How to Follow the Greatest Generation?
JANUARY 18, 2008 TAGS:
By Dick Polman
Ah, the merciless march of time.
Mark Rudd, the '60s protest leader at Columbia, now wears two hearing aids. Jack Weinberg, the Berkeley protest leader who famously coined the phrase "Don't trust anyone over 30," now looks like a kindly grandpa. Andrew Young, the civil rights activist, laments that today's young blacks know nothing about the '60s and says, "I'm not sure Tiger Woods has any idea who I am."
The novelist L. P. Hartley once wrote that "the past is a foreign country." Indeed, for many baby boomers, the '60s seem to be consigned to some distant shore, an ever-receding era that cannot be recaptured, except perhaps in song (the old classics, now available on download) or in the comforts of rose-colored memory. Every once in a while, a scholar or journalist will try to explain the '60s, only to find that its ultimate Meaning is maddeningly elusive.
It's surely a tempting exercise, given the demographics alone. Boomers constituted the largest youth population in U.S. history; between 1960 and 1970, the number of Americans aged 18 to 24 increased by 50 percent. Pockets of poverty aside, they also lived in unparalleled prosperity. Free of economic want, and cocooned in the burgeoning suburbs, millions had the leisure time to question a culture that made Vietnam a nightly staple on the recreation room TV.
In terms of trying to fathom the '60s, Tom Brokaw is the latest to think big and come up small. The companionable ex-anchorman admits as much in his new bestseller, Boom!, a semi-oral history replete with inconclusive generalizations. To wit: "The Sixties, like beauty and bias, is really in the eye of the beholder. The cataclysmic events were so sweeping, complex, and consequential that they cannot yet be encoded into one great truth. How can we even begin to have that discussion if we still can't settle on a common set of terms or language for discussing the Sixties and the lingering aftershocks?"
He has no answers, and I don't intend that as criticism. The plain truth is, every boomer experienced the '60s differently and drew different conclusions from what he or she experienced. Hence the problem with settling on "a common set of terms."
Rudd, Weinberg, and Young (all of whom speak in Brokaw's pages) shared the era with Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich (both of whom speak as well), but their insights do not jibe. Various musician-boomers show up to retell stories of rampant drug use, yet we also hear from Dick Cheney (not a boomer, strictly speaking), who tells Brokaw that, as a '60s college kid, he knew nothing about marijuana because "I was never around it. No one offered me any."
The '60s assessment process is even more complicated than that. Not only is it impossible for boomers to look in the rear-view mirror and reach consensus on what the era meant, it's also impossible to separate fact from myth, with respect to what actually happened at the time.
Random case in point: Woodstock. Lots of boomers undoubtedly recall the '60s as an idyllic love fest, simply because the famed '69 music festival lingers in the mind as the high-water mark of harmonic bliss, as wooden ships on the water very free. But reality was more complicated.
Turns out, the quality of the music was bad (as musicians later conceded). Stoned, stage-frightened performers puked on the crowd from their helicopters, the Grateful Dead was nearly electrocuted, and there were 80 lawsuits and countersuits in the aftermath. And Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," which celebrated the boomers ("we are stardust/ we are golden"), was actually penned in a Manhattan hotel because she couldn't get to the festival.
Left-leaning boomers who fondly recall the '60s as the heyday of liberalism are well advised to remember what happened in the election of 1968. As Rove pointed out to Brokaw, "It's funny, you look back on 1968 and think everybody was against the war " but two of the candidates (Richard Nixon and George Wallace) were not. And they got nearly 60 percent of the vote."
So it's no surprise, in the Brokaw book, that the reminiscences " and the lessons drawn from those memories " are so diverse. Weinberg, the don't-trust-anyone-over-30 guy, believes that the '60s helped trigger greater public awareness of environmental issues, and he works today as an environmental activist. By contrast, screenwriter Jeremy Larner, who wrote speeches for antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, now thinks the '60s changed virtually nothing. Rebellion, he says, is just a word on a T-shirt, and "the only thing that lasted was that boys and girls could stay in the same dormitories."
Some boomers are at peace with the life choices they made. Witness Woody Miller, "a proudly unreconstructed '60s hippie," who still lives simply in rural New Hampshire, where he hooked up a water-powered turbine as an electricity source; in his words, "I like living off the grid." But others are still dialoguing with themselves. Jeffry House, who fled the draft, moved to Canada, and never came back, tells Brokaw: "You swerve off the path you always thought you'd be on, and you wonder, "Was it my mistake? Was it inevitable? What in me " in my parents " drove me to make the decision I did?'"
