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2 - The Whole World Is Watching

from PART I - VIOLENCE AND POLITICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2013

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Summary

“The whole world is watching” was chanted outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago when TV cameras broadcast live images of the police beating up demonstrators. About 19 years later, I wrote this review of Full Metal Jacket in the ferocious mood that that film and some of the response to it had aroused in me. It seemed the right time to remind readers, or inform younger ones, of what the idealism of the 1960s and early '70s had felt like and been about, at least for me and the people I knew. The piece was published in the American Book Review in 1987. I respect its passionate writing and continue to agree with it, allowing for the fact that its present day was set deep in the time of Reagan. Younger readers may want to relate the discussion of nuclear war to what we currently know (but fail to act on) about global warming Note that when the article brings up terrorism in its discussion of one radical perspective, it does not endorse terrorism. Like “Me Tarzan, You Junk, ” this article brings the peace movement into the conversation about violent movies.

If any single hope characterized the American sixties, it was that oppression and hypocrisy would be vanquished, like a vampire in the sunshine, by an appeal to reason and official—i.e., Constitutional—laws and values.

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Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2013

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