Word: revelations
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Opinion v. Opinion. Myth No. 3: America is "the citadel of reaction." Revel's reply: Nothing quite as unreactionary as Ralph Nader or the mass opposition to Viet Nam has ever happened in Europe...
...Feed Revel an opinion and he will answer it with an opinion. While putting down Russia, China, the Third World and, above all, France, Revel cannot for the life of him discover significant flaws in the U.S. He likes Andy Warhol movies. He loves Playboy ("One of the most progressive magazines in America"). He even recommends American TV (with all those channels "it is more like being turned loose in a library"). What's more, he sees them all as part of the revolution. Not only blacks, Jesus freaks and grape workers but near-Establishment liberals get abstracted into...
Myth No. 2: Americans are slaves to "gadgets." Revel's solemn counterclaim: "The truth is that there is no country in the world where automobiles, for example, are treated more like ordinary tools-or where people drive less like maniacs." Furthermore, making an assertion that will particularly outrage Europeans, he insists that "aesthetic" imagination is "more pronounced in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world...
...Revel France's answer to Charles Reich-a 1971 champion of the sweeping statement? Not quite. Beneath the extravagances he is a shrewd polemicist out to score a fair rebuttal point: that America is not as bad as most Europeans-and many Americans-think it is. In other words, the New World is still a source of revolutionary hope. But the modern sin of overstatement runs away with Revel. Before he can stop, he is dreaming of a revolution that will spread from the U.S. by "a sort of political osmosis" until it arrives at its logical conclusion: "world...
...myth slayer has ended by creating his own myth. Still, Revel's act of provocation works pretty well within its own terms, and his corrective exaggerations should also have their good effects. At the very least, the author will become the pundit of the season. Writing grand-design scenarios of the future is a more popular art now than science fiction, even if less reliable. But how truly has the word expert been defined as "a man away from home...