Still others have renounced their '60s liberalism and moved rightward. In 1987, they even called it the Second Thoughts movement. I interviewed a lot of them at the time. For instance, Peter Collier, an editor of Ramparts magazine in his youth, decided in retrospect that the '60s were really about "casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism" and "hypocritical and self-dramatizing anti-Americanism."
Nor is there any consensus on whether, or to what extent, '60s boomers changed the world. Dick Cheney acknowledged to Brokaw that his gay daughter has thrived thanks to the climate of tolerance that took root in the era. Gloria Steinem lauded the incremental changes: "You can't go into any town [today] that doesn't have a battered women's shelter or a women's art gallery or a women's rock band, or a campus that doesn't have a women's history program." And Hillary Clinton, another Brokaw companion, insisted that "the larger message of the Sixties was really liberating… Choose your own life, make your own decisions."
But since the '60s also presumably taught us about the dangers of waging a war based on lies, why were so many boomers stricken with amnesia, along with other Americans, during the pre-invasion marketing of Iraq? Human nature, in its most gullible manifestations, seems impervious to the lessons of history, to the ongoing hype about the era's cosmic importance.
Perhaps today's boomers should simply be grateful that they survived the excesses of that era, and that they're still topside, free to ponder the unanswerable, to spin the '60s in accordance with their individual needs. After all, growing older is often about getting down to basics. Perhaps, as Judy Collins remarked, the bottom line is that "we were lucky to live through it."
Dick Polman is national political columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Ah, the merciless march of time.Mark Rudd, the '60s protest leader at Columbia, now wears two hearing aids. Jack Weinberg, the Berkeley protest leader who famously coined the phrase "Don't trust anyone over 30," now looks like a kindly grandpa. Andrew Young, the civil rights activist, laments that today's young blacks know nothing about the '60s and says, "I'm not sure Tiger Woods has any idea who I am."
The novelist L. P. Hartley once wrote that "the past is a foreign country." Indeed, for many baby boomers, the '60s seem to be consigned to some distant shore, an ever-receding era that cannot be recaptured, except perhaps in song (the old classics, now available on download) or in the comforts of rose-colored memory. Every once in a while, a scholar or journalist will try to explain the '60s, only to find that its ultimate Meaning is maddeningly elusive.
It's surely a tempting exercise, given the demographics alone. Boomers constituted the largest youth population in U.S. history; between 1960 and 1970, the number of Americans aged 18 to 24 increased by 50 percent. Pockets of poverty aside, they also lived in unparalleled prosperity. Free of economic want, and cocooned in the burgeoning suburbs, millions had the leisure time to question a culture that made Vietnam a nightly staple on the recreation room TV.
In terms of trying to fathom the '60s, Tom Brokaw is the latest to think big and come up small. The companionable ex-anchorman admits as much in his new bestseller, Boom!, a semi-oral history replete with inconclusive generalizations. To wit: "The Sixties, like beauty and bias, is really in the eye of the beholder. The cataclysmic events were so sweeping, complex, and consequential that they cannot yet be encoded into one great truth. How can we even begin to have that discussion if we still can't settle on a common set of terms or language for discussing the Sixties and the lingering aftershocks?"
He has no answers, and I don't intend that as criticism. The plain truth is, every boomer experienced the '60s differently and drew different conclusions from what he or she experienced. Hence the problem with settling on "a common set of terms."
Rudd, Weinberg, and Young (all of whom speak in Brokaw's pages) shared the era with Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich (both of whom speak as well), but their insights do not jibe. Various musician-boomers show up to retell stories of rampant drug use, yet we also hear from Dick Cheney (not a boomer, strictly speaking), who tells Brokaw that, as a '60s college kid, he knew nothing about marijuana because "I was never around it. No one offered me any."
The '60s assessment process is even more complicated than that. Not only is it impossible for boomers to look in the rear-view mirror and reach consensus on what the era meant, it's also impossible to separate fact from myth, with respect to what actually happened at the time.
Random case in point: Woodstock. Lots of boomers undoubtedly recall the '60s as an idyllic love fest, simply because the famed '69 music festival lingers in the mind as the high-water mark of harmonic bliss, as wooden ships on the water very free. But reality was more complicated.
