This is a book about the counterculture movement by two Canadian culture critics. It actually helped me do a lot of growing up.
That's a bit embarrassing for me to admit, since I'm writing this in middle age, by which time life is supposed to have smacked one's various immaturities and ideological obtusenesses out of you one way or another.
But no. We all have various idiocies lingering under the surface, left over from our younger years, many times having gotten lodged deep inside our craniums during our college years, or as a result of having spent our lives immersed in pop culture.
I have a lot fewer illusions after reading this book.
What illusions am I talking about? Oh, you know, the standard liberal package of ideas, such as that commerce is fundamentally evil; that ideally, we should all be living off the land; global corporations are the summit of iniquity, American values are imperialistic; those who bum around Europe with a Frisbee and a guitar are more in touch with their true natures; underground music is by definition more authentic; anything for the masses is to be eschewed, "despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible," (F. Dyson). That kind of stuff.
I would say that what this book is, broadly, is an attack on the Sixties and on radical leftists generally. But that's by implication: what the authors would probably claim is that this book is an exposure of the origins and fundamental silliness of such ideas as the anti-globalization movement, and how claims to countercultural legitimacy are really just the same game all over again.
An excellent job. Probably the best book I've read in the last two years.
There are, by the way, a couple of other books floating around out there on much the same theme. There's Diana West's recently minted "The Death of the Grown-Up," which is a good read but not revelatory, like this one was. Another one I admired tremendously was Thomas Sowell's "The Vision of the Anointed," written in the 90s.
Yes, it's not often that a book helps you become more (there's no other word for it) mature. Immediately more serious and realistic, I mean. Heath and Potter's book did this by means of systematically taking some of my most cherished but unexamined ideas out for a ride, and either exposing their contradictions or seeing where they would logically take one.
This book did what it set out to do: it brings such ideas out into the open for a good whacking.
As Judge Louis Brandeis is supposed to have said, "Sometimes sunlight is the best disinfectant."
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Cliente de AmazonReviewed in Mexico on December 22, 2016
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