Name one thing you know about Bullitt

Mention Bullitt to anyone who knows even just a little about movies, and I bet within 10 seconds the words “car chase” will be uttered.  And indeed, the car chase in this quintessentially 1968 film–vaulting through the (unusually quiet) streets of San Francisco and out into the northern California hills–is in some ways the granddaddy of them all.  Actually, the chase– police detective Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) in a now-iconic green “fastback” Mustang pursuing a couple of shotgun-shooting bad guys in a Dodge Charger– was inspired by a chase in Robbery, the previous film directed by Bullitt’s director, Peter Yates.  (This fact comes from Robert Osborne, host of Turner Classic Movies in his intro to Bullitt a few nights ago.)

The Bullitt car chase is, however, anything but derivative or tame.  Anyone who saw this movie when it first came out remembers being blown away by the stomach-churning drops and turns of the chase, which starts about an hour in and goes on for nearly 10 minutes.  There is not a word of dialogue, and the jazz score is only there at the beginning–otherwise, it’s all screeching tires and revving motors.   Amazingly, even on television the chase still works on a gut-punch level.

More than just a car chase.

But Bullitt is a lot more than just a car chase, classic though it is.  Saturday Review in its year-end 1968 issue, put Steve McQueen at dead center of its cover-story photo montage of “The NOW Movie” (see earlier post in Covering 1968).  It’s not exactly an “art film”–it’s still essentially a police procedural–but something about its affect and daring makes it feel different, edgy, smart. (Yates is British, after all, part of England’s astoundingly inventive 1960s film scene).  Take the credit sequence–so dark it’s nearly black-and-white, with some groovy graphics matched by some cool jazz–lots of horns and brushed cymbals–by Lalo Schifrin. Shattering glass, gunplay and screaming car action start right away.   The camera does a lot of tracking, and not just of moving vehicles; everything seems to be in motion, jittery.  There’s an extended, Hitchcockian chase — on foot– across an airport runway filled with taxiing jets. An emergency room surgeon is African American. Frank Bullitt has that cool disregard for the rules that came to be a standard trope of movie cops. As he says to the unctuous, corrupt politican played by Robert Vaughan, in what became the movie’s most-quoted lines:  ”You believe what you want. You work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine.”   The movie ends abruptly, wordlessly, ambiguously.

The look of 1968

Of course, one of the pleasures of movies set in the here-and-now of 1968 is being able reimagine that world:  If a gangster needs to make a call, he asks the cabbie to pull over at a pay phone.  Everyone in the boarding line at a very crowded airport is dressed up–men in suits and ties, women in dresses, hats, and stockings. “High-tech” police equipment–shown in close detail–is a copy-transmitting machine that’s hooked up to a phone receiver.  There’s still an Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco–it was torn down in 1991–and there are still airlines named PanAm and TWA.  Bullitt heats up his instant coffee with a little immersion heating coil.   ER nurses wear crisp little hats.  (Oddly, however, there’s little or no drinking or cigarette smoking–it’s not Mad Men.)

Violence as a way of life

But it’s not just the amusing period details that tell us this is 1968:  There is a lot of violence in Bullitt–not street violence, or racial violence–but it’s still intensely public.  There’s always a crowd witnessing the violence or the victims, and the director pans across the craning necks, the milling around, the murmuring.   And late in the movie, after Bullitt’s girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset) sees Bullittt dealing with a gruesome murder scene, she confronts him with some harsh words, and suddenly Bullitt starts to seem like less like the maverick anti-hero and something closer to the Everyman of 1968:  ”With you, living with violence is a way of life, living with violence and death.  How can you be part of it, without becoming more and more callous?  What will happen to us in time?”  Bullitt’s answer:  ”Time starts now.”

The guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and US colleges

Just about 42 years ago, this issue of LOOK magazine was hitting American mailboxes and newstands.  On the cover was one of the more unusual stories of our transformative year:  the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the impact of his “transcendental meditation” on the American college scene.

