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152 Chapter Four The Fugitive’s Hour:The Counterculture and the Vietnam Antiwar Movement in American Fiction Out on the street I couldn’t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The Sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse. . . . What I’d thought of as two obsessions were really only one. —Michael Herr, Dispatches That was just a dream some of us had. —Joni Mitchell, “California” The best time was dusk, she realized. . . . That was the fugitive’s hour, when the darkening air felt like shelter, yet you still had your eyes. —Jenny Shimada, American Woman I n 1998, in one of the many celebrations of the coming millennium, the U.S. Postal Service invited American citizens to vote for representative American events and images of each decade of the twentieth century. Millions of ballots were cast, on the Postal Service website and at 40,000 post offices and 300,000 public school classrooms around the country. The resulting issues were colorful sheets of first-class stamps—fifteen for each decade—commemorating what average American citizens selected as “the most significant people, events, and accomplishments of the 20th century.” For the stamps of the “rebellious Sixties,” as the accompanying narrative labeled the decade, nearly a million citizens voted to acknowledge such icons as the Barbie doll, the Ford Mustang, the Superbowl—and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Beatles’ yellow submarine, a large black-and-yellow peace symbol pinned to a denim shirt, a helicopter dropping American soldiers into the jungle of Vietnam, and the memorable image from Arnold Skolnick’s colorful 1969 Woodstock music festival poster of a dove perched on the neck of a guitar. Ryan.indb 152 Ryan.indb 152 8/22/2008 3:11:55 PM 8/22/2008 3:11:55 PM the counterculture and the movement in american fiction 153 Surely we are not surprised that five of the fifteen unforgettable images of the tumultuous 1960s are representations of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the Vietnam War, and the counterculture—in short, of canonized contemporary memories of the turbulent 1960s. And we can probably assume that the predominately young Americans who selected those icons—even baby boomers who came of age in that decade—would be hard pressed to explain intelligently the intersections and relationships among those powerful metaphors of that complex period in American history . Is it fading memory or lack of understanding, even at the time, of the complexities of that era that accounts for the simplistic representation of the 1960s in contemporary American culture? In Marylouise Oates’s 1991 Making Peace: A Novel of the Sixties, the protagonist , Annie, is a middle-aged television journalist preparing a documentary on the 1960s for a 1980s Democratic National Convention. Though Annie welcomes the documentary assignment as an opportunity to “indulge in the luxury of her own past,” she is surprised that the “vibrant colors” of the news film of the era belie her black-and-white memories (3). She has struggled to find “some original film, some footage that hadn’t appeared on the air in the nostalgia trips the network loved to take: a speech by Dr. King that didn’t say he had a dream; a clip of Bobby Kennedy in which he wasn’t walking on the beach; JFK without his daughter and not saying, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’; black students before Afros, hair all slicked down with pomade; antiwar protesters who weren’t from Berkeley or Columbia” (5–6). Are our inaccuracies and stereotypes due to protean memory or cultural simplification? The sixties activist and, now, sixties scholar Todd Gitlin, in his preface to the 1993 revision of his hybrid memoir–critical analysis The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), asserts that “perhaps no decade has suffered” the inevitable and unfortunate reductionism that simplistically labels all historical periods “more than ‘the Sixties,’ which in popular parlance has come to stand for a single seamless whole” (xiii). And, as Van Gosse suggests , “the poor decade cannot bear the weight” (Rethinking, ix). The cultural critic H. Bruce Franklin, in Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (2000), more specifically decries the simplification, demonization, and denial of the Vietnam antiwar movement, which he calls “the . . . movement we are supposed to forget” (47). The turn of the new century brought a spate of new books (not to mention...

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