Roger Kimball's "The Long March"

I just finished reading "The Long March" by Roger Kimball.  

It is not a very satisfying work. Mind you, I sincerely wanted to read an analysis of how we got from there to here, and admittedly Roger Kimball has written other articles and works that are impressive. Here, perhaps he takes on too much. Kimball attempts to show how the major characters of the radical left movement in the 1960s and 1970s successfully undermined Western culture and became ingrained in the society we now live through. Although I agree with Mr. Kimball's basic thesis, i.e. the radical movement altered the landscape of Western culture, I found that the book did not clearly trace how this alteration happened.

There was very little cause and effect analysis within the work. For instance, how did the writings of Norman Mailer, Abbey Hoffman, Alan Ginsberg and others directly alter what had come before? How do we see traces of their work in the current media (movies, music, literature) and academia? Additionally, though he implies it, the proof that this movement was a conscious attempt to change society just isn't convincing. It's as though the conclusion of intentional action is assumed as true. Bad logic. Those who agree with Kimball on this will accept the faulty evidence regardless, but I am in agreement with a previous reviewer that there were several institutions on the "right" side of the political spectrum that contributed to the problem. The fact that such a cultural upheaval occurred seems to indicate that something was very wrong prior to the upheaval while if the motus was evil communists seeking to destroy the West that needs plenty more proof. It may be that both are true, but communism couldn't take root unless there was already soil for it to find purchase.

This leads to another big lacuna in the work. There is no analysis of the moral emptiness of the generations prior to the sixties. Most conservatives see the eras of the 20s to the 50s as "the greatest generation" full of can-do spirit, sense of civic responsibility, and moral uprightness. But there was much lacking as well. The writings of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wanda Poltawska, Sinclair Lewis, Marshall Macluhan (whom Kimball slaps once or no apparent reason) and others seems to indicate that there was something quite wrong with Western culture which needed change. To say that ante-bellum Virginia's slavery was wrong and needed to change is not to suggest that the "national bloodletting" of America's civil war was a good thing. It would have been illuminating to hear Kimball's analysis of Margaret Sanger's insidiously genocidal intentions, or the communist party's machinations in 1930s America, or the exhaustion and vapid indifference of Wasp suburbia in the 1950s, or the moral/cultural impact of Oppenheimer's little experiment. None of these factor into the analysis.

Further, Mr. Kimball leaves out several key players who had a hand in this alteration; for instance Gloria Steinem, Andy Warhol, the publishers of Hearst magazines. He hardly even touches on any of the artists - the Who, the Rolling Stones get merely a mention, the earthquake of Led Zeppelin doesn't even enter the pages of the work. I seriously would have liked to hear how these artists (and others like Jackson Pollock, Robert Mapplethorpe, Coco Chanel, Cream) and others might have contributed to the culture shift. Though he mentions the Beatles in several asides he never goes into any detail about WHAT they did or the precedent they set.

Finally, though the work is shocking in some of its revelations (I had no idea Norman Mailer and Alan Ginsberg were such bastards!) most of the work adopts a negative tone that lowers the validity of the argument. If we follow Mr Kimball's lead there is very little positive that came out of the sixties and seventies and only bad stuff. Rather than taking a long view, seeing that cultural shift has occurred repeatedly in human history, rather than attempting to trace the intentional efforts of a few to consciously destroy Western culture, rather than offering sound analysis that might lead to adequately dealing with the problems we currently address, Kimball's writing seems to lump all cultural movements of the era in the same bad barrel. Rather than attempting to agree with The Who that The Kids are Alright the author assumes that we are now living in a cesspool like no other cesspool in history, doomed to continue circling the maelstrom of our own Charybdis until we suffer extinction. Nor can Kimball resist the snide quips and asides about each character he addresses, or offer ulterior motives to his subjects except for the obvious motives of self-indulgence and moral inequity. He tries to take the higher ground of the intellectual defending Western culture with moral probity and intellect, but he sounds like a crotchety old man sitting on his porch, grumbling about how bad "those kids" are. I'm sure several of "us kids" who grew up in the era would benefit from a better piece of writing.

FTR - Kimball also does not make clear why he chose the title; "The Long March" is a reference to the Chinese Communist army's march north led by Mao Tse-tung in 1935 to escape the Nationalist army of China under Chiang Kai-shek. Though Kimball implies that the various cultural shifts were intentionally advanced by the Communist party in America and England, It is never quite clear how this event in China connects to the undermining of Western culture.