zhulin's Full Review: Jonathan Leaf - The Politically Incorrect Guide to...
For the eighteenth book in the now well-established (in fact, declining sales-wise) Politically Incorrect Guide series, Regnery Publishing takes on the conventional wisdom of the 1960s as a decade of radicalism. Jonathan Leaf instead argues that the radicals for which the decade is remembered by most people today were only a small minority of America's population and that, for the most part, the 1960s were a decade of strong conservatism in every aspect of life.
The problem with what Regnery does in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties is that the author, Jonathan Leaf, who is by training a playwright rather than serious cultural historian, fails to grasp that what is popularly called the "Sixties" does not bear that much temporal relationship to the actual decade of the 1960s. Consequently, Leaf wrongly associates the 1960s with the conservative period extending from the end of World War II through the 1950s and into the early part of the decade. The period of cultural upheaval commonly called the "Sixties" covered only the later part of the decade and extended well into the 1970s, yet nothing about the 1970s is covered in the book at all.
Then there is the question of what purposeThe Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties serves for today's audience.
If the purpose was the typical message one hears from every Right faction - that the Sixties radicals were extremely violent and their legacy has been harmful or even dangerous, then there would be relatively little point focusing on the popular culture of the decade. For most people alive today, even conservatives, what Leaf shows to have been the popular 1960s culture can best be described as quaint. Except Robert Bork and Pat Buchanan, who were unlike many prominent modern conservatives already adults when the Sixties began, one never sees conservative intellectuals praise Dean Martin, Bobby Vinton, Connie Francis, Frank Sinatra or West Side Story. It is clear that, whether instantly or with age, the generation emerging during the 1960s did not see much of value in such music. People who came of age during the 1960s saw that what was really important in music during the decade were artists whom Leaf says (and most potential readers already know) lived hedonistic lifestyles and were sexually unfaithful.
If The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties was intended to show how Sixties radicals were a loud minority that took over America by force, the book would require at least a chapter detailing how and when they did this. Previous Politically Incorrect Guides have conclusively shown that this has happened in the media and academia, but The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties explains away the decline of conservative 1960s culture as if it was doomed to die with an aging audience.
Alternatively, if The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties was aiming to show that cultural values today have not changed substantially since the 1950s, Leaf has a great many historical facts against him. Fertility rates and levels of religious attendance clearly show major changes in cultural attitudes throughout the world since the 1960s. Changes have been considerable even in highly conservative Australia and the conservative Deep Southern and Rocky Mountain states of the US. Leaf would have to do the difficult job of explaining these changes if he really thinks the facts deviate from conventional wisdom. Most importantly, serious historians and cultural scholars locate the 1960s as precisely the period when major changes in value systems happened in Europe and Canada. Whilst eminent Italian historian Piero Scaruffi shows that rock and roll was much more culturally mainstream during the 1960s in Europe than it was in the United States and writers like Joe S. Harrington actually give significant evidence that rock and roll has very rarely been popular in "Middle America", Leaf leaves a blank. He does understand the complexities involved in defining "rock and roll", but does not grasp how many current fans of heavy metal or hardcore punk who agree that the acclaimed and popular rock artists of the 1960s were far from genuine rock and roll actually see many critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful underground 1960s acts as equally distant therefrom. I have read far too much to think for a second that the story of 1960s rock and pop can be understood so simply as Leaf tries to.
Leaf's treatment of the sexual revolution and feminism suffers from the basic flaw of misdefining the "Sixties", because the early 1970s, when the really radical feminists like Mary Daly, Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millett came to prominence, was clearly anticipated by what was happening at the end of the 1960s yet hard to foresee circa 1960. Leaf is right that these movements date back to the 1890s or earlier, but cannot see the roots of radical feminism. Although partly related to Marxism, radical feminism's origins also lie in nineteenth century European historian Jules Michelet and archaeologist Johann Bachofen. Both found evidence for goddess worship and higher status for women in prehistoric civilisations, now-discredited ideas especially influential upon Steinem and Daly. Leaf's aim to move the sexual revolution beyond the typical attacks on the not-so-original Alfred Kinsey is welcome, but The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties says nothing about its deeper roots, which come from people old enough to have been Kinsey's father like Havelock Ellis.
