Remembering the '60s

Way back in the early '80s, singer-poet-activist Gil Scott Heron rang in the Reagan era with a titanically sad song called "Winter in America." As usual, Scott Heron was on the money. For most of these eight years, it has been cold out there in America, and those who cut their teeth in warmer political climes have had to face some cold, hard facts.

To make matters worse, there were all these damnable anniversaries. It sometimes seemed that every week of the Reagan reign was the 20th, or even 25th, anniversary of some landmark political-cultural event of the fabled '60s -- the Greensboro sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, The Beatles, Selma, the Summer of Love, the March on the Pentagon. All have been duly marked, often mocked, and never understood.

In the world of academe and intellect, the dominant (though hardly unanimous) line on the '60s was reactionary. It was a period when the beast of passion and the specter of equality were loose in the land. In the view of these tenured and granted sages, we're lucky that a man on (cinematic) horseback came along to put the affairs of state back in the dispassionate hands of rich, white men. From the halls of ivy, and the glass-and-steel think tanks, this view has reached out to dominate the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as the "think pieces" of the Siamese-twin news weeklies.

Fortunately, TV never cuts that deep. There it all boils down to the weather-report platitudes of "youthful turbulence" and "calmer times" -- the world according to Willard Scott.

The only people who seem genuinely at home with the '60s are advertisers and marketers, for whom idealism and nostalgia are both, like sex, merely value-free human impulses which, when properly massaged, can inspire the purchase of commodities. Rolling Stone magazine also belongs in this category for its clever, network-subsidized 20th anniversary campaign which turned the erstwhile legacy of a generation into the slickest circulation-building device this side of the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

Among "the Left" or "the movement" or whatever you call it, the '60s is still the subject of some discomfort. The Utopian aspirations and self-absorbed excesses are downright embarrassing. But renunciation is tantamount to treason, or worse yet, surrender. So what we usually get is awkward silence, or a that-was-then shrug-off.

Recently some of the surviving white, male politico-intellectuals of the era have gotten around to writing their books, notably Todd Gitlin's The Sixties and James Miller's Democracy in the Streets. Both set out to rescue the '60s' first half as a high-water mark of American radical democratic theory and practice, and thus sidestep the wretched excesses, political and pharmacological, of the decade's latter third.

THIS SPRING, OF COURSE, brings us to the ultimate 20th anniversary. It was 20 years ago that, at the time everything seemed possible, but in fact everything started falling apart. In 1968 The System seemed to be failing, and revolution was supposedly in the air. This perception was fed by the insurrectionary intoxication of Paris, Columbia University, Chicago, and the black urban rebellions.

But those insurrections turned out to be only distractions. They led far too many radicals into a self-isolating "Third Worldist" orbit that was and, to the extent it survives, still is completely out of touch with the perceptions and felt needs of most Americans.

That isolation was intimately related to the two assassinations of '68. Martin Luther King Jr., aside from being the movement's most eloquent and charismatic spokesperson, was also in many ways the glue that held the movement together. He was the main link between the black civil rights movement and the young, white anti-war movement, and he was increasingly strengthening his links to the labor movement. And only that confluence of forces could have given real-world flesh and blood to any kind of substantial, systemic change, "revolutionary" or otherwise. When he was murdered, the movement lost its focal point, and increasingly its parts spent less time talking to each other and more time fighting among themselves.

Bobby Kennedy was, of course, nobody's revolutionary. But he was a politician with an unusual passion for justice, a passion apparently fed by his genuine Catholic faith. He was also a politician with his ear to the ground who sensed the new forces stirring in America. He wanted to be the one to channel those incipient forces into electoral politics, specifically into votes for himself for president.

Kennedy was, at least potentially, the movement's passport into the mainstream. He wasn't "of the movement," but he had movement leaders, most notably activist-politician Tom Hayden, whispering privately into his Left ear. Kennedy was the political vehicle through which some movement ideas, like ending the war, could become policy, while other, more far-reaching goals would at least become credible subjects of debate.

Ironically, 20 years after the dashing of all those grandiose hopes, we have a chance to start over. Marketing based on the '60s is so successful partly because there really is a latent and distinctly un-ideological idealism stirring again out there in America. Jesse Jackson's crossover successes are proof of that. But so is the way other candidates have stumbled over each other trying to copy Jackson's message.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.