Word: rahvs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Essay, Mr. Morrow founds his argument on Philip Rahv's quasi-philosophical sigh that nothing can last in America for more than ten years. So much for the Constitution, John Wayne, apple pie, Saul Bellow and the Ford Motor...
...Philip Rahv...
...proves once again that passions and issues are ephemeral and that, as the late Philip Rahv, an editor and longtime student of the American left, knew, radical movements in the U.S. are cyclical. Once, the generation of the New Left and counterculture believed that its youth, like the war in Viet Nam, would go on forever. It is tempting today to throw cherry bombs into the ruins of that delusion: the period seems prime for revisionism and ridicule. But to see that generation contemptuously as merely the screaming, Spock-coddled army of Consciousness III ignores the great changes it helped...
...such as nuclear energy, the arms race (the neutron bomb), the environment, the economy, unemployment and the urban underclass all lie in wait for anyone who approaches the future complacently. It would of course be difficult for history to duplicate the long, wild hallucination of the '60s. But Rahv's ten-year rule applies to historical pauses as well as upheavals. The cycle will surely come around again...
Since Jews have been reluctant to forget the values of their immigrant past, Howe's final section, in which he treats the third and fourth generations as the products of such a rejection, does not work. Explaining the phenomena of the "New York intellectuals"--men like Philip Rahv, Paul Goodman, and Harold Rosenberg--as a group that "sought to declare themselves through a stringency of will, breaking clean from the immediate past and becoming autonomous men of the mind," as Howe does, is simply not convincing. And the description of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin as part of the long...