The sixties, then and now - Culture - Column

Progressive, The, Jan, 1996 by Elayne Rapping

Will the real Grateful Dead please stand up? And when they do, will they please point us toward the real 1960s? Because I for one--a veteran of that infamous decade, and a sometime Dead fan (I have copies of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty in both vinyl and CD)--am getting very confused. The first hint that things were getting seriously twisted in the public mind was the endless prattle, upon the death of Dead leader Jerry Garcia, about "an era" having "ended." Why were people being led to believe that the success of the Dead meant that "the sixties" was, until a couple of months ago, alive and well in Newt Gingrich's America? What had "the sixties" become, anyway?

I kept listening and reading and watching TV, hoping to figure it out, but things just got curiouser and curiouser. For one thing, the parade of well-known public figures who felt the need to publicly declare their personal grief at the death of this "counterculture hero" boggled the mind, politically and culturally. Of course Bill Clinton had to tell us he shared our collective pain. And Peter Jennings seemed sort of plausible if you stretched your imagination. (Think 1968, bell bottoms, long hair and beads; it could work.) But Senator Pat Leahy? And Al and Tipper Gore? Wasn't she the founder, a few years back, of the group that started the now--raging war against socially offensive music lyrics, and the author of a parent's guide to fighting them? Did she perhaps write the thing while listening to the Dead sing "Drivin' that train/high on cocaine"? And there were even Republicans--William Weld and John Kasich--in the public mix of grief and eulogy.

But before I could get my mind around this madness, the next phase of public remembering took place, and things got even murkier. Somebody remembered, inevitably, that these guys were into drugs, that Garcia had in fact died in a rehab center trying to kick a heroin habit. "Oh, that sixties," it suddenly dawned on everyone, "the one we all are supposed to hate now. Well, thank goodness it's finally over, and good riddance to bad ideas and worse music." Forget good old, yuppified "Uncle Jerry Garcia," designer of chic neckwear and namesake of an upscale ice-cream flavor.

George Will's Time magazine column was typical. Decrying "the hot tub of bathos about the sixties occasioned by the death of Jerry Garcia," with its nonsensical evocations of "idealism" and "freedom," Will told of a young couple, Wolfgang and Lisa Von Nester, who abandoned their three-year-old son at a mall, sold their van, and took off for a Dead concert. The point, to Will, was that the Dead and the sixties were responsible for today's cultural and social decline.

"The spirit of the sixties," he wrote, "was, strictly speaking, infantile," based on a refusal of responsibility and an endless quest for cheap thrills and permanent highs through--what else?--sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. "Infantile" as this sixties spirit was, however, Will credited it with enormous power. According to him, the "disdain for inhibitions" and invocation to "do your own thing" have been responsible for "millions of shattered lives and miles of devastated cities." Those are some tough, determined infants.

These two reactions to Garcia's death--the meaningless mourning and the vicious trashing--represent the two dominant media attitudes toward the sixties. The first happily sells "the sixties" as a brand name and pretends not to notice that this product has been processed beyond recognition as it follows the bouncing ball of profits to a place where no hint of the true significance of the era is allowed to follow. In keeping with the mawkish corporate liberalism of the Clintons, and of events like Woodstock '94, this version happily sheds the radical demands of the era and reconfigures it as a time of vaguely longed-for "peace" and "love." Strains of "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine There's No Countries (It's Easy If You Try)" drown out the angrier chants of "Bring the War Home" and "Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker," less cheery, perhaps, but truer to the spirit of the times.

So what was that spirit? And why are the media and other powerful folk working so hard to mystify and obscure it?

First, let's be clear on one thing: despite the lack of political content in media versions of the era, the only reason everyone feels forced to endlessly recall, expound upon, and explain away the sixties at all is that it was, remarkably, even miraculously, an era of enormous, often spontaneous, political activism of a very radical kind. This was the era that gave birth, after all, to the civil-rights, anti-war, student, women's liberation, gay-liberation, and environmental movements, among others. Gender relations, race relations, foreign policy, military matters, issues of sexuality and family dynamics, and matters of personal and political ethics--all of these and more were radically challenged and transformed in the public mind and in public discourse.

Did the Grateful Dead have anything to do with all this? Well, sort of, but not nearly as much as we are being led to believe these days.