Why the Sixties Never Went Away

The Sixties are back. Patronized for the last quarter-century as "crunchy," then shown up as pathetically irony-challenged by the bebop-hatted members of the Gawker generation, we are suddenly invited to be in their thrall again. This weekend, The New York Times Book Review is featuring five books about the radical passion of the era -- two novels and three memoirs -- and there's a respectful, even yearning, tone to some of the reviews, not to mention to some of the books themselves. This, of course, follows two weeks during which we saw the Kennedy era return with an almost Originalist fervor and spontaneity: one family member after another, even the most private, standing up and re-invoking JFK and Bobby (who, had he lived, might have made "soulful" and "chief executive" a non-oxymoronic adjective-noun combination). At this same time, the Times's fashion pages decreed that spring '08 would be all about Camelot-era clothes: ladylike sheaths, as felinely taut as was the start of those ten years that took us from housewives kissing their refrigerators in magazine ads to the clamorous time-has-come-ness of the women's movement. In a sense, a string of recent semi-flop movies has paved the way for this re-embrace of the decade, which Barack Obama has sailed right into the center of, like some fated avatar. We had: Emilio Estevez's wistful love poem Bobby; the vastly underappreciated Factory Girl; Julie Taymor's bravura, heart-on-sleeve Across the Universe; and I'm Not There, as dazzling (Cate Blanchett's Dylan = Richard Burton's Hamlet) and as tragic (the brilliant promise that was Heath Ledger) as the era itself was.

As one who has spent the past five years re-living those times for a book I've just completed, I have a few ideas on why the Sixties have been hiding in the tall grass of public ridicule, just waiting for the right moment to try to wander home again.

1. We believed in the melodramatic gesture and the literal imperative, and that is irresistible. As Todd Gitlin put it in his authoritative The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, "The link between feeling and action was a short fuse. Actions were taken...to `dramatize convictions'...[T]he movement's rites became epiphanies....We collected these ritual punctuations as moments when the shroud that normally covers everyday life was torn away and we stood face to face with the true significance of things. Each round was an approximation of the apocalyps[e]." Why should the Right, with its Rapture, have co-opted all the searing emotion all these years, when the Left coined it and could return to it?

2. Status hierarchies were reversed. It's hard in these days of Lipstick Jungle and gangsta-rappers-on-the-Red-Carpet to recall that materialism and publicity-mindedness were once hopelessly corny. Yippies threw dollar bills from the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange; rock stars flocked to "freaks'" meccas in the Mediterranean to live in caves without toilets and fincas without showers. The beginning of the end was when Debbie Harry (so hip, Madonna has never stopped wanting to be her) was reduced to singing the truly awful lyric "Roll me in designer sheets." Perhaps we're unrolling the era where, as the way-cool '60s guitarist Danny Kortchmar put it, "people write love songs to their jewelry."

3. You could become the opposite of what they were born as. The late social critic and leading second-wave feminist Ellen Willis once made the point that "identity politics" -- all the rage from the early '80s on -- was initially secretly baffling to many coming across it in their 40s. Why? In identity politics, you become what you were born as, only more so, and...who would want that? If you came of age in the '60s you got to derail your fate and giddily reinvent yourself -- become a Berber or a Navajo, a Medieval princess or a James Gang member. (Walking around in clothes from other centuries was, for 19 year olds in 1966 what making sex videos on camera-phones was to 19 year olds in 2006: exhibitionism as social statement.) Suburban kids morphed into Om-ing mystics, bleeding-madras'd sorority girls into bomb-making revolutionaries. The dream of possibility can certainly be misused (and was then), but it's awfully nice to have it. And, ultimately, the dream of possibility -- so sorely needed now, in a time of so many dead ends -- may be why we've come hobbling back to The Sixties.

Comments

[dogman44]

We need that sixties activism now more than
ever but it means alot more risk to the activist these days. Back then the state labeled us "Commies" and "Hippies". When we
were arrested we were still protected by our
constitution. If arrested today for defying the
criminality of the state you can be declared a
"terrorist" and denyed all protection of constitutional law.

