Delanceyplace.com 04/05/07-Optimism in 1963

In today's encore excerpt--optimism in 1963:

"During the first exuberant spring since the brush with Armageddon in Cuba, established organs of mass culture promoted almost anything that was optimistic. Life magazine celebrated the government's plans for using hydrogen bombs to blast out new harbors and a copy of the Panama Canal, and predicted that LSD, peyote, and other hallucinogens soon would be harnessed to make people 'more productive and generally effective.' There was infectious awe over miracles--both profound ones such as the discovery of the DNA molecule, the 'key to life itself,' and prosaic ones such as the invention of the pop-top beer can."

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, Simon & Schuster, 1988, p. 711