Richard Rorty on the Value-Added Rage of the 1960s
“America will always owe an enormous amount to the rage which rumbled through the country between 1964 and 1972. We do not know what our country would be like today, had that rage not been felt. But we can be pretty certain that it would be a much worse place than it is. The CIA would undoubtedly be even more of a loose cannon than it is now. It is even possible that the Defense Department might lie to the public more frequently and fluently than at present, though I admit that this is hard to imagine. The anti-anti-Communism of the New Left, and its counter-productive habit of spelling ‘ America’ with a ‘k,’ are not important in comparison to what it achieved. By saving us from the Vietnam War, the New Left may have saved us from losing our moral identity.”
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
