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Nothing Happened An American Situationist Memoir by Isaac Cronin. While the book chronicles Cronin’s life it concentrates on the period of the 1960’s and 1970’s when he lived primarily in Berkeley and France. The book examines the social realities of the sixties but from a personal point of view. Cronin was there for the demonstrations, the sit-ins, the love-ins and fortunately he not only lived through the sixties but he remembers them. The book is also a portrait of the more radical factions within the left that would fracture and dissipate in the coming decades as the political landscape shifted. Cronin’s memoir is an important contribution to the history of the 1960’s and helps put that period in a new perspective.
As Cronin describes the period: The words we used to describe the social system–the totality, the old world, the spectacle, hierarchical power, the rulers and the ruled, masters and slaves, work and commodity consumption-left no opening for issues, fragments, special interest groups or minorities to divert our attention from our goal of a complete transformation of the world. We believed that our passionate desires could not be reduced to a ten point program but required a new poetic language that would be incomprehensible to our rulers.
Our religion was the unity of thought and action. We practiced free love, stole almost everything we ate and wore, shared all of our possessions like cars and clothes and lived communally. We never advocated any act if it could not be practiced by everyone. Most of all we believed that surprise was the key to succumbing to the constraints of what we called… the old world.
That old world would come back with a fury but Cronin was there everything seemed to hang in the balance. This book tells that story.
