Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Never!

Time recreates the year that changed the world, 19 (bet you can't guess the next two digits!) 68!


Found it at Wal-Mart.


It's exactly what you'd expect: a hundred or so pages divided into little sections on politics and fashion and sports and Bobby Kennedy and MLK and Chicago ("With the whole world watching, Chicago police bust the heads of protesters at the Democratic National Convention") and the Columbia takeover and TV ("The Mod Squad") and rock music (the Beatles go to India!) and riots and every other soul-withering cliché that's been beaten into the human race over the last 40 years.

Much more fun are the six writers who recount their memories of 1968 in City Journal, among them Christopher Hitchens on being a "sixty-eighter," Kay S. Hymowitz on how women got screwed ("Sex and its Discontents"), Guy Sorman on Paris, Stefan Kanfer on Mark Rudd and the takeover of Columbia and Harry Stein on how 1968 corrupted the media. Not surprisingly, only Hitchens and the fwenchie Sorman seem remotely nostalgic. One quote, Kanfer on an exchange he had with Mark Rudd:

Rudd had two expressions, blank and furious, and the first now appeared. “In the 1930s,” I shouted over the increasing crowd noise, “there were all sorts of insurrectionists who promised a New World, come the Revolution. You know what? The Revolution never arrived. A little later, the marchers abandoned their cause and wound up with real jobs. And they were damned glad to get them. Read some history now and then.”

“Never!” declared Rudd. It was unclear whether he meant getting a job or reading a book. “Never!” His admirers joined in, “Never! Never!” They crossed the street, broke the few intact windows, yelled at the cops, and started marching around the block urging student action, beginning with a refusal to attend classes. “Strike!” they shouted, like the chorus in a Clifford Odets play. “Strike! Strike!”

Anyhow, no pictures from Time. We're all doomed to see them over and over again this year anyway. Okay, just one, and only because it's the most perverted picture I've ever seen:


No caption necessary.

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