Volume 13, Number 12 · January 1, 1970
See America First
By Ellen Willis
Easy Rider
directed by Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures
Alice's Restaurant
directed by Arthur Penn, produced by Hillard Elkins
In 1969, the Year of the Pig, participants in what is known as (descriptively) youth culture or (smugly) hip culture or (incompletely) pop culture or (longingly) the cultural revolution are going through big changes. For choices have to be made now; they can no longer be left to a dubious mañana. After hearing Nixon's speech—'North Vietnam cannot defeat us; we can only defeat ourselves'—who can doubt that America as we have known it could completely disappear between one day and the next? Or maybe it already has, and what we are feeling now is phantom pain from an amputated limb. In this crisis our confusions and ambivalences about this country, our country, no matter how securely they seem to have occupied it, become more than intellectual gossip. Our lives may literally depend on how we resolve them.
Review, 3094 words
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