People Who Offer Historical Analyses of the 1960s Generally Have Not Done Enough Acid

I’m watching the History channel and they began this program with the words “In the 1960s…” and that sets me back.  The program is actually about London gambling clubs in the 1960s – an ocean, a half a continent, and a couple of social classes separated from my experiences, but still, it gave me the inspiration.

Good times

The problem is, whenever i see a retrospective of the ’60s (disclaimer: I’m actually more of a 70s person – I was 15 in 1969) i wind up shouting at the TV screen even though they’re not actually lying, most of the time.  They’re just missing the point.

Yes, guys had long hair and everybody wore bell bottom trousers and t-shirts and headbands and lots of bead necklaces, but it wasn’t a fashion statement.  It was an anti-fashion statement.  It was like “I’m not going to look like anything that anybody wants me to look like.”  Bit of youth rebellion.  Happens in every generation.

So, that wasn’t it.

There were a lot of drugs, for sure, but there’s still a lot of drugs, maybe even more now.  There was a lot of opium in San Francisco in the 1890s, and laudanum.  I suspect that ancient Druid witch doctors probably drank a lot of crazy mushroom tea.

So, it wasn’t the drugs that made the 60s unique.

The music was great, of course, and had a transformational effect on the relationship of music to culture, but every decade produces some great bands and a fair bit of crap that eventually is, fortunately, forgotten.  Remember Freddy and the Dreamers? (actually, I quite liked Freddy and the Dreamers, but nobody talks about them any more)

Still, even the music wasn’t quite it.  It wasn’t quite the thing that made the 60s different from every other decade in recent memory.  It wasn’t quite the thing that makes people speak of that decade, and think of that decade, with a bit of reverence.  It wasn’t quite the thing that made the 60s not just different from other decades in the ways that each one is different, it was different from them all, in some fundamental way.

It was a decade which actually had it’s own philosophy, it’s own vision of what it wanted to be, how it wanted to define itself:  Love everybody, share everything, do whatever it is that feels good.

It was a noble vision.  If enough of the human race had lived up to it, we would have been living in a Utopian society, without poverty, war or hate for the last 40 years.  We’d have legal marijuana, too.

But not everybody loves everybody.  Almost nobody’s willing to share everything and some people aren’t willing to share anything.  And, for some people, doing whatever they like involves doing some really nasty stuff to other people.

So, the hippie movement eventually died.  But I keep hoping it will come back some day.