In 1968, Paul Ehrlich founded Zero Population Growth and for the first time a great many fast-breeding Americans learned the ultimate horror of the Malthusian theory of geometrical population increase. Pave it over, tear it down, plow it under: filing cabinets for humans, color-coded structures for cars, and brother, can you spare a maggot sandwich?
Does it all jumble, one fact over another, one event atop the next? Does it have a breathless, crazy-quilt quality that leaps years and squinches history into a bewildering cube like something burped out of a car-compacter? Paraphrasing Whitman, “Do I jumble? Very well, then I jumble. The Sixties were large, they contained multitudes.” It all happened at once, so it now seems. Not a day passed that the fabric of American society did not get redraped on a general consciousness being raised from its Quasimodo-like bestial slouch. Nice image, that.
Nothin’ much happened in the Sixties that influences us in the Eighties? Countries granted or claiming independence in the Sixties, with which we now have to deal, as part of the universal economic chain, include: Somalia, Ghana, Upper Volta, Senegal, Nigeria, Rwanda, Syria, Algeria, Jamaica, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Biafra, Guyana and Botswana, not to mention the other twenty-five I don’t need to make the point. The bashers seem unable to make any connection between the rise of black power in this country at the time, the riots, the demands for an equal share of that mythical American Dream that blacks saw on television every day, and the assumption of responsibility for their own destinies of black people in far places. It took the French thirteen years after America fought and won its independence to get the message. But then, maybe black folks ain’t as slow as Prof. Shockley or Al Campanis think they are. Maybe there was one of those sudden biological leaps in intellect; after all, Amos’n’Andy had been pulled from syndication in 1965, and there’s no telling what that did for universal black intelligence. It certainly did a lot for their self-image.
Even our obese citizens benefited from the Sixties: Weight Watchers was founded in 1963. The same year gourmets realized Hydrox were better than Oreos.
We came to learn, in the Sixties, that one person could make a difference: Mario Savio’s stand in defense of free speech that began campus unrest at UC Berkeley in 1964 and culminated in the Kent State massacre of 1970, thereby bringing to full, hideous circle an object lesson we needed desperately to learn, that the cost of civil disobedience in the service of the commonweal can end up being tragically more than a failing grade in civics; Martin Luther King, Jr. dedicating and finally giving up his life that half a nation might see out of the eyes of the other half; Rachel Carson almost singlehandedly raising the alarm that we are killing the earth beneath our feet, alerting a generation to its responsibility to something as arcane as a planet; John Kennedy, for good or bad as the youngest President we ever elected, killed papist bigotry where the highest office in the land was concerned, and brought to his constituency a love of literature and the arts that not even Reagan can wholly flense from our priorities, try though he may; Ralph Nader, going at the corporations again and again, like some mad Quixote, till they clapped their hands over their ears and screamed, “Enough already! We’ll make it safer, cheaper, better, saner!” Those were the positive icons. We had, as well, the classic Jungian archetype of the trickster; madcaps like Ken Kesey and Hunter Thompson and Paul Krassner and looney Abbie; and that nameless vigilante who called himself The Fox, who appeared in bright sunlight to dump garbage in the pristine lobbies of Dow Chemical and the Rand Corporation, to bring the public’s displeasure with war games to the very doorsteps of the sightless masters on far glass mountaintops.
And we had our negative images. Men and women who gave us pause at the depth and inventiveness of their ability to make the world a drearier, deadlier place: Charlie Manson, Anita Bryant, Mayor Richard Daley, Spiro Agnew, John Mitchell, Lt. William Calley, the mad bombers of the Weather Underground, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, James Earl Ray, Judge Julius Hoffman. Forget their names. They made us feel bad, and many of them are now, thankfully, worm-food. They were that part of the learning experience of the Sixties that produced in us the occasional unworthy thought that maybe we ought simply to pack it in and let the cockroaches take over the ballgame. But they had their place: they showed us what we’d be like if we continued to operate off the status quo.