Beatles, Mia, and a Beach Boy in India

Actually, the Maharishi (only “Mahesh” is part of his given name; maharishi and yogi are honorifics) had been making international news since the 1950s, teaching his meditation techniques and spiritual beliefs on an incredible series of round-the-world tours, including the United States (his first tour here was in 1959) and cities on nearly every continent.  But it was only when the Beatles (along with Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence; singer/songwriter Donovan; and Beach Boy Mike Love) made a pilgrimage to India in early 1968 to study with the Maharishi that his fame exploded.  The Beatles, of course, were “more popular than Jesus,” in John Lennon’s famous line from 1966; and Mia Farrow had been an American tabloid fixture since her marriage to Frank Sinatra in 1966. (Her breakout movie, Rosemary’s Baby, wasn’t released until months after she returned from India.)  Suddenly, in early 1968, the beatific image and inscrutable pronouncements of the Maharishi seemed to be everywhere.

“The Non-Drug Turn-On Hits Campus”

Not surprisingly, the guru and his teachings had their greatest impact–in the United States, at least–on young people.  ”TM” followers were mostly white, college-educated baby boomers, rejecting the conventions (like traditional Western religions) of their parents’ generation and seeking distinct new identities and “heightened consciousness.”  The author of the article here in LOOK goes to a lecture by Jerry Jarvis, head of the Student International Meditation Society, the principal vehicle by which American college students connected with transcendental meditation.  (The preppy kids on the magazine cover are at Yale, but the event described here is at Berkeley.)

Something super-groovy

“The students had heard of the Maharishi . . . There wasn’t one who didn’t realize that he was the same jet-age guru who had guided the Beatles off the psychedelic drug scene by way of a new, nonchemical turn-on.  The motives of the Berkeley crowd were typical: some came to hear about what had gotten the Beatles so excited; some had a vague interest in all things Eastern and alien; many were acid heads or pot devotees in search of ‘mind-expanding’ ecstasy without the ill-effects of psychedelics (the chief of which being jail).  But more than anything else, the majority of the crowd knew individual meditators who were noticeably Better People as a result, and who must therefore be on to something super-groovy.”

The article concludes by quoting a “Los Angeles meditator”:  ”The student’s life is so tense today.  You go to school and get involved in the peace movement and the Sexual Freedom League and everything, and, gee, by that time you’re too uptight to have to think about studying too!  We’re really fortunate in this generation to have the Maharishi.”

Cavalier:  A “hipper” Playboy?

Cavalier magazine began publication in 1952–a year before the first issue of Playboy, to which it is usually compared. By the 1960s, it was striving to be a hipper Playboy, something for the college guys, or the “lads” as they might be called today.  Like Playboy, Cavalier is still being published, though to judge by its website, it’s a lot raunchier today, more like plain old porn. But in the 1960s, there are serious articles, some of them by famous writers (in this issue, Leonard Feather writes about jazz); smutty cartoons, many of them with topical references to hippies and LSD; fashion spreads with pouty (male) models; advice columns (here the lads learn about making a proper cocktail); fiction; and profiles of up-and-coming “cavaliers” (in this issue, it’s artist Jamie Wyeth, at the time 21 years old).   And, oh, almost forgot:   there are photo spreads of bare-breasted women.  Everything–the articles, the fiction, the cartoon, the naked women– was down a notch or two from Playboy in terms of finish and quality.  (Did Playboy ever carry ads for life-size, inflatable “Instant Party Dolls”? I don’t know.)

What if JFK had lived?

Two interesting things about this particular issue:  a feature “If JFK Had Lived,” with illustrations and retouched photographs and a text speculating on JFK’s future after he survives the 1963 assassination “attempt” in Dallas. He is re-elected in 1964, and in January 1969 turns over the White House to his successor, Robert McNamara.  (Not a chance.) The magazine’s summer 1968 deadlines seem to have missed the big Kennedy news, since in the “news stories,” Bobby Kennedy is still living when JFK dies in June 2000.   (RFK had become Secretary of State under McNamara.)  Along with his brother, President Ted Kennedy, JFK celebrates the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1980 (the prediction misses by 9 years), and JFK remarries in 1989, four years after the death of his first wife Jackie in a plane crash.

