Jan Olof Bengtsson

Front and Back Flaps:

“The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock”, Roger Kimball writes in this controversial look at America’s cultural revolution. “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.”

Others may think of the 1960s as The Last Good Time, but Kimball – author of Tenured Radicals, a brilliant and acerbic study of the radicalization of American universities – 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. “This inheritance has addled our hearts and minds”, Kimball writes, “and perverted our dreams while also preventing us from attaining them.”

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 guidebook of wrong turns, dead ends, and blind alleys that, tragically, became the roadmap to the present.

For all that has been written about America’s counterculture, until now there has been no chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped to provoke today’s “culture wars”. The Long March fills this gap with a witty and intelligent narrative that transforms the subject from what it was before Roger Kimball discovered it.

Amazon.com Review:

The 1960s, writes Roger Kimball, “has become less the name of a decade than a provocation.” This incisive critique of that turbulent time won’t calm the debate. The Long March will enthrall conservatives who think of themselves as culture warriors and infuriate liberals who still celebrate “the purple decade.” Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and author of Tenured Radicals, is one of the Right’s most articulate writers. He argues forcefully that the pernicious influence of the 1960s can still be felt: “The success of America’s recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. If we often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake, that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive the extent of our transformation.”The Long March proceeds as a series of stimulating essays on important cultural figures and movements, beginning with the Beats. Norman Mailer comes in for an eloquent trashing (“From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania”), as do any number of counterculture icons. I.F. Stone’s articles, writes Kimball, “read like neo-Stalinist equivalents of those multipart articles on staple crops with which The New Yorker used to anesthetize its readers.” And of The New York Review of Books, that bastion of elite liberal opinion, Kimball says: “Quite apart from the irresponsibility of the politics, there was an intellectual irresponsibility at work here, a preening, ineradicable frivolousness toward the cultural values that the journal was supposedly created to nurture.” There’s a distinctly conservative crankiness to Kimball’s writing; the jazz of Miles Davis is inevitably “drug-inspired” and rock music “was not only an aesthetic disaster of gigantic proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive.” Yet this inclination can lead to fascinating, if arguable, insights about modern American culture: “Everywhere one looks one sees the elevation of youth – that is to say, of immaturity – over experience. It may seem like a small thing that nearly everyone of whatever age dresses in blue jeans now; but the universalization of that sartorial badge of the counterculture speaks volumes.” Kimball’s writing is at once highbrow and accessible. Fans of Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind – or readers who have never quite believed all the English professors proclaiming Allen Ginsberg a poetic genius – will find The Long March engrossing and indispensable.

John J. Miller