Novelist and social critic Curtis White wants to rescue the term counterculture from its moribund connotations of rusty microbuses, faded tie-dyed T-shirts and shopworn FM tunes backing geriatric pharmaceutical commercials. His ambition is admirable: to revive a movement — restore the freeform electric guitar solos, as it were — to challenge the ruthless new Gilded Age and meet our manifold political crises. But the result is perilously close to yet another saraband to the ’60s that says only “Ya had to be there” and ends with “There’s no way out.”

The book offers a thoughtful, if dire, assessment of our current predicament (you can just imagine), and argues for an urgent response. But for all its potentially incendiary subject matter, “Living in a World That Can’t Be Fixed: Reimagining the Counterculture Today” recalls a mild, light evening’s read at Borders Books — the vanished chain, yes; but even more the Ann Arbor campus prototype upon which the chain was modeled.

Sipping a cup of espresso while turning its pages will take you right back to the worldview that (those) lost space(s) once offered, when required college reading, obscure university press titles, and weighty coffee-table art books sat on oak shelves in comforting, easy reach.

Even more than books, arthouse films from the heyday of the auteur theory mark the author’s intellectual landscape: Nicolas Roeg, Charlie Chaplin, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Res-nais, Akira Kurosawa, Spike Lee. Against this gauzy, nostalgic view is contrasted today’s tame, punch-pulling documentaries by Ai Weiwei and Ken Burns, and commodified “woke black superheroes”— Marvel’s “Black Panther,” a film, the author points out, with whiz-bang police-state technology that would have been turned against real Black Panthers back in the day.

Behind rapacious tech-economy billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and the late Steve Jobs, the author sees the specter of Harry Lime, the Orson Welles character from “The Third Man” — the black marketeer who gets rich selling tainted penicillin without regard for the human cost.

Younger readers who didn’t share the author’s bohemian over-education will find many references baffling: Dadaists, Zappa, Dylan, the Beats and San Francisco’s City Lights Books, Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” — the avant-garde ballet that started a riot in Paris. The roster reads like a menu of easily consumable PBS specials. The usual suspects Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and a selection of pomo (postmodern) critical theorists suggests a grad school correspondence course.

The author wants to relive and reclaim a lifetime absorbing Bay Area culture, while the rest of us in “Flyover Country” had to make do — belatedly—with the diluted chain version of Borders. While noting the commodification of certain icons — Jerry Rubin of the Yippies being the classic example — much of that legacy retains its inspirational zeal, the author wants to say. The old stuff, the good stuff was really good, before it “sold out.”

The author ably critiques real problems in our contemporary world and offers a coherent history of resistance, even if it prefers not to dwell too long on the shortcomings of certain cultish communes .(Once heads cool down, the author muses, we may even want to rehabilitate some of the less egregious #MeToo exiles.) But many will find this book only a feel-good self-congratulatory review of lots of big ideas and memorable moments that’s short on concrete advice.

Instead, only a very modest proposal is made: a plea for safe spaces allowing “improvisational impudence” from a variety of trial-and-error sources — hardly the “Burn, baby burn” battle cry of yesteryear. Besides, haven’t we had enough impudent improvising from a certain reality-TV huckster who blithely co-opted that shtick?

In the end, the book’s most horrifying image is not of climate apocalypse, nomadic herds of underemployed or even worker-maiming, AI-powered, roboticized factories. Rather, it’s of an American Dream permanently gerrymandered into red state-blue state hyper-regionalism — with one community enjoying legalized marijuana, gay marriage, safe and legal reproductive rights, and $1,000-per-seat scalped “Hamilton” tickets, while the next community over attends gun shows and mega-churches, shops at chintzy dollar stores and imbibes over-prescribed opioids.

In other words, an America permanently alienated from and utterly schizophrenic within itself. Certainly this much of the world can and must be fixed.

Don Simpson is a cartoonist and author who is contributing to Marvel Entertainment’s satirical CRAZY! magazine revival this fall.

First Published: November 1, 2019, 2:00 p.m.