Word: revelations
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...also supporting "solutions" which in fact would work to the disadvantage of everybody--and especially poor people. Wallace set up as the "enemy" not only the liberal-bureaucratic-wealthy-power-structure which radicals attack, but also poor people on welfare and precisely those people on the Left who may revel over his victory...
Ironically his attack on simplistic French attitudes precedes his own incredibly facil analysis of the United States. Without Marx or Jesus hardly bothers with American society. It is relegated to a series of confused vignettes supposedly confirming Revel's thesis. Witness: Leonard Bernstein's Black Panther cocktail party demonstrates a great depth of revolutionary commitment; the opposition to the "no knock" search law shows the growth of civil libertarianism; the movie of The Strawberry Statement indicates artistic fervor; the Hare Krishna Society and the Jesus freaks glow with revolution; and so do all students, all women, all liberals...
...Revel's rose-colored glasses have thick distorting lenses through which he sees what he wishes, not what exists. He handles his analysis of the United States by waving the stars and stripes and bellowing. "See, I told you it's red." Everything he witnesses walks a leftist path. His inability to acknowledge the traditional strength of American conservatism ruins his argument. For him the country consists of the Black nation, the Woodstock nation, the Wallace nation, and the liberals. But Woodstock was not the radical political convention that Revel calls it. Nor have dissenters forced the United States...
Meanwhile the rest of America goes homeless. Revel neglects the plurality that elected Nixon president. In Revel's context Spiro Agnew is kept busy fighting a rear guard action against the massmedia. The compulsion to split the country neatly into left and right also ignores the middle class and its love of the status quo. American is not, as he says, "composed of two antagonistic camps of approximately equal size." The nation holds a spectrum of ideologies. Even a division into three parts would be more valid...
...Revel uses extremes as a propaganda device, isn't he allowed some latitude in his descriptions? I might be tempted to accept his distortions, if only the book weren't so grindingly dull. In his efforts to sound like a political philosopher, Revel manages to make his startling premises excruciatingly boring. Without Marx or Jesus neither convincesnordelights. Revel displays so much pompous and artificial scholarship, I even find it difficult to be outraged by his phony ideological posturing. Absolutely rabid francophiles or phobes might be interested in this minor rhetorical gesture. The rest of us should forget...