When it comes to popular culture, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties is maddeningly inconsistent. Full chapters exist on movies, television and dress fashion during the decade. However, on journalism there exist only a few claims that the often-derided political correctness of the press was already established when the decade opened and that its bias accounted for the perception of anti-Vietnam activists as "pacifists" when most were Communists who wanted the Vietcong to win. This does not agree with other conservatives like Peter Kreeft, who argue that the modern liberal media bias came only when the Boom Generation took over in the 1980s. On literature there are again only a few poorly-chosen references. For example, the relatively moderate Ken Kesey is described instead of William Burroughs, who was the godfather of the punk revolution of the late 1970s that totally and permanently separated Europe, Canada and New Zealand from Western Civilisation's roots.
Leaf's omission of the growth of FM radio from an upper-class format to one capable of exposing music and opinions from outside the establishment is one void. Before MTV - and to a large extent even during the MTV era - radio was much more vital than television to the spread of the counterculture. Journalism was similarly more significant than television to spreading the counterculture and its omission can thus be viewed as bias. Another void is the growth and transformation of science fiction and fantasy literature, which were originally (often) conservative in ideology (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis) but later became important vehicles for much more radical opinions. When he turns to the roots of today's right-wing "counter counterculture" Leaf's selection of figures for study does not improve. He chooses to profile Ayn Rand, disliked by many conservatives and described by Benjamin Wiker and Donald DeMarco in Architects of the Culture of Death as "promoting selfishness as a virtue". The very fact that Rand was, as Wiker shows, adored by the very college students The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties seeks to discredit, makes her place in such a chapter dubious. It would have been better to examine Murray Newton Rothbard, the founder of anarcho-capitalism, probably the single most original idea from the 1960s, or Jane Jacobs, whose views on urban planning have been very influential on the Right.
The way in which the political spectrum has viewed and views major thinkers of the sixties shows Leaf incorrect in saying the culture wars as we know them today began with Milton Friedman and his economic criticism of big government. Rand and Jacobs illustrate how many thinkers from the Sixties had admirers on both sides of the modern culture wars, and many Sixties icons, such as Kerouac, were actually quite conservative (see Robert Inchausti or an interview with Bill Kauffman). It was only with the advent of punk rock that orthodox Christianity was totally dissociated from what the public regarded as countercultural or avant-garde. One of the reasons the punks hated (among others) Led Zeppelin was their Tolkien influence (Tolkien was so conservative a Catholic he rejected Vatican II). Some ideas with definite roots in 1960s counterculture, such as homeschooling, are seen as conservative today but Leaf does not grasp this.
Even when Leaf is able to make a reasonable argument, he suffers from being too derivative. For example: every argument he makes about the failures of the Great Society and Lyndon Johnson's expansion of government was covered in much better detail by Charles Murray in Losing Ground. When one considers the hatred for Rachel Carson's Silent Spring by many conservatives, Leaf's discussion of its views can be counted extremely sensible, but he does not discuss how Silent Spring's findings were developed into extreme conclusions by books like Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and Club of Rome's Limits to Growth. Those two books provide one of the best cases against 1960s radicals and their influence. Leaf's lack of originality is also seen in the coverage of feminism, more effectively covered earlier in one of the better books in the Politically Incorrect Guide series.
Leaf's viewpoint on the moon landings is also very reasonable but I do not give it as much credit as I might because I know that Leftists share Leaf's criticism of manned space flight's extravagance. His view of the Vietnam War is very much contrary to what I learned in school, but he does argue it well. His demonstration how the media's graphic violence helped turn Americans and Australians who previously supported the war away from it is probably the best moment in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties. However, it is difficult for me to believe that the US had Vietnam won when it pulled out and left the indigenous South Vietnamese to fight the war. Even if it faced immense opposition at home, if it were winning it would be very hard for the officers on the ground to not complain or do something drastic to prevent change in military policy. Leaf's point that many of the anti-war protestors really wanted the Vietcong to win is almost certainly true and I can testify this from such journals as Green Left Weekly and Socialist Worker. Still, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties overlooks that Christian pacifists like Dorothy Day were crucial in mentoring younger, much more socially and culturally radical, anti-war activists.
All in all, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties is a disappointment. Even for a book of its limited size it can certainly be faulted in what events and people from the decade are profiled, and whenever it does get something right it is never original enough to make for a worthwhile read.
Critically-acclaimed playwright and journalist Leaf reveals the politically incorrect truth about one of the most controversial decades in history. In...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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