Pun Salad

Confession: I've had this book on one bookshelf or another for the past fifty years. I finally got the courage to enter it into my bookpicking system a few years ago. And eventually…

The book was originally written by the French intellectual Jean-François Revel in 1970. The copy I bought so long ago has an afterword by Mary McCarthy, which is followed by Revel's "Author's Note to the American Edition" (dated March 22, 1971). You can think of that as a mini-debate between the two.

You might see problems in the book's subtitle: had a "new American revolution" really begun in 1970? Revel doubles down on that in the first paragraph of Chapter One:

The revolution of the twentieth century will take place in the United States. It is only there that it can happen. And it has already begun. Whether or not that revolution spreads to the rest of the world depends on whether or not it succeeds first in America.

Later in the book, Revel claims that "what was happening in the United States was actually modifying the concept of revolution". So his argument is pretty fluid: take whatever happened, and call it a "revolution".

Or maybe, to quote Homer Simpson, it was just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Revel's actual revolutionary vision is (as near as I can tell) a bunch of stuff that didn't happen: a withering away of the nation-state, an end to war and inequality, shucking off outmoded ideologies ("without Marx or Jesus"), and universal democracy.

In other words, we're talking the Gospel According to Roddenberry, the shiny Star Trek future, alas without the spaceships. It's very Greening of America stuff. He talks a lot about the Hippie movement.

I wish I'd gotten more out of the book, but I found it frustratingly immersed in the controversies of the 1970s. I enjoyed Revel's takedown of the Euro-weenie anti-Americanism of his day… and that's about it.