"...your movie rocks, bro" Whatever.

I'm agitated with this whole concept. I get where he's coming from, I guess. It is not History Channel, but it doesn't sound like he gets it. It was not a street riot at a convention followed by an unruly trial. It was the context of the time, the frustration and helplessness of the situation. It was a culture clash and it was young people being stupidly revolutionary too.

I don't think I'll see it in a theatre. The soundtrack alone would turn me off.

I was twenty years old,in Boston in front of a tv set amazed and heartbroken to watch what was going on in the park and in the convention.

I knew two of the Chicago "10" personally. My best friends were clubbed in the park. Mr. Morgan certainly doesn't need any opinions from someone like me who lived through it.

He can form his own myth about the events. To take it away from its cultural context is a crime or art or whatever "bro".

Some people think they own that shit. Tell them to make their own fucking movie!

What strikes me the most is how the film maker misunderstands how culture operates in clarifying his artistic stance regarding what his film is (or isn't) about.

His limited thinking is evidenced by his defensive analogy using his earlier work about Robert Evans:

"No one complained about that..." Morgen complains as if lack of criticism of the earlier work gives him a pass on very different subject matter. If he had intellectual depth, his next question would be "Why is that?"

The post-modern notion that there is no objectivity has been misconstrued in my opinion. Especially for people raised with that philosophy embedded in their education it means that everything is open to interpretation or re-imagining. It does not.

We've come to realize our reality is built incrementally and that has freed us from monoscopic POVs and attempt to allow a place at the table for as many information inputs as practical. This allows history the greatest chance to assemble itself around truths and facts.

We live in an open society so I would not dictate what a film maker can and cannot do. But Morgen, by simple virtue of being an artist, does not earn a place at the table where the cultural interpretations of these historical events are allowed and admitted, certainly not while the topic-at-hand still lives in memory.

After the living witnesses of an era or event pass it becomes a more wide-open game and an interpretation of evidence and artifacts are all that's left. That the era under discussion is highly documented isn't contested but withholding or omitting extremely germane information and explaining that away as artistic license is shallow and ignorant of the reality of the accretion of culture.

It's then easy to argue that a disservice is done. Our legacy is skewed and received so. It contributes to the cultural self-rationalizations. It abets inaccurate cultural memories and justifications. We are, as George W.S. Trow put it, "In the context of no-context".

It is the artist's duty, their obligation, to try harder.

I do take issue with ex-lefties (specifically, Todd Gitlin) who seem to proceed through a whole range of regretful arguments about the '60s

Right. No argument from me. Even as I child I loved and understood history. I could never stomach the inability to live other than in the moment, with the concommitant ignorance that characterizes most group political activity. With no roots, no grounding, no allies summoned from the people and ideas of the past, these folks typically lack the depth to think independently and clearly and they wash about on the fashionable tides of the day, some landing on the soft sands of self-indulgence, others on the grim reefs of self-destruction.

I get the potential analogy, sure. And sure, Humphrey was a better choice than Nixon, and Gore a better choice than Bush. No argument there. All I was really saying, albeit with some snark, was what I said: The consequences of electing Humphrey (or Gore) are unknowable, and it's kind of a Star Trek alternate-universe question.

My argument isn't with the many people like you who made a series of ethical choices, whether right or wrong, effective or not, in hopes of forcing an immoral government to change its course. I do take issue with ex-lefties (specifically, Todd Gitlin) who seem to proceed through a whole range of regretful arguments about the '60s -- 1) we were self-important middle-class rebels; 2) we inadvertently alienated much of the population, leading to the election of Nixon and the rise of a new wave of conservatism; 3) ergo, confrontational street protest is inherently self-defeating and nobody should ever do it -- to justify their stodgy later-life politics. Each of those premises is worth debating on its own terms, but Gitlin has grouped them together into this implacable Whack-a-Mole cudgel he uses to club anyone who still thinks that radical activism is sometimes necessary and even productive.

A little off-topic re Morgen's film, but not really. On a personal note, I was a little kid in 1968, but it's one of my first political memories. I went separately to the voting booth with each of my parents: My mom voted for Humphrey, even though she was a lefty and former Communist. My dad wrote in McCarthy, even though he was an Irish immigrant who grew up under the NYC Democratic Party machine. So go figure. What a year! Everybody did what they felt they had to do.

Instead of taking to the Chicago streets and getting beaten mercilessly by Mayor Daley's deranged cops, I guess those kids should have stayed home like good little robots and rung doorbells for Hubert H. Humphrey, the odious backroom-compromise candidate served up at that convention

Uh, no....I was in the streets of Chicago and as furious as anyone. But I went home, held my nose, and voted for Humphrey, stayed up all night and went to bed with trepidation when the election went to Nixon at 11:30 AM the next morning.

The analogy to "Bush and Gore are just the same" is exact.