How did America come to the “end of innocence”?

While downtown still smolders, and the country gears up for a likely war against the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks, we must keep in mind that state-sanctioned terrorism, too, should be rooted out.

The End of Innocence American Style. 1968 was the capstone of a decade of extremes. While often characterized as a time of free love, expanding sexual options, and belief in the possibility of peace and freedom, these books pull us up hard with reminders that 1968 was also marked by assassinations, riots, fears of imminent nuclear war, the generation gap, global unrest, and how America

Explanation:

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serve the people! ,” smoothly translated by julia lovell, offers an initial sample of yan lianke’s writing to an english-speaking audience. a bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases mao zedong by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the chairman’s precepts too literally. to a western sensibility, the broad strokes of yan lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. but then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a western sensibility. it lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century china, more than three decades after the death of mao, a decade after the death of deng xiaoping and seven years since china entered the world trade organization, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.