The Adventures of Fritz the Cat

The second feature of note is a three-page spread, the black-and-white comic strip, “The Adventures of Fritz,” by Robert Crumb.  ”Fritz the Cat” was one of the first “head” comic strips, written by and for people who were stoned.  (Crumb had, in fact, been experimenting with LSD just before publishing this series in Cavalier in 1968. )  Fritz is described in the strip as a “sophisticated, up-to-the-minute young feline college student” — just like the typical Cavalier reader, in other words.

Biafra: A disaster from the 1960s

The images from the catastrophe in Haiti this past week reminded me of another time that Americans were gripped by a similar disaster and its shocking images: the civil war in the tiny breakaway state of Biafra that was coming to a bloody peak in 1968.

“Look at us as human beings”

Ask people today where “Biafra” is and I suspect there would be few looks of recognition.  The civil war began there in 1967, when mostly Ibo tribesmen of southeastern Nigeria attempted to secede and create a new country: Biafra.  But, as LIFE’s editors said in 1968, it was a civil war that “has raged with a savagery barely noticed by the rest of the world.”  The vastly better equipped Nigerian forces–with arms supplied by Great Britain, Russia, and Arab countries–bombed Biafran towns and created blockades that led to mass starvation. The Biafran leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, said to a reporter: “All I really ask is that the outside world look at us as human beings and not as Negroes bashing heads.”

Images of starvation

It was not the first time that the West had seen images of war and revolution coming from Africa, struggling to overcome centuries of colonial rule.  But in the 1960s, the word “Biafra” began to take on especially totemic meaning. In the American media at least, the word became synonymous with images of starvation, particular of starving children, with bellies incongruously bloating below stick-like ribcages, and always the huge, pleading eyes (like the “big-eyed” Keane paintings so popular in the 1960s).  People in the West even learned a new African word: kwashiorkor, a word describing protein malnutrition.

A world getting smaller

It’s striking to compare this LIFE cover from July 1968 is to one published just a few months earlier, a photograph by Gordon Parks to illustrate LIFE’s story about race and urban America, “The Negro and the Cities: The Cry That Will Be Heard.”  The inescapable similarities provide more evidence that visual culture in 1968 increasingly reflected the sense that the world’s concerns and peoples were coming closer together.

Couples: John Updike in 1968

A recent article in the New York Times Book Review about American male novelists and their fictional portrayals (or avoidance of portrayals) of sex had me returning to John Updike’s Couples.  (The NYTBR essay is by Katie Roiphe, and you can read it here: http://bit.ly/92OgMV)

A 1968 shocker

Born in 1932, John Updike died in January 2009.  By 1968, he had already gained a reputation as l’enfant terrible of American letters, on the strength of his first four novels, which included Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963).  But Couples was — like a lot of other things that happened in 1968– a real shocker.  It is filled with exceedingly graphic sex scenes, but since it’s Updike, the scenes are richly drawn, complicated, on a sentence level dazzling and satisfying, though ultimately kind of wearying, too.

What becomes of the “greatest generation”?

The novel is set in the village of Tarbox, outside Boston, during the years of the tragically brief Kennedy administration. There is so much detail about politics and current events at the endless cocktail parties you can almost date the chapters precisely:  the USS Thresher disaster; the death of the newborn Kennedy baby; and a lengthy, boozy, and irreverent party on the night of the JFK assassination.  The plot, such as it is, revolves around a set of 6 or 8 (I lost track) married couples– most of them in their 30s,  making them the tail end of the “greatest generation.”  Some of the men are World War II veterans; most of them are college-educated (including the women); and some of the men commute into Boston or Cambridge for work.  There are children, of course, but the adults don’t seem all that interested in them.

