"In the days after it first
opened in early 1964, Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove"
took on the enchanted aura of a film that had gotten away with
something. Johnson was in the White House, the Republicans were
grooming Goldwater, both sides took the Cold War with grim solemnity,
and the world was learning to be comfortable
with the term "nuclear deterrent," which meant that
if you blow me up, I'm gonna blow you up, and then we'll all be
dead. "Better dead than Red," some said. Others said
the opposite. The choice was not appealing."
Roger Ebert's review of Dr. Strangelove
THE PORT HURON STATEMENT OF THE
STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY (1962)
As we grew, however, our comfort was
penetrated by events too troubling to
dismiss. First, the permeating and
victimizing fact of human degradation,
symbolized by the Southern struggle
against racial bigotry, compelled most
of us from silence to activism. Second,
the enclosing fact of the Cold War,
symbolized by the presence of the
Bomb, brought awareness that we
ourselves, and our friends, and
millions of abstract "others" we
knew more directly because of our
common peril, might die at any time.
We might deliberately ignore, or avoid,
or
fail to feel all other human problems, but not these
two, for these were too immediate and crushing in
their impact, too challenging in the demand that we
as individuals take the responsibility for encounter
and resolution....
Our work is guided by the sense
that we may be the last generation
in the experiment with living. But
we are a minority -- the vast majority
of our people regard the temporary
equilibriums of our society and world
as eternally-functional parts. In this is
perhaps the outstanding paradox: we
ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet
the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative
to the present. Beneath the reassuring
tones of the politicians, beneath the common
opinion that America will "muddle
through", beneath the stagnation of
those who have closed their minds to
the future, is the pervading feeling
that there simply are no alternatives,
that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not
only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well.
Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness
of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any
moment things might thrust out of control. They fear
change itself, since change might smash whatever
invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for
them now. For most Americans, all crusades are
suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual
sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common
reluctance to organize for change. The dominant
institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of
their potential critics, and entrenched enough to
swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of
protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies.
Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and
by our own improvements we seem to have weakened
the case for further change.