Our younger readers - younger than me, that is - might be interested in the reminiscences of the 60s by six prominent writers and commentators in City Journal.
Let me say that I was there. There is no period of time that is more wrongly romanticized, glorified, and magnified in importance. It was the lunatics trying to run the asylum, and little more. The socio-cultural story of the 60s belongs in the dustbin of history.
Just one quote from Sol Stern's contribution, to tempt you:
The liberal media’s misunderstanding of what the antiwar radicals were all about continued through 1968, and particularly in the commentary about the year’s two biggest explosions: in May, the student uprising at Columbia University; and in August, the violent street demonstrations at the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago. Tom Hayden was back in action for both events. He happened to be in New York when he heard about students’ seizing buildings and imprisoning a dean to protest Columbia’s decision to build a gymnasium in Harlem. Immediately, he rushed to the campus and joined a student “commune” barricaded in one of the buildings. Most of the Columbia student leaders were SDSers well versed in Hayden’s grand project to “bring the war back home.” The whole point was to provoke a confrontation with the New York police, the closest available surrogates for the U.S. military. In a firsthand report on the uprising for Ramparts, Hayden proudly noted that his younger disciples had scrawled on the walls of the occupied buildings an exhortation to “create two, three, many Columbias,” a play on Che Guevara’s call for “two, three, many Vietnams.” Columbia was merely another battle in the plan, and Hayden fantasized that “the U.S. must either change or send troops to occupy American campuses.”
Whether the Vietnam War was a wise idea or not (debatable, as wars usually are), the cultural news of the time was dominated by nihilists, Communists, the drug-addled, and mixed-up adolescents - all magnified by a press who found a pimply "society-rejecting," pot-smoking "hippie" more intriguing than an upright, straight-arrow kid who volunteered for the Marine Corps.
The only consolation for us in the US is that the press in Europe took this BS far more seriously than ours did. Our press just wanted voyeuristic and disturbing new stories to sell magazines and newspapers. Their press wanted a Communist revolution. (They would have been quite surprised, however, if it did happen, to find that they and their friends were not in charge.)
Photo: The appalling and deluded Tom Hayden - Communist, traitor.