“A black mass of community sex.”

The milieu of Tarbox (widely assumed to be Updike’s Ipswich MA by another name) is not quite suburban, not exactly Revolutionary Road or The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit territory, but close, very close.    Television’s Mad Men comes to mind, though Updike has almost no interest in the work life of men and much more interest in fornication.  The title could well be “Coupling,” given the novel’s virtually un-mappable network of marital infidelities, all of them within the tight confines of “the group” of couples.  The affairs are supposedly clandestine, but it’s clear that “everyone” knows about everybody else’s business in this fishbowl.  As TIME magazine’s editors put it:   “The fact is that beneath this suburban idyl, Updike’s couples are caught up in a black mass of community sex.”

Couples– and the sensation it caused–landed Updike on the cover of TIME on April 26, 1968.  (Updike’s second TIME cover came in October 1982, after his third “Rabbit” novel, Rabbit is Rich, received the Pulitzer Prize.) The extent, the casualness, and the voraciousness of the dalliances truly astonished American readers–and, in fact, I was also more than a little incredulous.  ”This is my parents’ generation,” I thought to myself:  ”Was this really going on?”  (Probably not, I assumed: the class/religious differences probably meant that my parents’ circle of couples–Catholic, working-class, “traditional”–was more chaste.  But . . . doubts linger.)

Tarbox and the material world

There is such a wealth of period detail in Couples!  It’s as if Updike had set himself the task of delineating a precise place and time– the minutiae of household decor, of dress and hairstyles, of music (the couples play records and dance in their living rooms at parties).  The couples engage in tedious, often inebriated chit-chat about “the world” outside their world, which could mean the next suburb over, or another hemisphere away.  There is talk of the space race, the Cold War, and the barely audible sounds of conflict coming from Vietnam.  And then there is “the Pill,” which–they all acknowledge–has given “everyone” so much freedom to play around.

The novel’s timeline edges just into 1964, and thus misses the upheavals and notorious events of 1968.  Still, Couples still provides a remarkable “picture window” into the affluence, cynicism, and complacencies of the entire postwar era.

When 1968 became “1968″

Forty-one years ago today, LIFE magazine brought out this issue entirely devoted to a breathless review of the year that had just ended:  1968.  The scale of attention here was unprecedented for the venerable LIFE magazine, and I don’t believe it was repeated during the rest of the magazine’s tenure.  Surely, year-end journalistic wrap-ups were (and are) commonplace, but this was something more: an entirely retrospective issue of a magazine that ordinarily prided itself on its up-to-the-minute journalism (especially photojournalism).  Such was the stunning power of the “Incredible Year”  and the extraordinary self-consciousness of the moment.  At virtually the first possible moment, 1968 became “1968″–something larger, more symbolic, more worthy of engraving in virtual monuments.

Battered by a series of awful waves

LIFE begins its coverage with a fast-paced timeline, with a few words and thumbnail photos for each month.  ”What ELSE could have happened in one spin around the sun?  It was a year when everybody had to be heard–students, blacks, hippies, yippies, rightists, leftists, dissidents–and then heeded, instantly.  It was a year of confrontation, a year the Establishment became the Enemy, the alienated became the activist and nobody could hear the sensible voice of the quiet man.  It was a year that pulled down the moon almost close enough to touch and put new hearts in people who would have died without them. It was a year nudity lost its novelty and sex came on strong.  Most of all, it was a year we had to learn to expect the astounding, to accept the unthinkable.  Assassination, starvation, invasion–the events, like a series of waves, battered us with awful rapidity.  In short, it was an incredible  year.”

