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...long ago, the "go for it" mentality of untrammeled capitalism was a virtue in the culture of Reaganism. Now that culture is being questioned. The Rambo story, which was a cartoon of Reaganism's individualist machismo, has been discredited by the escapades of Oliver North. The enduring ghost of Viet Nam returns not in the cretinous revenge fantasies of Sylvester Stallone but in Platoon, a movie that confronts the ambiguous mess and tragedy of America's mission in Viet Nam. The show that has captured Broadway is Les Miserables, with its themes of suffering and redemption, and the injunction "Look...
...next few years will be groping toward a new definition of itself. Now a new generation comes to power. Those marked by the formative experiences of the Depression and by World War II will leave the stage. The generation of the baby boom, which was formed by the Viet Nam era, will begin taking over...
...onetime celebrities, hacks and propagandists who have long since been swept into the dustbin of history -- with Hook handling the broom. He was performing those janitorial services at N.Y.U., when classes were shut down during a '60s antiwar protest. Hook was an early opponent of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam but characteristically went on teaching. At one session, he recalls, "three raucous S.D.S. students burst into the classroom, shouting 'Strike! Everyone out!' No one moved. I turned and shouted, 'I am placing you under a citizen's arrest,' not knowing exactly what that meant, and the students fled." The incident...
Those who tend Washington decade after decade have many faults, but there are splendid moments when the best rise to defend this ungainly democracy. When Lyndon Johnson passed the acceptable threshold of bloodshed in Viet Nam, the political establishment weighed in. Richard Nixon violated the law andthe threshold of decency in Watergate, and the city exposed and expelled him. Reagan crossed a threshold of mismanagement, and is being called to account...
While the White House has been in and out of more political battles than one can count in the past half a dozen years, the armies of the industrialized world have been mercifully underemployed. There have been no superpower standoffs, no new Viet Nams in Central America, no Cuban missile crises or Afghanistan invasions, no oil embargoes. There have been failures like Lebanon and frustrations like Nicaragua. Yet a significant number of experts believe that even if Reagan does not manage to negotiate a reduction in nuclear weapons, the grim specter of World War III, an image relished by demagogues...