A Chronicle of Wasted Time is a cultural history of the 1970s in America. It presupposes that the Seventies had a distinct character, although it cannot be so sharply defined as the Sixties or Eighties. A book on the Seventies joins almost innumerable unresolved elements, and what troubled that decade continues to trouble us. The difficult part is that these troubling elements do not connect, so that a continuous narrative is often impossible to maintain. Yet there was something like a "culture" " of the Seventies, however disconnected the parts. That culture is the theme of the book.

Frederick R. Karl is the author of several books: biographies of Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and George Eliot; as well as several volumes of literary criticism, among them American Fictions 1940-1980 and Modern and Modernism. He is also general editor and volume co-editor of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. His most recent books for Xlibris are American Fictions 1980-2000 and Quest for Biography. Married, father of three daughters, and grandfather of five children, he has taught at the City College of New York, Columbia, and New York University.

Excerpt

Folk singers such as Josh White and Odetta, plus gospel singers like Mahalia Jackson, left a large legacy. Black singers were often imitated or replaced by whites - Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Phil Ochs - who saw in folk music a way to protest against segregation, discrimination, and racial theories of white superiority. Much of this carried well into the Seventies even as the formal movement ended. Folk remained a political weapon.

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On a more rational note, another sound did ring down the decade, the sound of antiwar songs. Vietnam was one part of such music; all war, soldiers, military planners were slammed. As early as 1964, Buffy Sainte-Marie presented "Universal Soldier," not as anti-Nam, but as an assault from the peace movement on the values of the soldier class itself. What she created did not define the Vietnam conflict, for there the soldier was to be portrayed as victim, not as an agent of destruction; whereas the government and its leaders were the criminals. More specific Vietnam songs came from others, in the early Sixties, with Phil Ochs - "Talking Vietnam Blues" and, a little later, "White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land." With Ochs, that separation of the common soldier from those who run the war is clear. Tom Paxton was in this mold, with his "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation," and Pete Seeger's "Ballad of the Fort Hood Three," the tale of three soldiers court-martialed for their refusal to serve in Vietnam.