"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."--The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1965.
Hey, is my generation aging well, or what? As we trailing-edge baby-boomers move into our fifties, skydiving schools are filling up, Harley-Davidsons are selling like the double-pecan special at the Waffle House and botox has become the new viagra.
Boy, I tell you, Dylan Thomas would be proud of us. Nobody "raged, raged against the dying of the light" like our crowd.
I'm as guilty as anyone else. I'm 52 and I just had the braces taken off my teeth. When my father was 52, he decided to head off what he regarded as the inevitable and he had all of his upper teeth pulled out, opting for store-bought. Not me. And if the Crest whitening strips don't work, I'm going to have 'em whitened by a pro. And by the way, if my ship comes in before it sinks, I'm heading for a cosmetic surgeon to get rid of my father's turkey wattle before it gets much worse. (His got so bad that eventually his grandchildren liked to climb in his lap and bat at it like cats playing with a ball of yarn.)
OK. I've made my point, which has been made countless times by others. We baby boomers are (a) vain, and (b) afraid of getting old. (And there's growing evidence that we are also (c) cowardly. Well? Didn't Pete Townshend write in My Generation, "I hope I die before I get old?" '60s bravado. The old geezer is still out there somewhere, huffing and puffing and collecting whatever the Brits call social security.)
Which brings me to my real topic.
There I was, in Frankfurt, Germany, minding my own business. I was 31. Reagan was president, New York baseball was all about the Mets, and you couldn't be a pop star in America unless your act included dancing.
And then it appeared. That issue of Newsweek with the breathless cover story
all about the 20th anniversary of incredible 1968, that Annus Mirabilis, the Year That Changed Everything.
Fast forward. I'm back in Germany again, Bonn this time. Still minding my own business. Now Clinton is president, the Yankees have retaken the attention of New York media, and Marilyn Manson is channeling Alice Cooper for a generation of little shits too young to remember Alice Cooper.
And here it comes again,that issue of Newsweek. Now the breathless cover story is all about the 30th anniversary of incredible 1968, That Annus Mirabilis, The Year That Changed Everything.
The first time around it was kind of pleasantly nostalgic for me. I had nothing to do with the turbulence of the '60s myself; when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated I was only 12 years old. Speak to me of 1968 and what I remember is Tiny Tim.
But now, ten years later, it makes me a little uneasy, and I note it in my journal. Are we going to have to listen to this crap every decade, in the year that ends with an "8," until the last loose-sphinctered old crock who remembers throwing a beer can filled with piss at the Chicago police has gone to the great Woodstock in the sky?
It would seem so. Because if you look at the calendar, folks, we are now in a year ending with "8," and in the immortal words of The Dave Clark Five, "Here they come again."
I'm not sure if I'm quoting with 100 percent accuracy here because I don't have a copy of Dave Barry Turns 50 at my elbow. But that book, published by the way in last decade's "8" year (Barry was born in 1948) contained a sentence that went something like this: "Our convictions gave us the courage to go out and change some things about the world that needed changing. They also turned us into the most self-righteous bunch of assholes who ever lived."
Not to mention the most narcissistic. But calling baby boomers narcissistic has become a cliche on the level of saying that so-and-so got "thrown under the bus." No, the narcissism of my fellow Romper Room-watchers is not what I'm here to discuss.
It's our dishonesty.
Here is what Hemingway would have called "the true gen:" 1968 was no great shakes. The sixties in general were no great shakes. Think I'm an old party-pooper for saying that? Okay, Mr. or Ms. Smarty Pants, hear it from one of your own household gods of the Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out era. Bob Dylan says the sixties were no great shakes. He doesn't even like to talk about them. Dylan, who for so many of you unrepentant geriatic teenagers was the very embodiment of the sixties, has no illusions about them. When he says "Don't Look Back," he means it.
