The sixties, then and now.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne
• Position: Culture - Column

Will the real Grateful Dead please stand up? And when they do, will they please point us toward the real 1960s? Because I for one--a veteran of that infamous decade, and a sometime Dead fan (I have copies of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty in both vinyl and CD)--am getting very confused. The first hint that things were getting seriously twisted in the public mind was the endless prattle, upon the death of Dead leader Jerry Garcia, about "an era" having "ended." Why were people being led to believe that the success of the Dead meant that "the sixties" was, until a couple of months ago, alive and well in Newt Gingrich's America? What had "the sixties" become, anyway?

I kept listening and reading and watching TV, hoping to figure it out, but things just got curiouser and curiouser. For one thing, the parade of well-known public figures who felt the need to publicly declare their personal grief at the death of this "counterculture hero" boggled the mind, politically and culturally. Of course Bill Clinton had to tell us he shared our collective pain. And Peter Jennings seemed sort of plausible if you stretched your imagination. (Think 1968, bell bottoms, long hair and beads; it could work.) But Senator Pat Leahy? And Al and Tipper Gore? Wasn't she the founder, a few years back, of the group that started the now--raging war against socially offensive music lyrics, and the author of a parent's guide to fighting them? Did she perhaps write the thing while listening to the Dead sing "Drivin' that train/high on cocaine"? And there were even Republicans--William Weld and John Kasich--in the public mix of grief and eulogy.

But before I could get my mind around this madness, the next phase of public remembering took place, and things got even murkier. Somebody remembered, inevitably, that these guys were into drugs, that Garcia had in fact died in a rehab center trying to kick a heroin habit. "Oh, that sixties," it suddenly dawned on everyone, "the one we all are supposed to hate now. Well, thank goodness it's finally over, and good riddance to bad ideas and worse music." Forget good old, yuppified "Uncle Jerry Garcia," designer of chic neckwear and namesake of an upscale ice-cream flavor.

George Will's Time magazine column was typical. Decrying "the hot tub of bathos about the sixties occasioned by the death of Jerry Garcia," with its nonsensical evocations of "idealism" and "freedom," Will told of a young couple, Wolfgang and Lisa Von Nester, who abandoned their three-year-old son at a mall, sold their van, and took off for a Dead concert. The point, to Will, was that the Dead and the sixties were responsible for today's cultural and social decline.

"The spirit of the sixties," he wrote, "was, strictly...