October: the Kennedy-Nixon debates are televised. YouTube has a very brief clip which is nonetheless revealing. We watched these at home on our b&w TV in my parents' bedroom, although I have the dimmest memory of them (I was 4 1/2 at the time). My first vivid political memory, if that's the phrase, is of the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later. Here's the link to the video. And here's a 4-minute piece of a documentary about the debates.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
all jowels
October: the Kennedy-Nixon debates are televised. YouTube has a very brief clip which is nonetheless revealing. We watched these at home on our b&w TV in my parents' bedroom, although I have the dimmest memory of them (I was 4 1/2 at the time). My first vivid political memory, if that's the phrase, is of the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later. Here's the link to the video. And here's a 4-minute piece of a documentary about the debates.
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
