PARTISAN REVIEW
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tuality straightjacketed, at its most dismal bound by the sort of pieties,
fantasies, and "values" that one might expect to hear articulated
today only by a genuine oddball like Tricia Nixon.
Even to have been a dissident, highly skeptical member of that
generation did not make one any better prepared than the straight–
jacketed to absorb the shocks and upheavals of post-Oswald America
. . . for in retrospect the first act of demythologizing committed in
the decade seems to me to have been the "demythologizing" of John
F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. The re-mythologizing of Ken–
nedy began the instant the last shot had been fired, but once the
president of "Camelot," as they called it, was pronounced dead, the
point about the vulnerability and mortality of the "charismatic" and
the indestructible had been made; it remained for Sirhan Sirhan to
demythologize Bobby Kennedy, and for the lesser characters like
Jackie and Teddy Kennedy to demythologize themselves, the one
with Aristotle Onassis and the other with Mary J
0
Kopechne, for the
decade to tum completely inside out this particular legend of glamour
and power and righteousness.
Disorienting, shocking, all this may have been, but it did not
begin to work deeply to test or alter one's ties to America; Vietnam
did that. To have been trained to be a patriotic schoolchild on the
rhetoric of World War II, to have developed an attachment to this
country in good part on the basis of the myth
and
reality of that war–
time America, made my own spiritual entanglement with this wartime
America probably more like Lyndon Johnson's than Jerry Rubin's.
That I came eventually to despise Johnson did not mean that I was
impervious, ever, to
his
sense, which I took to be genuine, that the
America whose leader he was, simply could not be on the wrong
side, even if for some God damn reason everything seemed to look
that way. No, it could not be, cried the America of World War
II –
"Say it ain't so, Lyndon." Instead he went on television and said it
was, in the only real way he was ever able to admit it publicly, by
washing
his
hands of the whole hideous mess. The last of the decade's
great demythologizers, L.B.].
Apres
lui,
the bullshit artists once again.
All that by way of background. Here's what I'm getting at: the
fierce, oftentimes wild and pathological assault launched in the sixties
against venerable American institutions and beliefs, and even more
to the point, the emergence of a counterhistory, or
countermythology,
