Letters to the Editor
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another studied missing of the point
I agree with mdlewis (above). 60s bashing is its own genre in which the caricature, the stereotype, and the straw man are the stock in trade. It was tiresome in the voyeuristic press then and it is tiresome in the snide quasi-histories now.
Of course there were displays of immaturity and outright idiocy back then. But focusing on those things at this point is--let me be tactful here--a display of immaturity and outright idiocy.
Forty years of perspective since I was there, and I have only deepened my sense of the significance of the cultural changes that came into focus then and are still in progress to this very day.
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Even Todd Gitlin thinks it was more or less pointless
Mr Gitlin one of the founders of the SDS now says that the '60's' pretty much didn't accomplish anything and also that this new crop of angry anarchists is even worse. But I'm not sure who this fascinates. Other than every other TV commercial which uses 60's pop music or aging broken down icons like Dennis Hopper, who's really paying attention to that anymore? The 60's? C'mon I was watching retarded MTV program about the '90's' and THAT was like ancient history.
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Is it even the right question to ask?
Arguing whether the counterculture movement achieved anything treats it as a cause of change, good or bad, when maybe it is more useful to see it as an effect, ask why it happened in the first place or what could reasonably have happened in place of it and whether that would have "achieved" anything.
I'm not a historian and was too young at the time to speak from direct experience (and probably would have been too unhip anyway), but I see it as an outgrowth of a general trend over the 20th century. Much of 19th century thinking is marked by the idea of perfectability through rational progress. This applied not only to politics, but mathematics and science as well. Eventually, a long list of results in every field was sufficient to point out the limits of human reason. This was true at the beginning of the 20th century.
I think what happened was a rejection of reason based on disappointment over the fact that it would never solve everything. By the 60s, this had percolated through the culture to the point that otherwise sane people were claiming that everything was subjective and malleable. I don't even know if this was particularly leftwing--the most extreme neoconservatives today seem to believe that reality is a normative belief enforced by power. Somehow the idea of self-expression took over as the greatest good--at least among a small, influential, and relatively privileged group.
To claim that the beats were better or the lost generation was better is also to miss the point. It was part of the same trend--each generation clinging to some past notion of reason, but less so over time.
The 60s could not have accomplished much directly because it was not undertaken with planning or empirical testing. But I wonder if this is really the right question to ask. Young people were testing a cultural belief that they could shape reality by looking inward. It turns out that it is not true, but what could have stopped that test from happening?
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More Than One Way to Do It
Oh please, if it "accomplished nothing" why are we writing about it now, why is it referenced, and why have the books been written?
The professor doest debunk too much!
What's not said is the 60's relationship with the generation before, and the permutations it went through. I was born at the beginning, and saw it all. It's rise, which was spontaneous, and it's fall--aided and abetted by it own excess and radical innocence.
The "greatest generation" were foot soldiers. They got their orders and stuck to the plan. By and large the sixties amounted to a massive generational reaction--of a type that has been happening to a greater or lesser extent in most advanced cultures and times since humans formed cities--not to mention inventing communications that span the globe.
The 60's were different because of it's scope--it was across the board--cultural, political, spiritual, sexual, etc. There is no reason to make the list, everybody knows them. From my perspective, what happened is that the jerks took over as they inevitably do--and that scared the piss out of the old collective agreement--culminating in the conservative backlash that headed back toward the cave.
They were organized, they were realistic, they represented survival and order, "they" won--and "we" became domesticated just like every other generation with a legacy of disillusionment that haunts society and the body politic until this day.
Call it armchair psychologizing or call it common sense, it doesn't matter. That the culture is still dealing with the fallout is no less true and undeniable. The worst was the drugs and the divorce, the best the individuality and the sense there is more than one way to do it.
Perhaps a re-hashing has value for the future, perhaps not. The 60's weren't "planned." A culture doesn't grow and expand that way unless it wants too. The forces that led to the 60's aren't so easily contained and predicted, and certainly not controlled.
America is simply not the America it was before then. I doubt if Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would be running for the presidency if it weren't for them, and this entire discussion taking place. The 60's offered this country a new kind of hope that is still manifesting itself.
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Talk about decoupling!
What always kills me about these assessments of the 60s is the premise that this generation (m...m...m...my generation) sprang fully-grown like, man, totally crazy out of Zeus's head. The fact that we were the offspring of that holiest of holy "greatest generation" never seems to register. What responsibility did that generation of warriors who vanquished fascism and Hitler have for unleashing legions of dopers, rockers, and sex maniacs on the world?
Answer: very damn little. We're talking about kids in both instances. We come into the world and make of it what we can. We react to what's there already. We don't bring tangerine alarm clocks or stock market crashes with us. As left and anti-war as I was back then, I have no doubt that if me and Jerry Rubin and Cassius Clay had been our fathers fathers, we, too, would have been taking fire on Anzio, and they would have been chanting, "Hell no we won't go." The thing about the destiny of generations is that no one sits around in a board room planning what's going to happen. They just freakin' happen, ya dig? That's why we called it a happening.