terça-feira, 17 de abril de 2012

''THE YEAR THE WORLD WENT DAYGLOW''

                               Matthew Engel puts on his bell-bottoms and pads back 40 years to ask why the world erupted in 1968, and what was achieved. A longer version of this article appears in the new Intelligent Life magazine ...
Any history of 1968 is going to be full of if onlys, what ifs, counterfactuals and might-have-beens. You can construct a zillion parallel universes of what could have happened if a single event had turned out a fraction differently. The reality was astonishing enough. And, as the 40th anniversary approaches, the year continues to maintain a remarkable grip on anyone with a sense of modern history.
There was, quite simply, an eruption: a global explosion of political, cultural and social energy that was at once both thrilling and terrifying. It had been rumbling and spitting for at least five years beforehand (since 1963, the year Philip Larkin said sexual intercourse was invented) and continued to send out lava flows for some time after that.
There was also a short version of '68--that brief period when "the revolution" (whatever that might have meant), as discussed in a thousand French cafés, and dingy student dormitories and flats across the world, felt like an imminent certainty...

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