It has long been understood that history is written by the winners. Those who emerge from a conflict victorious spend reams of paper and gallons of ink describing the bravery of their forces, the Herculean efforts necessary to overcome a vile, corrupt enemy who deserved to be soundly thrashed on the battlefield.
History is not always accurate.
I’ve spent a good portion of my life fascinated by the culture of America in the 1960s. For the record, while most historians probably would not agree with me, I am of the firm belief that the American period commonly thought of as “the Sixties” began November 22, 1963 and ended April 29, 1975 (these dates were very specifically chosen; ask if you don’t know why). A properly trained historian will tell you that “the Sixties” has its seeds in whatever movement and political party power combined to get John F. Kennedy elected President. This, too, is a simplistic view.
In some ways part of the allure of that particular period in history, not just in America but in places like Paris, London, and Prague, is that it was a time of great upheaval, of social and political change unlike anything we’d ever seen before. True, much of that change began with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 but much of it was an affront to the basic tenants held by many of the church-going folk who supported Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to secure equal rights for Black Americans.
Free love, drug culture, the sexual revolution (began in 1960 with the approval of the pill and still hasn’t ended as far as I can tell) had several loci a major one being the neighborhood known as The Haight in San Francisco.
Cheap rooms in huge 19th century Victorian houses, available because of a downturn after World War II, made The Haight a haven for poets, musicians, druggies, and those more interested in grooving on the universe than working for their living. Culturally The Haight meant art, self-expression, and freedom from the strictures of mainstream society, a place where you were as likely to find a bong for sale as you were whole grains, soy, and sprouts. It meant alternatives to the nuclear family and being a wage slave. It meant a life that was tangential to the expectations of mainstream culture, that took what it needed from the culture and molded it into something usable while discarding the rest.
The hippies, free love, commune culture all bumped up against changing social ideals: that free speech was a right belonging to all Americans, including those under 18, that all the people affected by the decisions of government had a right to help decide who would be making those decisions through the electoral process (though we still haven’t cured the “you can be drafted but you can’t buy a beer” (no, being able to drink on Post isn’t enough) problem, though).
Perhaps I’m being too naive, too blinded by myth – most war protestors didn’t actually burn their draft cards and a lot of the anti-war sentiment had more to do with not wanting to die in a muddy jungle 14,000 miles from home than it did with the fact that we didn’t belong in Vietnam (or that starting a land war in Asia is about as dumb an idea as invading Russia from the west in October) – to see that the history that has been written about that time ignores what came after it.
It ignores the fact that free love, some mind altering experiments with marijuana and LSD, and the rejection of “traditional values” turned into the Me Generation of the 1970s, self-indulgence, cocaine, and EST, that the little brothers and sisters of the hippies went right to college and voted in 1980 to elect Ronald Reagan, and the fact that no culture can sustain that amount of systemic change for a long period of time. Without a galvanizing force, like the Vietnam war (or perhaps the war in Iraq?), keeping up that frenzied a level of social change is equivalent to an hour-long orgasm; desired, perhaps, but not really achievable. |
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The revolution, when it came, was indeed televised. We just didn’t notice because they did it in the spaces between plays during Monday Night Football.
Reference:
- Gil Scott Heron: “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Bluebird RCA, 1974.
- Haight Ashbury, Wikipedia