The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

The 1960s is a time that holds near mythical status with a great deal of today’s youth. All across America one can find students and professors alike engaged in an utter fascination with the time period and the social changes pioneered during it. It is little wonder that there is a great deal of written material detailing the times and the movements, but Roger Kimball’s book is slightly different. Kimball looks at this reverent era without rose colored glasses and comes to a ground breaking conclusion: the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s broke America. Kimball’s book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America is a riveting tale of the masterfully executed takeover of American sensibilities by extreme left wing hippies.
Kimball approaches the Cultural Revolution like one would approach the cold war. He identifies the key players and the key targets in the war for American social opinion. Kimball uses a exponential amount of text from books by the self-proclaimed voices of the 1960s Beat movement, which Kimball seems to focus on, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs to illustrate his point that the Cultural Revolution was a series of degrading principles. Kimball main focus is
“to show how the paroxysms of the 1960s continue to reverberate throughout our culture… it lives on in our values and habits, in our taste, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives one especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog.
Kimball entire book lives on the fact that the changes made are so insidious that we are no longer aware these changes have been made. He uses the widespread trend of wearing blue jeans to illustrate his point.   Kimball said that people in every station of life wear blue jeans, something that used to be only for youth. Kimball uses a series of text from professor and critics who glorify the musicians, writers, and activist of that day to show...