So why don't all of you, who worshipped him when he looked like Cate Blanchett, take his damn advice? Quit selling us this snake oil every ten years that the age of Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman and the Weathermen was some kind of good old days that we should all gee-whiz wish we could board the old Willoughby Express and zip back to?
Bull cookies. The hippies of the 1960s were merely the younger brothers and sisters of the Beats of the 1950s. They picked up on the messages that the Beats espoused and ran amok with them, Vietnam and Civil Rights having generated an atmosphere that encouraged amok-running among kids raised in comfortable suburban households. Their parents had survived the Depression and WWII and were determined that their kids should have it better than they did.
Picture a nursery full of spoiled brats clutching volumes of Herbert Marcuse. And by the way, that's been offered as one of the reasons the Chicago police ran amok at the 1968 Democratic convention and started cracking heads. Most of those beleagured cops were blue-collar types who resented the Yippies throwing rocks at them as much for being the pampered and spoiled children of wealthy suburban parents as for the rock-throwing. I can easily believe it. Kids always think they know everything, and in the sixties they thought it especially loudly.
So what did the wonderful Peace Now, Sex, Drugs & Rock n' Roll sixties, with their Che Guevara T-shirts and Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh buttons actually give us? Well, let's list a few of their legacies: Campus speech codes. Political correctness. Institutionalized reverse racism. A massive welfare state that creates more problems than it solves. Runaway teenage pregnancy. Fatherless homes. A "gender war" now in its fourth decade even though virtually every goal of the 1960s "women's movement" was achieved a long time ago. (But to admit that would put the women who run NOW out of a job, wouldn't it? -- No, the whining must continue, so they can.) More recently, the legacy of the sixties has come out to bite Sen. Barack Obama in the form of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that venom-spewing racist volcano whose hate-whitey bullshit is as quaint as the striped bell bottoms and polka-dot shirts of Carnaby Street, and has been a complete embarrassment to a candidate trying to pitch himself as a unifier.
And here's the real kicker: (You can believe me, I was there. I was young, but I was a precocious kid who noticed things and, just ask my good friend Holly Inder, remembers things.) The country club revolutionaries who now sip Metamucil with their marijuana rather than the Schlitz they slurped when The Fugs and Norman Mailer were doing their thing in front of the Pentagon, want you to believe that the '60s really were this wonderful socialist-utopia never-never land where peace, love and inclusiveness were the preoccupations 24/7 of everyone under 30.
You want to get a real, non-rose-tinted picture of what life in the sixties was like? I can actually recommend a novel that gives a pretty good description of it. Go and dig up Rabbit Redux by John Updike. Published in 1971, its action takes place in 1969, and it sugar-coats nothing. When I first read it, around 1990, I thought "Yeah, this is close to what life in the late sixties was really like."
For those of you young enough to be hoodwinked by all the reflexive nonsense about freedom, idealism and social justice that gets nostalgically regurgitated every time 1968 is under discussion, let me throw some snapshots at you from one who was there:
-- I mentioned Tiny Tim above. He was the hottest thing around in the spring of that year, and no act more unbearable ever trod the boards.
-- In revolutionary 1968, the year the great global communist utopia seemed within reach to anyone and everyone wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and stoned out of their skulls, the top 10 most popular shows on American television included Gomer Pyle, Mayberry RFD and The Beverly Hillbillies.
-- Thousands of hippie romantics, Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi echoing in their heads, headed for the hills to "get back to the land," living in communes and quarreling over whose turn it was milk the goat. Of course, being revolutionary romantics, they wanted to get away from anything and everything they considered "bourgeois," and that included basic hygiene. Pretty soon they were coming down with things like thrush and crab lice, things that can easily be avoided if you use soap and water and don't do stupid things like sharing a toothbrush. How romantic.
-- The Velvet Underground (and Tiny Tim) aside, here are a few of the big radio hits of 1968, a year the Boomer Nostalgia crowd remembers as one long idyll of Beatles, Stones and Jimi Hendrix:
1. Simon Says, by the 1910 Fruitgum Company.
2. 1,2,3 Red Light, also by the 1910 Fruitgum Company.