The jumble coalesces. The great Bayeux tapestry of the Sixties, from JFK’s joyous inauguration to Nixon’s ignominious fall from power, solidifies into one unseamed memory. The good times and the bad times, the rivers of blood and the brave winds of change. All the names that mostly mean nothing to high school kids today, as distant and chill as the Norman Conquest. But definitely not the revisionist horse puckey of the bashers.
Is the current prevalence of reactionary attitudes a product of the baby boomers’ hardening of the liberal arteries? Where did all the passion go? What happened to the great starts made in the Sixties, now backslid with erosion of civil rights, feminist imperatives, environmental concerns, humanistic philosophies?
After all, even Rolling Stone has sold out. Consider their Summer ’86 glossy folio insert in Advertising Age. In a ten-page, slick-paper explication of the magazine’s stance as a journal oh so au courant, they said, “If your idea of a Rolling Stone reader looks like a holdout from the ’60s, welcome to the ’80s.” And on the left we see a hippie in jeans and Mexican wedding shirt, festooned with love beads, an elephant hair bracelet on his wrist, auburn locks fit for a biblical prophet hanging to his elbows, the beatific look only enhanced by the beard and the poached-egg eyes. Above the photo is the single concept: PERCEPTION. On the facing page is the gently smiling, self-assured photo of a clean-shaven, neatly coiffed yuppie in linen slacks, pinstripe button-down shirt, loose-fitting Giorgio Armani jacket and a look of such consummate smugness that we know with the certainty of those who were never invited to pledge his frat, that this demographic rep of the 18-34 wedge is wondering whether there’ll be a ticket on the windshield of his Porsche when he gets finished with this photo sitting. Over his head is the word: REALITY.
On succeeding spreads we get as PERCEPTION the dayglo-painted hippie VW bus; and as REALITY that smirking yuppie’s burgundy-toned, mag-wheeled import with the rear deck spoiler and the back seat only Billy Barty could love…a funky aluminum beer keg tapped with a vacuum pumper; as against a dozen lightly bedewed bottles of the Now brews, Erlanger, Bud, Dos Equis and imported Guinness extra stout (we are told Rolling Stone’s readers consumed 33,607,000 glasses of these socially-relevant elixirs in just the preceding seven days)…on the left we get as PERCEPTION a handful of spare change, the kind kids in the Hashbury used to panhandle, total 48¢ and on the right the REALITY is a stack of credit cards, American Express on top (at least they opted for suave good taste: the AmEx is a standard green, not a gold card)…and on the final spread the PERCEPTION is that weary disappointment George McGovern, arms outspread as he makes his speech, his hands open and a trifle pathetically imploring; on the right (oh yeah, on the right) we done got the REALITY: Ronald Reagan, a grin as wide and as deep as the Cayman Trench, arms lifted and thumbs up in his best Gipperwin gesture.
All this little appeal to Miami Vice manqués lacks is a left-hand shot of backyard-grown marijuana as PERCEPTION with a dozen fat lines on glass of the best unstepped Peruvian nose candy as REALITY.
What a sorry pass it all seems to have come to. Technology pioneered in the Sixties, to better our condition of life, has been coopted by the recidivist Eighties not only to abet the Me Decade selfishness and lethargy of an increasingly conscience-dulled electorate—pocket calculators so no one has to be able to add or subtract, digital watches so no one has to figure out what it means when Mickey’s big hand is over his head and his little hand is in his crotch, cable tv and videocassettes so no one has to read a book that ain’t interactive or a newspaper that doesn’t sport a headline informing us that 300 LB. MOTHER TRADES TWINS FOR COOKIES—but that same technology has totemized the post-Me Decade sensibil
ity. It has given the semiliterate, smug know-nothing a cachet. To rely entirely on the purchasable gadget is the mark of homo superior. And since the President himself is all style and no content, a man who may not be a know-nothing but who doesn’t seem to know what he knows, or when he did or didn’t know it…that cachet looms large as reflected in the top man of the U.S.
How did it happen? No big secret. No codex needed to fathom it. Activists got weary after twelve years on the barricades. Took a breather. The whole country took a breather. Out went Nixon, and we thought we’d bought some surcease. But as we keep forgetting, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and in that vacuum of power, with the balming hum of Gerald Ford’s motor in neutral, Torquemada returned with Reagan, Meese, Schlafly, Watt, Falwell, Ollie North and all that little gang of knuckle-brushing shamblers from the 15th century. We snoozed a few years too long.
