Postmodern cover = "what's particularly loathesome is that he found a potentially fascinating moment absolutely oozing ambiguities but glossed over it in order to get to the 'meat' of the story" (t). Todd Gitlin is just a leftcon, the undead of cold-war liberalism. The postmodern cover helps because without it what's being sold may look (to some) too old to be sold.
As Steve said:
>Gitlin wrote a very interesting book on media distortion of protests
>during the Vietnam War era....Since then, it's all been downhill...This
>latest piece is a farce. He is wrong, what typifies the American left is
>not kneejerk anti-interventionism...More often it's been fear of
>anti-communism and an obsessive desire to demonstrate that, hey, i'm left,
>but I aint that kind of leftist...
Postmodern obsession with "a potentially fascinating moment absolutely oozing ambiguities" is a rhetorical defense mechanism so as to prove, "hey, i'm left, but I aint that kind of leftist...". This rhetoric merely provides air cover for Gitlin's troops, even though t, Angela, and others like them don't know its effect.
off to check out Benjamin DeMott's Little Red Discount House (thanks to Carrol),
Yoshie