ABSTRACT
For anyone who lived through the 1960s on a campus, there has to be a shock of recognition on seeing the anti-war demonstration in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Oliver Stone’s fi lm based on the life of Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic. A feeling that you were once present at this very scene, saw these very students on the steps of a university hall, with their long hair, Afros, beards, levis, bandannas; witnessed these very gestures, the raised arms and clenched fi sts; heard this very speechifying by Blacks and Whites, the denunciations of war, the shouted words Nixon , On strike , Shut it down , Right on. Even that middle-aged fi gure on the steps, wearing a dashiki and calling for a March on Washington, looks strangely familiar – but at the same time somehow too old and out of place. Before the tear-gas bombs explode and the cops descend with swinging clubs we (who were around in the 1960s) may realize: that is Abbie Hoffman, King of the Yippies, saying precisely the kind of things he had said at such demonstrations twenty-some years before the fi lm was made.