Now we have the sorry spectacle of that Brightest Hope for the Future, the young of this nation, littering in a way that would have been unthinkable in the Sixties, spazzing out for the benefit of MTV exploiters during Spring Break in Ft. Lauderdale and Palm Springs, coming out of school only slavering to work in airless cubicles for a corporate pension; we have Rambo-ism, vigilantism, racism redux, Bernard Goetz as Zorro, inhumane tv interviews with people saying of murderers who’ve drawn life sentences, “He should oughtta burn in Hell forever” we have millions gulled in every aspect of their lives by televangelists who tell them everything they do is wrong or dirty, movies geared to the mentality of a twelve-year-old (a retarded twelve-year-old); and we have the bashers of the Sixties. A time, we are told, not worthy of our respect.
There is a scene in The Big Chill, written by Lawrence Kasdan and Barbara Benedek, a famous dinner scene, that is the perfect example of Newspeak about the Sixties. In that scene we have seven characters who have gathered to attend the funeral of one of their ’60s group. The time is more or less today. These seven are: Sam, a successful tv actor known for his popular Magnum-like series; Sarah, a successful doctor; Michael, a successful People-style gossip journalist; Nick, a successful drug dealer; Harold, a successful manufacturer of running shoes; Meg, a successful lawyer; and Karen, a successful suburban wife and mother.
At the funeral, a disingenuous pecksniffian minister who didn’t even know Alex, the dear departed, lays down the first paradiddle of the song of revisionism sung by the Eighties about the Sixties: “A brilliant physics student at the University of Michigan who, paradoxically, chose to turn his back on science and taste of life through a seemingly random series of occupations.”
Let us rewrite history through the innocent medium of the nostalgic movie. Let us dismiss the symbols and the reality will scintillate into nothingness, for the oxen are slow, but the earth is patient. And memory fades. And youth knows not.
They sit at the dinner table, these seven (and Alex’s Now Generation girl friend, a model of pragmatic sensibility and sweetness, not a mean bone in her body, but also not a passionate one, either), remembering what Harold said at the service: “Alex brought us together from the beginning; now he brings us together again.” Alex as symbol of the Sixties. Time gone by, and the bashers have told us friendships were transitory, so we know it now by these seven; they have grown apart. Alex as symbol of the fruitless Sixties—lost hope, misspent life, protracted irresponsibility, frustration, self-loathing, suicide.
The song Karen played at the funeral: the Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want (You Get What You Need).
And here is the dialogue:
The Doctor: “I feel I was at my best when I was with you people.”
The TV Star: “When I lost touch with this group, I lost my idea of what I should be.”
The Journalist: “Maybe there was something in me then, that made me want to go to Harlem and teach those ghetto kids.”
The Lawyer: “And I was going to help the scum, as I now so compassionately refer to them.”
The Doctor: “I hate to think it was all just fashion; no commitment.”
The Lawyer: “Sometimes I think I put that time down, pretended it wasn’t real, so I could live with how I am now.”
And the running-shoe magnate sums it up: “Great then; shit now.”
How sad if Larry Kasdan and Barbara Benedek really believe that ready-made tract for the bashers. They portray these seven “refugees from the Sixties” as cynically hollow, confused, ambivalent, duplicitous, betraying, distrusting, self-absorbed, settling for mediocrity, overly analytical but at heart simply shallow…profligates, has-beens, dopers, figures better suited to Hemingway’s Lost Generation than to the activist Sixties.
But that’s the bashers’ view. That’s the revisionism proffered by people who have settled into way-over-age-thirty guilt at having become part of Reagan’s America, the yuppie generation, the survivors of the Me Decade. And like those who drink till they puke on your shoes at a party, they cannot stand to see those who came out of the Sixties with their souls and humanity intact not drinking. So they will ridicule sobriety. Rambo teaches us that going to war in ’Nam was somehow morally superior to staying out. Environmentalists are fuzzy-headed idiots who care more for the snail-darter than they do the sensible development of watershed land for a new shopping mall. Anybody who ain’t looking out for #1 is simply a wuss whom we will not see lodged in upper management.