Discovery, Shock, War–and Sex

The rest of the magazine is classic LIFE: huge spreads of great photographs, under categories like  ”Discovery,” with photos of the Apollo VIII mission; “Shock,” focusing on the King and Kennedy assassinations; “Dissent,” on the student uprisings in Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, New York; “War,” with subheadings of “Starvation” (more Biafran children) and “Vietnam,” a gruesome pile of wounded American soldiers; “Comeback” (Nixon, of course).  ”Social Notes” included spreads on the Jackie-O wedding in October, and the Julie & David nuptials.  There is a photo-spread articles on people surviving with heart transplants, and another on the “Black is Beautiful” movement, with a jaw-dropping, full-page, color photo of a bare-chested Jim Brown–football hero turned movie star–being fondled by Raquel Welch.

Saving LIFE in the basement

A classic issue of LIFE, in short.  And the editors knew it.  The first page of the issue (after an Oldsmobile ad, of course) makes the bold-faced claim that “1 out of 4 Americans will read this issue of LIFE . . . 48 million people will be reading it with you. . . . Which makes Life the single most powerful communications medium that ever existed.”  These are the kinds of “souvenir” magazines that people would save in their basements for years.  The particular issue in my hands now, with a scan of the cover appearing above, was saved by LIFE subscriber Michael Spock of Lincoln, Massachusetts–son of one of the people whose photo appears on page 4:  Dr. Benjamin Spock, convicted in June of conspiracy for counseling draft-evaders.

“Are We Heading to the Day Everything Stops?” The query (the headline omitting, oddly, the question mark) comes from the editors of the venerable but by this time shaky Saturday Evening Post near the end of 1968.  The apocalyptic overtones of the headline notwithstanding, you have to admit that the cover illustration is kind of fabulous, almost festive.  Maybe they thought about this hitting the mailboxes right before Christmas, and wanted the Post’s readers to have a little fun?

Cities of Tomorrow

The cover is by illustrator Gene Holtan, and he clearly turned to classic futuristic cartoons and illustrations of the turn of the last century, ca. 1890-1910, for inspiration.  (If you want to see more of these and other visions of “yesterday’s tomorrows,” set your dial to www.paleofuture.com).  Inspired–”horrified” might be a better word–by the nightmarishly exploding growth of cities both upward and outward, illustrators conjured cities of the future jammed with impossibly tall skyscrapers, criss-crossed and pierced by fantastic transit systems, their towers strafed by phalanxes of flying machines, their streets and stacked-up highways choked with a gridlock of wheeled conveyances, their people– well, “people,” per se, can hardly be glimpsed.

Gridlock and “Near Collapse”

The editors of the Saturday Evening Post suggest here that 1968 was similarly full of warning bells–and this time the “future shock” had to do with massive infrastructural gridlock.  ”We are going very fast just to stay where we are,” the editors write.  The nation has a choice of where it will be in 25 years (that is, 1993):  ”Either an efficiently computerized and integrated transportation system . . . or an air-land-and-sea traffic jam so enormous that it will bring our entire society to a virtual standstill.”  There is an article on the nation’s urban freeways and the choking rush-hour traffic; interestingly, two of the aerial views are of jammed freeways that were, in fact, subsequently torn down or buried (San Francisco’s Embarcadero elevated freeway and Boston’s “Big Dig”).  A scary article follows about the air-traffic control system (”approaching near collapse,” with “200 near-collisions a month”).

The solution?  ”Automated highways.  500-mile-an-hour trains. Underground ‘bullets’ linking our cities. . . . But we’ve barely begun.”

MAN OF THE YEAR

TIME magazine’s “Man of the Year” issue, begun in 1927 with its cover story on aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, has long since become an American institution, and is still the best-known feature of the magazine, now struggling for survival, like all general interest news magazines.  The annual announcement of the TIME editors’ choice was always a front-page news event in itself, though I wonder how many people were paying attention last week when this year’s choice–the Fed’s Ben Bernanke– was announced.

