Idealism of the ‘60s Lives On for Some

As a rule, I don’t go to ‘60s parties, read ‘60s books or play nostalgic board games; living through the decade at full throttle was difficult enough.

I tend to keep my memories of that period--which shaped my adult life--locked up in a trunk, along with other old loves. The music of the period still goes right through me, dragging me back to when I first heard it, so I try to stay away from that as well.

But when a friend now living in Venice invited me to an “appropriate attire requested” publishing party for her first fiction, called “Convictions” and subtitled “A Novel of the Sixties,” out came the standard weekend wardrobe of jeans, work shirt and Birkenstocks. And the flashbacks.

The book being celebrated, set on the North Carolina campus where I ran wild in the streets for five years, had a lot to do with my reflective mood, evoking that manic period at the cusp of the decade when bombast gave way to bomb blast.

Fortunately, the party was far less traumatic and yuppified than I expected, with a surprising number of the guests now holding down jobs with small colleges, day-care co-ops, peace groups and free clinics. The conversation was low-key, the drinking moderate, the Kool-Aid non-electric. Most of the talk was contemporary, without much wistfulness, more about the present and the future than the past. Nobody used the term “selling out” and I left free of the high anxiety I had feared.

Although what I heard and overheard at the party sounded encouraging to an unreconstructed remnant like myself, it is becoming clear that for many, the “Me Decade” has melded into the “Gimme Decade.” The narcissism and compulsive introspection that characterized the ‘70s has given way to a certain amount of unabashed, name-brand grabbing. Activism in the ‘80s may have been reduced to coaching soccer, or to organizing against prisons, public housing projects or nuclear power plants--and only if they’re going to be built in your neighborhood.

However, what those at the publishing party and at similar gatherings I have attended recently seem to find most frustrating is the pernicious notion that “you can have it all.”

Spread by ubiquitous commercials, this message is the perfect, unrealistic pitch for an indulged generation: That is, whatever mundane or hateful things you may do from 9 to 5, you can always loosen your tie or shed your dress-for-success duds after work and instantly turn back into the same fun-loving, sensitive character you were at school. As a couple, you can have two fast-track careers, raise a family, own a house, take exotic vacations, work out three times a week and maintain a healthy, stable and stimulating relationship. Even those ‘60s children who now embrace the acquisitive ethos of the ‘80s figure out before too long that most people can’t have it all.

Among other things, the ‘60s were about making choices, the antithesis of “having it all.” Which is one reason it is so troubling to see once-fiery student leaders now running for office by finessing their pasts and pandering to any special interest they can glom onto; or contemporaries, who were once war resisters, now gazing jealously at the combat veterans among their peers--especially those who returned decorated, but physically and emotionally unscarred--and wondering aloud whether they missed something by not having their mettle tested under fire.

Since the ‘60s ended (and even before) there have been those who delighted in any indication that ours, after all, was a generation just like any other--eager to betray its beliefs for a mess of pottage, a BMW or a development deal. (And, to be fair, there was some talk of the latter in Venice--but after all, this is California.)

But looking at the generation as a whole, there is little cause to celebrate the death of our idealism. For one thing, not everyone from that generation was idealistic.

Statistically, most never made it to a college campus (or the battlefield, for that matter), and a majority of the ones who did sat on their hands or on the sidelines while the fireworks were going on. The social consciousness of those in the action faction was largely a product of events and demographics in a period of plenty--and not of any intrinsic moral superiority on our part. When the fabric of society frays and disintegrates before your eyes, suggesting that, in the words of the Firesign Theater, “everything you know is wrong,” it doesn’t take much more to begin to question all authority and most assumptions.

Added to this spectacle of the world turned upside down were the traditional discoveries of late teen-age: that unholy trinity of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Death at an early age--in combat with Asians or simply battling excess--was also in the air. So was nihilism, as the words of a 19th-Century Russian anarchist, scrawled on many a wall, typically exhorted: “whatever can be smashed must be smashed.” By the end of the decade there were, to be sure, many other extremes of rhetoric and proposed remedies for society’s inequities.

With those caveats, I wouldn’t trade the hours of meetings, marches, speeches, or even time in custody for anything. I continue to feel that we were right on the fundamental social, political and economic issues of the day. That is, in the generalized sense that those who have-- power, money and influence--have an obligation to those who have not , and that for some there is a further imperative, to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” As a superpower in the world community, we should try to confine our activism to picking on countries our own size.

Assaulted Barriers

Judging from the magazines and the movies celebrating yuppiedom, it is easy to forget that there is a significant (albeit relatively silent) segment of ‘60s people who, according to an informal survey at the publishing party and a recent Skelly Yankelovich poll, still believe in what they did when they assaulted the barriers of race and sex and made being a yuppie possible. In addition, there is a more vigorous, redemptive minority out there--and not just in Santa Cruz, Aspen and Santa Fe--that acts on those beliefs every day: public school teachers and inner-city social workers, union organizers and community activists. Cindy Lauper’s older sister is a former steelworker running for mayor of Phoenix, as a socialist. For them, the ‘60s never ended.

What does bother me is that a lot of my contemporaries who, apart from avoiding the draft, never did anything but watch during the ‘60s are now publicly apologizing--for things they never did or said--on behalf of people who are not sorry. Chief among these, alas, are journalists who started out as generational chroniclers and ended up as real estate speculators, kvetchy novelists and pompous television personalities. The same people who made their reputations explaining what “they” meant and “they” wanted 20 years ago, have recently been lining up to reconsider what “we” meant and what “we” wanted.

The problem with those offering the mea culpas, as well as with the people who have thus far produced emblematic literature of the period like “The Big Chill” and “Loose Change , “ is that they were never really a part of the complete emotional and political letting go, the wrenching Sturm und Drang of the period. “Being there” is simply not an adequate credential , except for a voyeur, and it shows. It may be a case of those who say don’t know, and those who know don’t say, but hanging around the periphery was not enough: You got to suffer if you want to sing the blues.