They pose the question: was it all just fashion?
And they reassure themselves that they’ve made the right choice, joined the winning side, played it smart, outgrown all that kid stuff, by answering, negatively, with the skepticism swamping Reagan right now. Like Rolling Stone, in for the ride when it was fashionable to follow the dissenters (from a safe distance behind the typewriter), they try to convince us that the Sexual Revolution ended up in herpes and AIDS, that the creative ferment, questioning of authority, and outpouring of simple concern for others was a Big Chill.
But we live with the benefits of the Sixties, the large and small treasures enumerated here. In the din of the bashing to justify personal moral flaccidity and floating ethics, they try to drown out the song the Sixties sang.
They despise themselves, and what they have settled for; and so they seek to make us join their zombie death march to the nearest point of purchase.
But here are the vocals accompanying the song, remastered and digitalized, pure in their melody:
Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I have a dream. I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood…”
Ronald Reagan: “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.”
Muhammad Ali: “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”
Barry Goldwater: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Eldridge Cleaver: “You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.”
Neil Armstrong: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Richard Nixon: “I’m not a crook.”
Anonymous, 1965: “Save water: shower with a friend.”
Bob Dylan: “Don’t follow leaders; watch the parking meters.”
Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Martin again, and last, and always: “Free at last! Free at last! Great God almighty, we’re free at last!”
I thought I’d buy it at age fourteen, but I’ve done the Thirties, the Forties, the Fifties, the Seventies and most of the Eighties. And though the sky is no darker, and though the friends have gone to dust, and though the killers of the word are still with us, I must tell you that those who bash the Sixties out of present shame and self-loathing flummox you about a time that this country can be proud of. They are merely trying to devalue Boardwalk and Park Place so they can get you to like living in one of their hotels on Baltic or Mediterranean.
Hotels in which every room is numbere
d 101.
Screw’m. The Sixties were exactly as good as you remember them. The Eighties suck because viewers couldn’t handle Buffalo Bill. And God don’t hear the prayer of the Swaggart.
Cup your hand behind your ear. Listen hard. The song is still being sung. Not as loud, perhaps, but just as sweetly. It’ll all be better in the morning, kiddo.
APPENDIX G
THE DINGBAT APPENDIX
INSTALLMENT 5
Goodness knows why, but my Publisher bristled at my description of publishers as creatures whose ancestors, when their fossilized remains have been dredged out of primordial ooze, sported tails with rattles on them. He assured me he wasn’t taking it personally, but he did bristle. He did not rattle. He is, in fact, a good friend and a fine publisher. And as should be painfully clear, this far along in the book, he is long-suffering with your Humble Author. So let me say this:
I wrote those words of asperity in 1972.
In those days one dealt with a very different kind of publisher than clogs the landscape today. I’m not sure things are better because of this difference in template, but they sure are different.
When I started writing as a professional in 1955, the great multinational epicures had not yet recognized what a banquet could be enjoyed at the groaning board of the American Publishing Industry. Nothing like Michael Milken, junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, greenmail or entrepreneurs who reside in Hokkaido owning the Statue of Liberty existed. Publishing today is a bookkeeper comptroller bottom-line lawyer-festooned forest of conglomerate redwoods, heterogeneous and arrogant, captious and greedy, with its guiding intellects as far from Maxwell Perkins or Alfred Knopf as Paula Abdul is from Bessie Smith.
It is, in brief, a nightmare. For publishers of the sort we revere because of their obstinate adherence to the standards of responsibility and literature-nurturing that was de rigueur in times past. (And you may assume the publisher of this book is one such, for I would not otherwise be with him in this venture.) For agents who care more about a writer-client’s future and art than for how much can be gouged in a cattle-call manuscript auction. For the book-buying public, that has been so often stampeded into buying trash by blanket-bombing hype that it now turns to the tabloids and tv for “quality entertainment”—a cynical statement that speaks for itself. And for authors, who now deal with obdurate, faceless entities who proffer contracts as complex and as heteronomous as the Treaty of Versailles.