I'm delighted by the responses to this review -- clearly the 60s acomplished a great deal, if they can still stir up so much emotion & fire. Previous posters have already given excellent examples of how the 60s changed this culture for the better, so there's no need for me to repeat them. At the same time, I won't try to deny the shadow side that cropped up as well.

Still, it's clear that the incredibly confused & complex period which we label The 60s has already entered the realm of cultural myth, one with the Beats, ther Surrealists, the Transcendentalists, the Romantics, and many others. All of them flourished & faded, yet their influence remains strong to this day. Future generations will rediscover them when they need spiritual ancestors & guides, because they'll be struggling to create their own guiding narratives, their own self-defined lives.

As for the ongoing right wing assault & revisionism re: the 60s ... they wouldn't be so vicious & relentless if they really believed the 60s hadn't accomplished anything, would they? The intensity of their reaction is living proof that they know, somewhere within their dark hearts, that they've already lost.

I'm reminded of something the late John Holt once wrote during that decade: "Beware the man who feels himself to be a slave. He'll want to make a slave of you, too." Isn't that it exactly? Prisoners of their own paranoia & self-imposed chains, it infuriates them to see anyone daring to strive for personal freedom. And rather than cast off their own chains, they want the rest of us to wear them as well.

Erich Fromm defined them well: Necrophiliacs. Lovers of death, destruction, authority, control. Haters of life in all its vitality & messiness. And they'll do their best to impose their universe of death (William Blake's phrase) on the rest of us.

But no matter how hard they try, sooner or later, people begin to break free anyway. It'll happen again, in a new way. It always does.

An absolutely beautiful response, both from Cary & the previous posters!

LW, perhaps another therapist might be helpful. Perhaps some time spent really delving into your soul might be helpful as well.

Whatever you do, you have got to work through the curse of perfectionism, because it will poison every wonderful & meaningful thing you try to create.

Strive to do your best, strive to improve -- yes!

But torturing yourself to make everything perfect will eat your soul alive, because there ain't no such thing as Perfect.

Or, from another angle ...

There's a Zen story about a monk who goes to see a butcher. The monk asks the butcher for the best piece of meat in his shop. The butcher replies, "Every piece of meat here is the best. There is not one piece that is not the best." The monk is enlightened on the spot.

If you're creating something & you're giving it all you've got, that's perfect right there. Some flaws? Part of that moment's perfection.

And keep in mind the first lines of Sylvia Plath's poem "Edge," too:

The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment

Anything alive & vital & vibrant is always changing, never perfectly one thing forever. When something reaches that point of "perfection," it's dead.

Time to start living, LW, with all its beautiful, ragged flaws & imperfections. Because that's the only "perfection" worth having in this world.

Good luck to you!

When some future Edward Gibbon writes "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire," he'll single out Reagan's presidency as the tipping point, the beginning of the inexorable slide into ruin.

I remember RR's reign all too well -- glorifying ignorance, greed, selfishness, and bullying under the pretty gloss of partiotic violence. For the first time since my childhood in the Duck & Cover days, I genuinely feared nuclear war. For the first time since old black & white pictures in high school history, I saw soup kitchens.

Reagan offered an empty, shining illusion, when the country desperately needed the courage to confront its own failures & sins. There was still time to salvage the best of what America had to offer, what had inspired so many people around the world. Instead, too many people bought into the Great Golden Lie & traded their souls for the illusion of moral goodness, and basically told the right wing, "Go ahead, do our thinking for us, just don't make us grow up & act like responsible citizens."

Bush is simply Reagan magnified, without the golden gloss. I weep to think of what we could have been, if only enough of us had rejected the opiate of complacency & America Uber Alles. The America of Tom Paine, of Whitman & Thoreau, of Martin Luther King -- trashed for a self-serving lie.

Amen! That was the era that gave us "Greed is good." And if Oliver Stone meant it as an indictment of the times, it was eagerly embraced at face value by all too many Americans.

And talk about sucking ... remember how popular vampires were in pop culture back then, in novels & films? Aristocratic, wealthy, powerful, self-centered creatures who subsisted off the lifeblood of humanity, who were regarded as faceless & dispensable cattle by their masters. Sound at all familiar?

Reagan & company simply did not care about the majority of Americans, much less the majority of humanity. Oh, they liked to make speeches about Freedom & Honor, while wiping away a manly tear -- but they did their best to exploit the rest of the world for their own comfort & pathetic psychological needs.

Interesting that the pop culture monster du jour these days is the zombie: mindless, devouring the living, bereft of reason & morality, incapable of reflection, shambling endlessly through a ruined world ... yes, GWB is RR's (un)spiritual heir, all right!