Turns out, the quality of the music was bad (as musicians later conceded). Stoned, stage-frightened performers puked on the crowd from their helicopters, the Grateful Dead was nearly electrocuted, and there were 80 lawsuits and countersuits in the aftermath. And Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," which celebrated the boomers ("we are stardust/ we are golden"), was actually penned in a Manhattan hotel because she couldn't get to the festival.
Left-leaning boomers who fondly recall the '60s as the heyday of liberalism are well advised to remember what happened in the election of 1968. As Rove pointed out to Brokaw, "It's funny, you look back on 1968 and think everybody was against the war " but two of the candidates (Richard Nixon and George Wallace) were not. And they got nearly 60 percent of the vote."
So it's no surprise, in the Brokaw book, that the reminiscences " and the lessons drawn from those memories " are so diverse. Weinberg, the don't-trust-anyone-over-30 guy, believes that the '60s helped trigger greater public awareness of environmental issues, and he works today as an environmental activist. By contrast, screenwriter Jeremy Larner, who wrote speeches for antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, now thinks the '60s changed virtually nothing. Rebellion, he says, is just a word on a T-shirt, and "the only thing that lasted was that boys and girls could stay in the same dormitories."Some boomers are at peace with the life choices they made. Witness Woody Miller, "a proudly unreconstructed '60s hippie," who still lives simply in rural New Hampshire, where he hooked up a water-powered turbine as an electricity source; in his words, "I like living off the grid." But others are still dialoguing with themselves. Jeffry House, who fled the draft, moved to Canada, and never came back, tells Brokaw: "You swerve off the path you always thought you'd be on, and you wonder, "Was it my mistake? Was it inevitable? What in me " in my parents " drove me to make the decision I did?'"
Still others have renounced their '60s liberalism and moved rightward. In 1987, they even called it the Second Thoughts movement. I interviewed a lot of them at the time. For instance, Peter Collier, an editor of Ramparts magazine in his youth, decided in retrospect that the '60s were really about "casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism" and "hypocritical and self-dramatizing anti-Americanism."
Nor is there any consensus on whether, or to what extent, '60s boomers changed the world. Dick Cheney acknowledged to Brokaw that his gay daughter has thrived thanks to the climate of tolerance that took root in the era. Gloria Steinem lauded the incremental changes: "You can't go into any town [today] that doesn't have a battered women's shelter or a women's art gallery or a women's rock band, or a campus that doesn't have a women's history program." And Hillary Clinton, another Brokaw companion, insisted that "the larger message of the Sixties was really liberating… Choose your own life, make your own decisions."
But since the '60s also presumably taught us about the dangers of waging a war based on lies, why were so many boomers stricken with amnesia, along with other Americans, during the pre-invasion marketing of Iraq? Human nature, in its most gullible manifestations, seems impervious to the lessons of history, to the ongoing hype about the era's cosmic importance.
Perhaps today's boomers should simply be grateful that they survived the excesses of that era, and that they're still topside, free to ponder the unanswerable, to spin the '60s in accordance with their individual needs. After all, growing older is often about getting down to basics. Perhaps, as Judy Collins remarked, the bottom line is that "we were lucky to live through it."
Dick Polman is national political columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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Kevin Fleming wrote on January 26, 2008 8:18am
'I agree that the meaning of the 60s is largely a matter of personal experience, although it is undeniable that great changes in American society took place, e.g., the Civil Rights Act. I do, however, take issue with the description of "Boomers" that you give. "Pockets of poverty aside, they also lived in unparalleled prosperity. Free of economic want, and cocooned in the burgeoning suburbs, millions had the leisure time to question a culture that made Vietnam a nightly staple on the recreation room TV." I grew up in the Irish-Catholic ghetto of southwest Philadelphia, attended a Catholic grade school that had 3000 students, and attended an urban Catholic boys' high school. Sure there were plenty of kids my age living in the suburbs, but I do question that most of us were "cocooned in the ever burgeoning suburbs". That description, like the often used "self-centered" or "selfish" boomers, is reductionist. City kids of the 60s were pretty well informed on social issues, because many of us came from homes where newspapers and TV newscasts were staples. Speaking of Catholic education during that time, we were exposed to papal encyclicals calling for social justice and the rights of workers. There were, to say the least, "racial tensions" between young whites and young blacks in Philadelphia in the 60s, but that only serves to point out the "diversity" of my generation. Someone is supposed to have said that "if you can remember the 60s, you weren't there." I'd say most of us who were there do, in fact, remember the 60s but not in the neat, media sound bites that covered over a very rich and textured time in American history.' [Report Comment]