[silverball]

it's obvious you didn't live through the experience....i think you had to be there and not just live during the time period.....big difference...

[Economike]

I hope your right and the period were cruising into doesn't resemble the 1930's more.

[wakeupAmerica]

The 60s, a time in which America formed some of of its best hypocricies since slave owners telling the rest of the world all men are created equal and a country 5000 miles away should not be meddling in another country's affairs. We had the smelly stoned out hippies telling us "give peace a chance", "do your own thing," "if it feels good do it" and "free love" to morph into born again yuppie Reaganites who went from free love to free trade, "greed is good" to just say no and tax cuts and war. A generation that was riding a wave of change from the civil rights movements, burning draft cards to almost impeaching Nixon because his administration illegaly spied on the Democratic Headquarters, the peace movements and other "enemies" but does nothing about Bush's incompetece and his abuses of power. "9/11/01 changed everything" has been the mantra of rebellious youth who turned into authoritaran adults.

[YankeeCanuck]

The 60s were a complicated era. Your comments about hippies may be true of some individuals, but true hippies were generally not very political. The antiwar movement was born of the civil rights movement and the serious students who went south to join the Freedom Riders. The movement, as it was called, went through its own upheaval, but its main failure was to ignore the members of that cohort who were not college educated. THe failure to forge links with working class young people is what led to the polarization of the country that remains today. An excellent review of these times is Mark Kurlansky's "1968: THe Year That Rocked the World."

[marko77]

wakeupAmerica, you are mistaken. There were plenty of people during the 60's who wanted no part of the changes. For example, people like Karl Rove. The 80's and Ronnie Reagan gave all these people a chance to come out of the shadows and into the limelight.

[tbone99]

Actually I know a lot of hippies who have not morphed into anything but old hippies as well as lawyers , teachers, doctors and civil servants , maintaining their belief in humanity against amazing adversity.Its the folks who stood by in their buttoned down shirts , too afraid to take risks that built up their portfolios and and began accruing power behind the scenes in order to prove that life is only about security and money. We're in the same generation but we're definitely not all the same.

[research]

What bullshit. I was there, Hippies were in the streets every friggin day protesting, rightly, the injustices in our society.

The conservatives fought back and won. J. Edgar and Nixon infamously targeted the liberal hippies by going after pot smoking. They sent the FBI to infiltrate peace groups to spy on them, disrupt them and incite them to violence.

The ills you speak of originating in the 60's are not the legacy of the Hippies, but the legacy of the conservative rethug corporatist fascists who put down the liberal hippie movement.

But of course, it is conservative modus operandi to project their own crimes on their enemies.

[TommyMcCarthy]

I expect to read some interesting comments to this post.

[LeoMarvin]

'60s Lesson #1: The right combination of chemicals will make just about anything interesting.

[horseface]

I'm not quite sure what the blogger is trying to say - the 60s I lived through did not resemble rehashes or documentaries. I wish "old guy" reunion bands would stay home; their original music was great and doesn't deserve a shriveled parody. When a Doors, Joplin, Hendrix, Band (etc. - there were so many) comes on I KNOW I'm not imagining that today's pop scene is limp and gray - like a white t-shirt washed too many times with blue jeans. Disco & Nursery Rhymes, over and over and over. I pity youth: that's my job.

Oh yeah - life was exciting if difficult: Think NASA, think women getting GOOD jobs and having enough money to go out on their own. And awful: my boyfriend got drafted for switching colleges, went cuckoo, got a dishonerable discharge, vanished into the drug scene for years, finally surfaced as an insurance salesman - maybe the cause and effect was: screwed by the draft, turned loose as an undesirable, suffers trauma AND THEN went back to the "corporate" life.

Maybe money-grubbing in a corporation was both desperation and revenge!

[loril]

Most of us remember the era in which we were young with a rosy glow. Yes, we recall the negative parts...but the positive aspects are so much more vivid (if we were having a happy youth, and not personally stuck in war, poverty or some other trauma.)