MEN AND WOMEN AND PEOPLE (and non-people) OF THE YEAR

Browsing the whole 82-year list is, however, an instructive way to pass the time.  (You can do it, of course, online at http://bit.ly/6PSngy).  The chosen one is supposed to be the “person who has affected our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”  (About that “good or ill” phrase:  Bad guys are rarely chosen–Hitler in 1938; Iran’s Ayatollah in 1980; and that’s about it.)  The list is a good source for trivia buffs:  the first “Woman of the Year”? Wallis Warfield Simpson, 1936; the first “Man and Wife [that's what it says] of the Year”?  Mr. and Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek,  1937; the first “collective” Man of the Year?  The American Fighting Man, 1950.  (There were other collective choices in the 1960s: “Young People,” 1966; and “Middle Americans,” 1969).  The first (and so far only) non-human?  ”The Machine of the Year,” about personal computers in 1982.   When did the feature change to “Person of the Year”?  1999, with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com.

1968′S CHOICE:  A TOUGH DECISION

It cannot have been an easy task for the TIME editors to choose the magazine’s 1968 Man of the Year, and clearly the decision was made at the last minute–since the Apollo VIII astronauts were still in outer space during the last week of the year.  My guess is that there were many other candidates who ended up on the cutting room floor:  Martin Luther King?  (He had been the choice in 1963).  Robert Kennedy?  Richard Nixon?  (He would be named twice in the coming years). George Wallace?  The Protesters at the Democratic National Convention?  The Czech Resistance, or Alexander Dubcek?  (the “Hungarian Freedom Fighter” had been named in 1956).

Not surprisingly, given the multiple “candidates,” all of them with some potential controversial baggage, the editors made a “feel-good,” forward-looking choice with the Apollo VIII crew.  Of course, the editors were also paying homage to the American space program, heretofore absent from the “Man of the Year” rolls.  (The 1968 choice also trumped, in advance, the men who actually landed on the Moon in 1969, as well as the crew of the Challenger who died in 1986.)  As they entered their orbit of the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968, the crew, William Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman, read a passage from the book of Genesis (”In the beginning . . . “) in what became the most watched television broadcast of its time.

A NEW AGE

With its characteristically florid prose, TIME honored this 1968 crew:  ”In the closing days of 1968, all mankind could exult in the vision of a new universe. For all its upheavals and frustrations, the year would be remembered to the end of time for the dazzling skills and Promethean daring that sent mortals around the moon. It would be celebrated as the year in which men saw at first hand their little earth entire, a remote, blue-brown sphere hovering like a migrant bird in the hostile night of space.

“The year’s transcendent legacy may well be that in Christmas week 1968, the human race glimpsed not a new continent or a new colony, but a new age, one that will inevitably reshape man’s view of himself and his destiny.”

Generation gap– a Sixties “meme”

Certain phrases migrate from being just a combination of words to something with a little more immortality.  Mundanely, we might call them “catchphrases.” Today we would probably call these virally spreading cultural nuggets ”memes.”  That word probably had little currency in the 1960s, but one of 1968’s most pervasive memes was “generation gap.”  It was the upheavals of the 1960s that gave rise to this term, if not the actual phenomenon, which had been around for centuries.  Sociologist Kenneth Keniston, in his influential 1968 study Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth, found his informants to be “hostile . . . to patterns of power and authority.” No lesser lights than Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, and Margaret Mead all produced social-psychological studies focusing on generational divides and challenges in this era.

Understanding the gap

Margaret Mead, in the book Culture and Commitment (subtitled “A Study in the Generation Gap”), based on a series of lectures in 1969, turned her anthropologist’s eye to the problem:  ”Today, nowhere in the world are there elders who know what children know, not matter how remote and simple the societies in which the children live. In the past there were always some elders who knew more than any children in terms of their experience of having grown up with a cultural system.  Today there are none.”  Classically, of course, young people define themselves in relation to—if not always in opposition to—the values of their parents’ generation. But the Sixties sharpened this process, compelling one to find a place on one side or the other of a yawning “generation gap.”

