Oliver-Stone-like piece, to be sure, but, if nothing else, Talbot has amassed a few quotes from doubters in high places — RFK, LBJ, Nixon — that I hadn’t seen before.

Gene Machine.

“The vortex of the late nineteen sixties swallowed up not only Eugene McCarthy. It consumed a whole generation of liberal politicians and radical thinkers and culture heroes, from John Lindsay and Marshall McLuhan to Tom Hayden and Buckminster Fuller — a long list of ‘an idea whose time has come’ types whose time abruptly ran out. The survivors wandered, as McCarthy did, through the decades that followed, caricatures of their former world-historical selves, like old heavyweight champions working as greeters in casinos. You could say that these people failed; but what would success have looked like?” A bit too glib as always, Louis Menand examines Eugene McCarthy (by way of the new biography by Dominic Sandbrook.) I’m not sure if McCarthy is really a very good exemplar of “postwar liberalism,” but this sounds like an interesting read nonetheless. (Via Follow Me Here)