I was a toddler at the end of the 60s, so I can't feel it the way others can. I have noticed that people who came of age in the 60s are more passionate about the era of their youth than most and are less able to poke fun at some of the excesses. Due to my age, I love the 80s. Not because of Reagan, of course. I am just old enough to have voted against him my first time at the polls. But because I was young, relatively carefree and immersed in my own sub culture. (We dressed up in clothing from other centuries (or at least other decades) in the early 80s, too. And we loved Blondie.)

I don't think elements of the 60s ever really went away. Other aspects of that decade had disappeared by the time my life memories really begin. You can't hold onto all of it and you cannot replicate it, as much as you may wish to. It was a place in time with a unique set of circumstances combining in a certain way and you can't go home again.

[VicPerry]

The real sixties were a lot more interesting and varied than the pretend sixties, which is what gets repackaged over and over again like some godaaaaaam renaissance fair.

[research]

That's for sure! I went to a 60's dance night. Everybody learned their dance steps and did them all together!

THAT is NOT 60 dance.

Raves are more like the dancing in the 60's, of course I like the 60's music better.

[HamletsMill]

Very few people really learned anything at all in the 1960's. Some activists that went to prison did. Some soldiers who suffered unspeakable horrors did. Some civil rights marchers did. A few rock musicians did. That was pretty much it.

For everyone else it was pretty much a party. It was sometimes a very, very thoughtful party. It was definitely high energy and I loved every minute of it even when I was in the U.S. military with all that sorrow and dark night of the soul. But very few people really learned anything at all. For some it was face to face with the raw energies of the Cosmos. For others it was a Joseph's Coat of Many Colors that could be just taken off when stock options came their way.

That tear in the fabric of time and space really came from the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 when everyone of age that was thinking was shown that this could all be gone tomorrow. The assignation of JFK, MLK, and RFK showed everyone that their President or their object of hope, could be gone tomorrow. Vietnam showed that the Military Industrial Complex, to counter the saying of Jesus, actually LIVES by the sword but does NOT die by the sword AT ALL. In fact in death it indeed prospers and grows even richer. It receives life and life more abundantly on death at a level right out of a badly written George Romero "Night of the Living Dead" movie.

But very few souls really learned anything at all.

Ask a soldier. No one ever cared and no one gave a shit about really anything in the end.

So we have now all come to this end. A nation of appalling cowards that now face losing everything. Absolutely everything fought for and built up for over 230 years! All at risk to be completely gone. Because we are a nation of spineless cowards who bent over on command for some evil, evil, spiritually sick people.

The amazing and supernal 1960's are gone and they aren't coming back.

[rixhex56]

HamletsMill,

I grew up during the 60s, and I almost feel sorry for you that you remember them the way you describe. Maybe you're just under the cloud of the Bush years --- it's pretty difficult to feel upbeat about much of anything under the cloud known as BUSH. I feel that I have to point out that you contradict yourself in your post; you talk about how nobody learned anything and nobody "gave a shit", yet you also talk about the things people learned and cared about.

Considering all the social movements during the decade of the 60s, it is simply unfathomable that anyone who lived during those years could say nobody gave a shit about anything. Students were shot and killed on college campuses while others were jailed for standing up to power; riots based on social injustice took place in large cities; there was a true sense of brotherhood and unity among numbers of people such as we do not see today; there was a new version of the Enlightenment taking place, and people DID GIVE A SHIT, and DID LEARN A LOT.

Bush is the worst thing to happen to this nation since the Civil War of the 1800s, but some good things came out of that dark period, too. You say, "That tear in the fabric of time and space really came from the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962", but I disagree. While I agree that the 3 assassinations to which you refer were epiphanal moments for those who were learning and giving a shit, I think it was Nixon that created that "tear in the fabric of space and time" to which you refer---a sort of "final nail", if you will. Nixon's administration was a dark time in our nation's history, Reagan's created a different kind of darkness, and Bush's has been an even darker time, but perhaps out of the ashes of what he leaves behind, we can recapture some of that spirit that DID exist during the 60s, whether you experienced it or not.

[robbie]

The recurring theme in yur post is Rpublican = Bad.

KUDOS!!

[starboymikey]

Zappa redux:

As some of you may know, a group of astronomers named an asteroid after the late Frank Zappa. Having met him, I can say that he may have gotten a bigger kick out of having a hemerroid named after him.

