I suspect that my age plays a factor in my attitude--if you were young person working for social justice in the late 80s or early 90s it was easy to feel very very alone in society, abandoned by a generation of yuppies who you could personally recall having been very loud about ideals they no longer seemed to show any interest in. Obviously a generalization, we did have elders to look to, but they certainly felt like people on the margins of what it meant to be a boomer in an age of spandex.
Of course, my cohort of engaged Gen Xers was often too cynical, and to prone to focus on narrow issues where a few people could at least hope to get some traction: stop funding death squads, get recruiters off campus, protest Apartheid, demand action on AIDS but mostly fight to get condoms in the bathrooms, free Mumia rather than change everything about policing, get that ozone hole closed, but don't have a sustained critique of the root causes. People to whom civil unions seemed, almost, like an irrelevantly unattainable if aspirational goal.
The sort of people who would eventually do much of the hard work conjuring the web out of nothing, but who wouldn't ask deep enough questions about what they wrought.
As for Lucas, I kind of want to sneak through a portal and see what would have happened his career without the ego inflation of making Star Wars. If he had been the director of Apocalypse Now, as originally planned, so he didn't have time to make his space opera flick. Could Spielberg alone have pushed the industry to focus on blockbusters if Lucas ended up being just another member of the American New Wave, the one known for ruthless technical skill and inept dialogue?
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Of course, my cohort of engaged Gen Xers was often too cynical, and to prone to focus on narrow issues where a few people could at least hope to get some traction: stop funding death squads, get recruiters off campus, protest Apartheid, demand action on AIDS but mostly fight to get condoms in the bathrooms, free Mumia rather than change everything about policing, get that ozone hole closed, but don't have a sustained critique of the root causes. People to whom civil unions seemed, almost, like an irrelevantly unattainable if aspirational goal.
The sort of people who would eventually do much of the hard work conjuring the web out of nothing, but who wouldn't ask deep enough questions about what they wrought.
As for Lucas, I kind of want to sneak through a portal and see what would have happened his career without the ego inflation of making Star Wars. If he had been the director of Apocalypse Now, as originally planned, so he didn't have time to make his space opera flick. Could Spielberg alone have pushed the industry to focus on blockbusters if Lucas ended up being just another member of the American New Wave, the one known for ruthless technical skill and inept dialogue?