In 1973, Patrick Moynihan said, “Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade.”
The 1960s began with a presidential election between conservative cold warrior Richard Nixon…and the surprisingly conservative cold warrior John F. Kennedy. In terms of the similarity between the two candidates, and the public they represented, this was a high point in national unity.
The assassination of JFK began a process that ultimately shattered that unity. During the course of the 1960s, Americans witnessed the split between the liberalism of FDR, Harry Truman, JFK and LBJ, and the rise of the punitive New Left that emerged in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination.
As we explore in the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, the alpha and the omega of those two forms of American liberalism came less than a month apart, in the summer of 1969:
Tune in for our take on:
- How Jackie Kennedy retroactively created Camelot, and the death of the New Frontier.
- We’ll look back at the “Helvetica World,” both in real life and at the movies.
- The end of New Deal-era optimism.
- The death of modern architecture, and the mansard-roofed canary in McDonald’s coalmine.
- The Malthusian doomsday pessimism that was a hallmark of Hollywood science fiction after 1969.
- The song remains the same.
- What does it all mean? Watch to find out!
And for almost 60 previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling.
Part of this essay is missing, at least on my computer. What happened in the summer of 1969?
the video is the essay, not the text
OK, there’s something there now, the video, which is quite interesting. Thanks.
Great stuff Ed, very interesting thoughts. It certainly was a dour period design-wise. Punitive is a good way to put it.
I never believed the government conclusions of Kennedy’s murder. Many, many others don’t either. After Walter Cronkite and others in the elite media went to bat for the Warren Commission in the 60s and 70s I lost most of my faith in the MSM too. The official explanantion is patently absurd.
In recent years we now know:
1. Kenny O’Donnell drank himself to death after the assassination. He was in the car behind JFK; when he repeatedly told the FBI the last shot came from the front the investigators told him he had to be wrong. He went along. Many did.
2. E. Howard Hunt, as cancer was eating away his last days confessed to his son…the tape is on the net…that he was “backup” that day in Dallas for the CIA. Why is nobody in the MSM interested in this story?
3. Madeline Brown, LBJ’s mistress of many years was told by Johnson the night before the murder that it was going to happen. Why is her story being surpressed?
We know today JFK was living a reckless personal life as POTUS…some in the Joint chiefs and CIA wanted him gone. Does anybody else remember the TFX jet plane scandal of the early sixties? ABC reported back in the ninties that JFK was blackmailed into giving that contract out based on one of his girl’s diaries falling into the wrong hands.
Why doesn’t anybody investigate this stuff? Too busy covering Natlalie Holloway?
Why would these reservations be investigated. What is your standing in the private / secret political power clubs of Washington, the “elite” purveyors of “information”, or the “elite” educational institutions of the nation? They hold all the cards,and very close to their chests.Your reservations can be and have been easily dismissed as creation of conspiracy theory loonies.Take a good look at the TV photos of Ruby’s killing of Oswald – held by Dallas Police. A GOOD LOOK.Then consider the information to the public of Ruby’s later life story. The real problem is that, whatever the truth (which we shall never know) about the assassination, it was a “break” for the further development of the political history of the United States at the hands of the “liberals”/called “Democrats.NOT TO FORGET THE INITIAL CHAPTER OF THIS DEVELOPMENT, in the “election” of Kennedy ensured by the tainted vote from Cook County, Illinois (Chicago). And finalised in the triumph of the “liberals” in the tainted? election of the, from Chicago, present incumbent of the Oval Office. Chicago is not known as the Windy City for nothing.
those two forms of American liberalism
That’s rather like referring to Edgar and the Bug that wore his skin in “Men in Black” as two different forms of human.
American liberalism was destroyed from within by Leftism, whose end-of-road is tyranny. As muddled and confused as the former became before the Left finally shed its hollowed-out form in the 1960′s, there’s no excuse to be confusing the two.
It was George Orwell who described lefties as capable of holding two opposing ideas in mind, and believing both. He called the principle ‘doublethink’.
Per Wikipedia: Doublethink is a form of trained, willful intellectual blindness to contradictions in a belief system.
Insufficiently Sensitive,
Of course. But the original essay version of Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” beat 1984 to the punch by a couple of decades.
At least that’s what the backroom boys at the Ministry of Truth are telling me…
Regards,
Ed
Ed,
You have answered something I’d always wondered about: the differences in graphic design all of a sudden. This presentation reminded me of Francis Schaeffer’s Escape From Reason, which shows the parallel development of art, architecture, literature, philosophy, and general thought throughout history.