3. Yummy, Yummy, Yummy by the Ohio Express.
4. I Gotta get A Message To You by the Bee Gees (I wince just thinking about it.)
5. Nobody But Me by the Human Beinz.
6. The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde by Georgie Fame.
7. Playboy by Gene and Debbie.
8. La La Means I Love You by the Delfonics.
9. Tapioca Tundra by the Monkees.
10. And Suddenly, by The Cherry People.
11. Honey by Bobby Goldsboro.
12. Bang-shang-a-lang by The Archies.
13. Chewy, Chewy by The Ohio Express. (Yummy, Yummy Yummy and Chewy, Chewy...Do you see a pattern here?)
14. Dreams of The Everyday Housewife by Glen Campbell. (If you really want to gag, try Wayne Newton's version.)
15. Fire, by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. (His damn shouting set a new standard for annoying.)
16. Here Comes The Judge, by Shorty Long (See below.)
17. In-a-Gadda-da-Vida by The Iron Butterfly (Yes, I know it's considered a cult classic, but Doug Ingle's voice always affected me like fingernails on a chalkboard, and say what you will about that long drum solo, Ron Bushy was a lousy drummer.)
18. U.S. Male, by Elvis Presley. (Some Elvis bitter-enders claim everything he recorded was great. This stinker was three lemons, period.)
19. Little Green Apples, by Roger Miller.
20. Goody Goody Gumdrops, by the 1910 Fruitgum Company. (Anyone see a pattern here?)
Anybody who wants these back can have them.
-- Speaking of goodies, here's one! In 1968, cigarettes were still being advertised on television. There's something I miss like my last attack of diverticulitis.
-- 1968 was the year of the Nehru jacket. For those of you too young to remember what that was, imagine the sartorial equivalent of the hula hoop.
-- Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis (imagine them having sex. Eek.)
-- The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and arrested its president, Alexander Dubcek. (See August, 1968 by W.H. Auden, a truly great expression of outrage over this international outrage.)
-- Director Roger Vadim released Barbarella, starring his then-girlfriend Jane Fonda as some sort of outer-space nymphomaniac. A more eloquent tribute to bad taste was never committed to celluloid.
-- Everybody was going around saying things like "Sock it to me," and "Here come da judge." Let me tell you that got old fast.
-- Everywhere you looked on the road, you saw station wagons.
-- All male teachers dressed exactly alike: short-sleeved white shirt, skinny necktie, black horn-rimmed glasses, crew cut. I swear to God. I was in the 7th grade that year. I remember. All my male teachers looked like members of some doo-wop group for nerds.
-- Telephones were all rotary dial and came in two colors: Black and "Princess."
-- The hottest book of the year was Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, and the airwaves were filled with Dionne Warwick singing the theme song from the stupid movie they made out of the stupid book.
-- The annoying Lyndon Baines Johnson exited the White House and the annoying Richard Nixon followed him into it.
I can't think of much that was very good about 1968. Well, maybe a few things. (1) Women were wearing skirts halfway up their asses. (2) Gasoline was 34 cents a gallon. (3) Don Martin was still drawing cartoons for MAD Magazine. (4) It was the year the Rolling Stones released Jumpin' Jack Flash and also what I consider their greatest album, Beggar's Banquet, and it was also the year the Beatles released the so-called "White" album.
And finally,(5) A year that began with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the illegal seizure by North Korea of the Navy spy ship Pueblo and its crew, ended with Apollo 8 orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve, and astronaut Frank Borman read the opening chapter of Genesis as a holiday greeting to everyone back on earth. (imagine what the ACLU would say about that now.) And then, to follow that up, the Pueblo's crew was released to freedom.
Other than that, take my word for it (and Dylan's). Don't Look Back.
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