Vivid snapshot or blurred vision?
From the review:
If the book falls short in some ways as biography, it delivers as history. It offers a vivid snapshot of America in the mid-1970s, when the collapse of institutional authority after the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal was followed not by revolution or reformation but by exhaustion and decadence. As Stevenson writes: “The fierce and euphoric idealism that had arisen in the 1960s was giving way to doubt and paranoia, a kind of creeping corporate co-optation and, ultimately, downbeat social lassitude and introverted resignation.”
Well, there was plenty of lassitude and resignation, but there was much else. During the seventies some of us made a decision to “get more serious” about the idea of revolution. We studied Marx and got working-class jobs to organize among The Class and sold our conscious-raising newspapers at factory gates, etc. Others, instead, embarked upon a deep re-thinking of the problems and the solutions. The former manifested years later in Occupy and the Bernie Sanders campaign; the latter in deep ecology, social ecology, and Green politics.
There were waves of euphoria and doubt and exhilaration and exhaustion, but to portray it all as a bust is to misunderstand what a cultural turning point can look like.
