Started reading Mark Kurlansky's 1968 this morning on the subway, after spending too many days reading Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover books. Thought it was time for some non-fiction after all the feudal lost colony of Earth telepath stuff!
I've always thought 1968 a very romantic year - all that student revolution stuff - and regret, in a way, that I was only 4 at the time. Maybe the author is exaggerating (as too many of these popular non-fiction authors do - I mean, does everything in history have to turn on codfish, or establishing longitude, or the Irish saving civilization?) when he describes how "special" it truly was, but he has a good point about how television, for the first time, allowed people to know what was going on almost immediately, and how remarkable it was for people in one country to see that their counterparts on the other side of the world were doing some of the same things. Also, having an audio-visual, well, that elicits a visceral reaction, rather than the more cerebral reaction one would have to, say, a printed newspaper report.
Kurlansky claims that we'll never have another 1968, in part because we cannot repeat the impact of how new the new medium was. But nowadays TV is so controlled that it's the web and the internet, I think, that will provide a revolutionary means for, well, revolution.
Some interesting tidbits of information thrown out as the author tries to evoke the tenor of the times:
1. The mind-set in which ghettoes are enemy territory and tanks being considered for use in them
2. The perception of the French that the Americans are out to humiliate them - well, I didn't realize how old that theme was, freedom fries!
3. The fact that in 1954 the US was financing four-fifths of the French war effort to keep Indochine
4. The "shocking" nature of an admission that PR was gonig to be strongly used in an election year to make the war look successful (vs our present conviction that everything out of a presidential administration is spin)
Well, that's all for now. I have a daughter to go see...!
