Word: viorst
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Though every hero in the book exposes him, Milton Viorst never seems to confront Moloch. Instead, he credits the success of the Movement to good liberals and dedicated reformers, and he blames the disintegration on cynical militants and radicals...
Once grace had left the movement, the game was wild-eyed confrontation. Chicago. May Day. Kent State. Mark Rudd. Reform had become revolution, Eisenhower's "silent generation"--in which Viorst claims membership--had become "the silent majority," and an American President had promised to end the war. It took time, however, and during that time Viorst believes the Movement burned...
Kent State was the final stand. According to Viorst, it was the test of how revolutionary the left was, and how far they would go. But "few were ready to die, so the decade reached its end." Viorst says that by this time, the country had reached agreement that America had blundered in entering the war. But the animus of the Movement, vibrant in all of Viorst's heroes, was not the nemesis of one war, of one minority--it was the nemesis of an entire machine, the ideals and values of America which caused the country to blunder into...
...Orwell said," Viorst quotes Ginsberg, "a functioning police state doesn't need police to enforce. They get people to internalize. In 1984, the people don't realize there's a war at the other end of the planet. Then, suddenly, they wake up to the fact that there has been some vast conditioning. Brainwashing may be too strong a word, but it's accurate. It was a conditioning so that the public was able to amnesiaize vast areas of its own consciousness...
...WHAT ABOUT the '60s? Viorst is a good journalist, and like a good journalist, he has written a good story, a collection of informative and deeply moving profiles of America's heroes. But as an outsider, he does not share their stirring disillusionment with America, with its institutions of democracy and justice. He does not see the ultimate goal of any social movement, taken to its wildest extreme; he does not feel the urgency to change--the fire in the streets. Viorst is content to believe that the Movement ran out of steam and conviction--and something to complain about...