Now that postmodernism has run its academic proponents into their nihilistic ditch, now that religion has returned as the principal discourse through which we Americans make sense of our reality, this paradigm-breaking book dares to rethink the whole of the '60s experience, not from a political or sociological but from an historical/theological perspective. Camille Paglia wrote that "the spiritual history of the sixties has yet to be written." This is that book.
Since the Old Testament was replaced by the New, we have ever had in Western culture a constant back and forth between the law and the spirit, between the establishment and the awakening, between the rational head and the irrational heart. If the 50's were all structure, the '60s was another romantic effort to escape the control of the rational and give full vent to the repressed spirit. Who are we, anyhow, when all the lies are stripped away? "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" The romantics of the '60s, like the Transcendentalists before them, rejecting the very idea of sin, dared to open the cage and let the repressed slave come forth, only to find that the light at the end of the long dark tunnel of consciousness was the gleam in Charlie Manson's eye.
With the election of Barack Obama, the Sixties has finally ended, not because he fulfills the ideals of that decade, but because he, like Jo-Jo, has returned us to where we once belonged. Bush is not the last hippy, but his approach to life, to governing, purely intuitive and from the gut, a rejection of his father's rationality, was the last breaking wave of that ocean storm. Paradoxically, Bush was much more like Bill Clinton in being led by his id, his passions, than any true conservative.
The book's 8 chapters each correspond to a line in Emily Dickinson's poem "Finding is the first act." The parallel to Dickinson's experience in the psychic wilderness demonstrates just how much the experience of the '60s was part of an ongoing American story and not an aberration. Though it seems contradictory, this books argues for an appreciation both of the '60s, 1960s, 1860s, 1660's, as well as of the religious core of the American story.
The central theme of the decade, a romantic rebellion against neo-orthodox cynicism, may well have been a mistake, but a necessary mistake, a correction that had to be made. Post-modernism's rejection of the essential romanticism that drove that decade, its emphasis on contingency and absence, is but another signifier for our powerlessness in the hands of an angry God. The enemy turned out to be, not them, or the social structure, but -- as Pogo said -- us: Jason sham too.
Soon to be published by Univ of Delaware Press
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