To be young again

A national obsession with youth and youthfulness and youthful rebellion was evident throughout the decade.  LIFE magazine, with this May 17 issue, was actually a little behind the curve in finding currency in this concept.  TIME, after all, had declared “Men and Women Under 25″ to be their “Persons of the Year” way back in January 1966.  LIFE’s hook was to document an actual gap, to publish the conflicting views of two men–Richard Lorber (age 20) and his uncle, Ernest Fladell (age 42), both New Yorkers, who decided to write a book together about their experiences when young Lorber moved in with his uncle in 1967.   That’s Lorber’s head on the cover, with his uncle pictured in his right eyeglass lens.  (Of course, it’s not surprising that LIFE’s choice for these stand-ins for “the gap” are both white males.)

Communicating across the gap–or not

The pair have some archetypal adventures together:  Richard turns Ernie on to pot; Ernie enjoys it, but Richard turns resentful when afterwards Ernie professes great insight into the drug’s appeal:  ”It is as if he had crashed a very private party I was having with myself.”   Richie and Ernie hook up with Richie’s friends in Greenwich Village (Ernie wants to meet a “few bona fide hippies”), and it gets a little weird with some girls they hang out with. (Ernie proclaims that “the so-called sexual revolution isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”) They visit a few head shops in the East Village (e.g., the “Psychedelicatessan”).  They disagree–strongly–about the “Negro riots” which Richie sees as “the most hopeful sign I have seen in the past year;” he understands “exactly” how blacks have been “driven to violence.”  Ernie is appalled:  ”I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about.”  Richie and Ernie (a veteran of World War II) disagree on military service.  After Ernie’s draft board reclassifies him, he gets worried, and tells Ernie that he was “facing one of the most agonizing decisions of his life.”  Ernie says: “I went to war weak with fear but strong in pride. Richard has only fear.”

With that provocative question mark in the title and the enticing subtitle, “Memories of the Future–Unsolved Mysteries of the Past,” Erich Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? became a huge success in the English-speaking world, following its translation from the German of its original 1968 publication.  ”Was God an Astronaut?” the American version’s dust-jacket asks:  ”All over the world there are ruins and improbable objects which cannot be explained by conventional theories of archeology or religion.  But supposing you look at them in the light of today’s knowledge about space travel.  A remarkable consistency emerges.  They suggest the appearance of beings from other planets in prehistoric times and pose the question–Was God an Astronaut?”

Von Däniken, identified only as a “famous Swiss author,” was just 33 when the book was published.  ”It took courage to write this book,” he tells us in the book’s first line, “and it will take courage to read it.”  ”Scholars will call it nonsense,” he correctly predicts about a book that claims to reveal that the “past teemed with unknown gods who visited the primeval earth in manned spaceships” and that these “’strangers’ annihilated part of mankind existing at the time and produced a new, perhaps the first, homo sapiens.”   Von Däniken sees evidence of visitations from prehistoric astronauts in cave paintings showing “the extraordinary obsession primitive man had with figures on suits and unusual headgear,” and in Incan and Aztec ruins and landscape formations.

Von Däniken’s theories became even more widely known in the 1970s with the TV “documentary,” In Search of Ancient Astronauts. Later eruptions of Von Dänikenism came with the TV series Battlestar Galactica and Stargate.  In fact, the Chariots of the Gods phenomenon, although clearly a product of 1960s gullibility, apocalypticism, and fascination with all things “scientific” and astronautical, has never really gone away, and may in fact be even stronger today.  One has only to turn to that bellwether of nutty popular credulity, the History Channel, for proof.  The cable channel (which owns the domain name “history.com”), once dubbed the “Hitler Channel” for its devotion to WWII documentaries, has lately turned increasingly to content based on conspiracy theories, mythology, pseudo-science, extraterrestrials, and mythical monsters like Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster.   In March 2009, it first aired a program called Ancient Aliens (it’s being shown again tomorrow night, November 29).  Its promotional materials claim that “millions of people accept the theory that intelligent life forms visited Earth thousands of years ago and were worshiped as gods by primitive man. Are monuments like Stonehenge and Easter Island the last remains of an ancient alien visitation?”

As the final frames of the famous 1958 movie The Blob once asked:  “The End?”