It once seemed that the civil rights movement resulted from a kind of historical immaculate conception and signalled an historical “break” of major proportions. Now, however, we have historical studies tracing a long tradition of “core values” at work in black American culture and sociological studies that reconstruct the dense institutional matrix from which the civil rights movement emerged and drew sustenance. We can now identify historical developments – the great migration of southern blacks to the North, the increasing prosperity enjoyed by the South after World War II, and, most crucially, the Supreme Court decision of 1954 – that set the stage for the movement. Nor could the movement have come into existence without the nexus of black churches and colleges, the early work of the NAACP or the emergence of action-oriented organizations such as SCLC, SNCC and CORE. Even before Montgomery, we now learn, there were mass action campaigns by southern blacks that provided both information and inspiration for the fledgling movement in the capital of the Confederacy.

A familiar sight at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. is people tracing onto a piece of paper the name of a relative or friend who was killed in Vietnam. On one hand, this gesture is sadly poignant, even cathartic. On the other hand, it is also symptomatic of many Americans' perceptions of the Vietnam war, whether in the sixties or in the eighties: when we have the name of something we somehow also possess the thing named. Even though there is obviously an enormous semiotic gap between that symbol, etched instone, and its object, long gone, that symbol nevertheless acquires a powerful ontological status. A traced symbol of a symbol on a symbol becomes reality. When I recently witnessed this scene, I couldn't help asking myself, “just what kind of legacy is this?”

In 1960, on the edge of a new decade, Norman Mailer thought he might have seen a superman coming to the supermarket. The supermarket was the U.S. presidential election; the possible superman, disguised as an orthodox candidate of a mainstream political party, was John F. Kennedy. Despite the conventionality of his politics, Kennedy had “the eyes of a mountaineer” and the “cool grace” of a hipster. Ever since a Japanese destroyer rammed his PT boat and left him swimming for life on the vast Pacific, Kennedy had “the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.”