Nixonland
Nixonland The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
Perlstein is a scion of the 60s. Perlstein has also reconstructed, in this same manner, many of the events of the 50s and 60s in fascinating and often compelling narrative detail. Through reading a lot of newspapers and mining a lot of television, he has constructed an imaginary world called Nixonland. Nixonland, like Hobbitland, exists in the mind of the fabulist. As a popular history of these times, Nixonland is an exciting and sometimes fresh read.
As a paradigm for understanding America in the postwar era, the concept of ‘Nixonland’ is extremely limited. The limitations of the concept are readily apparent, for example, in the race narrative that Perlstein grapples with throughout the book.
Nixonland indeed exists, but not in the way Perlstein imagines. It is the remote magic mountain nursing home for those unable or unwilling to recover from the past, where the patients live in the twilight of a rapidly fading era. Most of the kids today don’t visit the nursing home, except occasionally on grandpa’s birthday, when he tells them stories of cities burning, John and Yoko in bed for peace, and ‘radical’ philosophy be-ins, but leaves out the part where he took acid and ran half-naked in the streets before becoming a lawyer and moving to the suburbs. Nixonland is the same kind of invented place as John Ford’s American West.
The book repays reading and one should anticipate with enthusiasm a further installment where Perlstein will presumably draw out the picture of a fractured America. You should have to read the book, find it HERE
READ ELSE BOOKs:
Barack Obama Book; The Audacity of Hope.
