Spring 1968 compressed utopian possibility into a half-week window

Evidence

Surreal, if not Dada: Sunday evening, March 31, President Johnson materialized on TV to announce that he would not seek reelection. … The next half-week was golden. The stock market soared. The New York Times ran a page-one picture of Robert and Ethel Kennedy mobbed by ecstatic supporters brandishing signs that read BOBBY IS GROOVY. Time put Czechoslovakia’s reform Communist leader Alexander Dubček on the cover. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey opened at Loew’s Capital and the producers of Hair announced their move into a Broadway theater only blocks away. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1214

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The compression — Johnson quitting, the market soaring, Dubček, 2001 opening, Hair moving to Broadway all jammed into days — is a paradigm case of how a historical moment’s density conditions cultural production; the reader needs this to test the cultural-stagnation claim.