Seeds of the Sixties.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

IT DOESN'T TAKE A BABY BOOMER IN THE White House to know which way the wind blows. But it sure helps. While Bill Clinton may not be Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin, having a faux student radical (he almost smoked pot, he almost dodged the draft) as president drives home the fact that the "1960s" are now our central cultural, social, and political reference point. Forget those musty old issues--the Spanish Civil War, the New Deal, the Cold War--that once demanded a response from all "concerned" and "engaged" citizens. It is more relevant now whether you "grokked" Spock, dug Phil Ochs records, or "fucked the system" every chance you got.

Although this referential shift from one generation to the next is a natural progression, this time around it is more ironic than usual: After all, the generation that came to power following World War II didn't spend its youth warning that "you can't trust anyone over 30." Irony notwithstanding, the stakes in defining the activities loosely referred to as the "counterculture," the "movement," and the "New Left" remain very high. If they are seen as part of a righteous revolution, the current power elite will try to recapture them in law and spirit; if they are viewed as a series of cultural catastrophes, their legacy will be spurned.

So far, the various countercultural movements of the '60s have been portrayed in movies, TV shows, and books mostly as noble, liberating struggles of pure-hearted, peace-loving longhairs against small-minded, selfish squares--a serious version of Rowan & Martin's Laugh In. As urban-guerilla-cum-establishment-pol Tom Hayden wrote in his 1988 memoir, Reunion, "Like the American revolutionary period, the awakening of the early sixties was a unique in-gathering of young people....The gods of our parents had failed or become idols....When we first used the term revolution, it was not about overthrowing power but about overcoming hypocrisy."

This self-congratulatory scenario glosses over a much more complicated--and interesting--reality. However they might have started, the counterculture's '60s ended on a sour note, as "All You Need Is Love" segued into "Gimme Shelter." Martin Luther King's integrationist plea of non-violent resistance was discarded, even before his death, in favor of the armed insurrection of the Black Panthers; the "child of man" conceived at Woodstock was delivered stillborn at Altamont four months later; Students for a Democratic Society transmogrified into the...