This past summer, Rick Perlstein, the author of the new biography called Nixonland, looked back on the period leading up to Richard Nixon’s 1968 election and told Reason magazine that in his opinion, “Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left“, adding:
“It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys–you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.”
It certainly was strange, compared with the nation’s politics at the start of the 1960s.
In the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we take a look back at the film, its radical chic times, and its champion–Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, who would reject traditional culture for “trash cinema.” And we’ll also look at Bobby Kennedy’s Fascist Moment–and even a Bonnie & Clyde-related excerpt the fourth edition of Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan’s A Quick And Dirty Guide To War. Which sounds like one meaty, beaty, big and bouncy little video to me.
Tommy guns and fedoras are optional, of course.
(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, going back to the start of the year, can be found here.)
Update: Welcome readers of InstaPundit, the Brothers Judd, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog at NRO, and–appropriately enough–the New Nixon Blog. Please look around, there’s lots here we think you’ll enjoy.
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