2017 is coming to an end, and things are looking apocalyptic. Politics is like a surrealistic dystopian fantasy. News reports seem like deranged hallucinations. Some people are actually saying that the world is coming to an end.
Sigh.
Kind of reminds me of the days of my youth.
By
coincidence (yeah, I know, some folks say that there is no such thing
as coincidence) I happened to read two books more or less at the
same time (I usually read several books at once, don’t you?) that
bring back those thrilling days of yesteryear . . .
The first is Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul by Clara Bingham, a fascinating multi-viewpoint, multi-dimensional oral history, with occasional quotes and excerpts from the dead. It concentrates on the year between the summers of 1969 and 1970,but there’s some spillover, because history tends to be messy. And this was a messy time. A time I remember well.
The
first moon landing had happened, and I had entered high school. The
future had arrived. I was looking around, wondering what kind of
world I was going to be living in, and expecting change. And, boy oh
boy, did it ever happen.
It
wasn’t what I was expecting, but the future never goes according to
plan, which is probably a good thing.
Witness
to the Revolution isn’t
a hippie-dippie Fabulous Sixties nostalgia trip. Voices of the
Establishment, cops, Feds, even Nixon himself, are heard from. The
Weathermen admit they were crazy. The witnesses, who are often major
participants, are delightfully frank the way victims of politically
correct educations never are.
And
checked against my own memories, they ring true.
They also provided the perfect state of mind for reading David Memmott’s new novel, Canned Tuna, in which we swing from the lives of two young American men, one in Vietnam and Boise, Idaho in 1969, the other in Oregon in 1963. Do you find that twisting of time sequence disturbing? Well, it’s typical of this novel.
Don’t
worry, it also has a sense of humor.
Apocalyptic
happenings mesh with fantastic, gritty realities, in the war, working
class America, and the counterculture without any sci-fi explanation.
One of the best novels about the period I’ve ever read. It does for
the Vietnam era what Slaughterhouse
Five did
for World War Two.
Maybe
now and then we all come unstuck in time. Or time gets sticky.
Spacetime. Timespace. Whatever.
Again,
it rings true.
They
are unprocessed history, before it’s stereotyped, made into
classroom propaganda, and ultimately forgotten.
Both
books take me back to when I was coming of age in a world that seemed
to coming to an end. Seemed. I got mad when people--smart
people--kept saying that it was all over. It wasn’t what I wanted
to hear, being young, and now that I’m old I see that they were
wrong. Life, time, goes on. It gets strange, but it doesn’t stop.
These
books give perspective on our current troubled times. I recommend
them, not just to us old farts, but to the younger generation, too.
Things getting weird and crazy aren’t anything new. It’s the
future; get used to it, kids.
Like
Criswell said at the beginning of Plan
9 From Outer Space:
“We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I
are going to spend the rest of our lives.”
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