Word: kremen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...over for you," Kremen muses...
...Kremen is, I guess, what the boys over in William James would call a participant-observer. He's fiercely determined to cram as much experience into a soujourn away from New York as possible, reveling in bars and dirt and cheap hotels and the like. Anything that smacks of either youth culture or the working class or, best of all, a combination of the two, sends him into ecstasy. Smoking marijuana, for instance, especially in a factory or a commune, is always tremendously meaningful: "The smoke striking into my lungs sends my blood leaping. And soon the flying sparks...
...same time, Kremen can never resist pulling out his notebook in any situation--a drunken college party, a pool game in Louisiana, a car he gets a ride in--that might possibly give him some pearl of wisdom that will help him in telling us what's going on out there. He's always sidling up to someone and asking the provocative questions that will get to the bottom of it all--except that more often than not, his questions are designed to bear out his own assumptions about what people are thinking. Here is Kremen on his first...
Dateline: America isn't just only Kremen's interviews. He throws in a lot of economics--particularly the theories of his hero, Paul Samuelson--and public-opinion poll results in an effort to explain the broader patterns that provoke the answers people give him. His general theory is that the baby-boom generation is about to take over America, and that it doesn't believe in all the moral and working codes its predecessors did. Therefore, when the younger generations takes charge, the country will drift leftward and somehow deal with economic and population problems in ways that reflect...
...Kremen ended his voyages with a new beard and long hair, the better to achieve solidarity with the youth culture he admires so much, as well as what must have seemed to his a battery of new perceptions about America. But nothing else really new emerges out of Dateline: America other than a few interesting interviews with young people and a few boring ones, all romanticized. overblown and laden with dubious significance by Kremen. There is no cohesive vision of what's happening to the country...