[Economike]

I would imagine he's probably past caring.

[nyquist27]

"late"..."may have"

[yodaveg]

Actually, I think the reason is even simpler. We live in a world where the only true motives are ulterior. People are growing sick of the hypocrisy and disingenuousness that drive our politics and economy. Our contrived and ironic culture is leaving a bad taste in our mouths. We hunger for something authentic.

Obama seems to be that something.

Now, of course, the punditocracy will feel obliged to destroy him. If they succeed, they will have extinguished the first flicker of real light in decades.

[Computer Geek]

Amazingly the song Monster released by Steppenwolf in 1970 is dead on today and just as relevant:

http://www.steppenwolf.com/lyr/mnnster.html

[RoseMerry]

AMEN to that! I had the pleasure of seeing Steppenwolf perform this Magus Opus live when it was new and fresh.

From memory,

"Amerika, where are you now?
Where are your sons and daughters,
Amerika, where are you now?
We can't fight alone
Against the Monster!"

[sandpiper]

Second line =

"Don't you care about your sons and daughters?"

[Miamiman]

The 60's..Generation of lots of talk and no ACTION! They became the Execs at the Fortune 500 companies that sell us all out and are worse than what they "fought" for in the 60's...

[darcy]

Not all of us, Miamiman.

[research]

Not all of us.

[starboymikey]

The 60's..Generation of lots of talk and no ACTION! They became the Execs at the Fortune 500 companies that sell us all out and are worse than what they "fought" for in the 60's...
__________­__________­__________­__________­______

Some hardly equals all. Most of my 60's friends are environmentalists, political activists, opposing Bush and his war, artists and poets. Some are doctors and lawyers, working with the poor, or for social causes in one way or another. Some, like me, are working stiffs looking foward to retirement, but still dreaming the dream. My wife watched "Across the Universe" for the first time Sunday night on DVD and the memories were thick as flies, and brought a tear to our eyes.

If you want to be cynical and angry, that's your right, and a lot of joy may it bring you. But don't go attributing your cynicism to everyone who lived through that time. Instead, speak for yourself.

[tbone99]

Not sure what you call starting a movement that ended a war or the civil rights movement, if not action.Today very few young people can be energized enough even to sign an online petition.

[nyquist27]

the February 15, 2003 antiwar protest was the largest in history so what is your evidence

[sandpiper]

Not exactly all of us...

[KenArnold]

The sixties are back as "the dream of possibility" against the backdrop of Armageddon.
Much of the sixties was the almost rational live-for-today attitude of the generation taught to "drop-and-cover". That generation saw no progress on nuclear disarmament (the source of the "peace sign" - ND) and many expected not to make it to old age. Now again we are faced with global cataclysm and have seen only denial and inaction from 8 years of a Republican administration and too much of the rest of society. And frankly many expect too little action after this administration, to save the planet as we know it and most of (if not all of) the human race. The long suppressed fear of WMDs has again returned but it is now thought insignificant compared to the prospects for run-away climate change (although a global thermo-nuclear exchange is still too possible). The main differences in the U.S. this time, are the demographics (smaller youth / college population proportionally), the economics, the lack of the draft and other issues (civil and women’s rights, …) and the more complete and sophisticated control of the media.

[eshalom]

But Obama has pledged to transcend all of those horrible conflicts, struggles, arguments, etc. that continue to haunt Boomers.

So now you say the new Messiah is harking back to the sixties for guidance under the wing of 75-year-old Ted Kennedy?

[chumleypotts]

Yes - Obama has pledged to lead us out of the darkness into the light of hope so we may regain the freedoms so long denied us, and our aspirations will finally be realized as we free ourselves from our chains and achieve the greatness of our founding fathers.

Swell words...but I'd rather he gave me some specifics....

[tbone99]

Not only that but he keeps making snide remarks about 'fuzzy headed liberals " and "love- ins.".Evidently bringing the Vietnam war to an end had nothing to do with the people of the 60's persistence and organization.You sure don't see any "stop the war " signs at HIS rallies.