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It is a hazardous enterprise to attempt to capture the spirit of the times, the cultural pattern, in a single overarching formula. To simplify is always to exclude. In following a single theme, I do not deny the salience of others; in fact, the test of any theory is its ability to explain what is originally not taken into consideration. My thesis is that the present crisis of American culture is characterized by the return and the vengeance of the father, the second act of a drama whose first act was characterized by the rebellion and temporary triumph of the son over the father. The Oedipal conflict, I am well aware, has been invoked to explain everything from psychohistory to culture history. Abuses should not, however, be confused with uses. That a tool of insight becomes adopted for magical purposes is not new. All I ask is that the reader suspend radical disbelief, as I have had to suspend it in order for the pattern to become clear.
Although the two acts of this first drama overlap considerably, I propose that the curtain opened on the first act with the experience of World War II, began its slow descent with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and closed with the assassination of Robert Kennedy, bringing to an end the first act. Using the language of the times, I shall call the first act “hope,” the second act “despair”; the first act “idealism,” the second act “disillusionment”; the first act “intention,” the second act “rage.” I should clarify that by “drama” I do not mean a metaphor that is the author's organizing principle neatly superimposed on events and then conveniently abstracted from them. The present analysis finds, rather, that the literary metaphor of the two-act drama is an accurate description of events and the process that underlies them. Although the analysis is not limited to the iceberg