A Brief Line of Inquiry: The Sixties

When Jefferson Airplane appeared on American Bandstand in 1967, Dick Clark’s questions addressed the Sixties counterculture’s challenge to social norms. The band’s answers are brief but interesting, and one in particular got me to thinking: How should we judge the Sixties?

 

I especially like this part:

Dick Clark: Older people worry, they see the way you’re dressed, they hear your music, they don’t understand. Do parents have anything to worry about?

Paul Kantner: I think so. Their children are doing things that they didn’t do, and they don’t understand it.

Kantner’s answer evokes a vision of Sixties rebellion, a vision that runs deeper than slogans like “love and peace,” a vision that marks an event (previous post), a vision that destroys an old order so it can open new possibilities, an emancipatory vision. You know that society that we’re always talking about, the one at the heart of the culture wars, the one where everyone is free to explore their potential, broaden their minds and project themselves freely regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual orientation and so forth? Well, that’s what they had in mind.

When I was growing up, the Sixties were a big topic and the attitude was generally positive. The Baby Boomers had come to run the show and were looking back at their youth. Enough time had passed to make the media interested in a retrospective. Golden oldies radio stations abounded and parents lectured their children about how superior the music had been back in the day. Pundits embraced the hippies’ vision as sincere if nothing else, discussed Camelot in tones by turns reverential and scandalized, and debated and redebated the Vietnam War. Everyone knew the Sixties weren’t all good, but let it be known those years had some substance.

However, the Sixties had already proven a bit of a disappointment. As a kid, nothing could bore me more than The Big Chill or Thirtysomething, and to this day I’ve never watched much of either, but my impression was always of Boomers gaining weight, getting divorced, and finding themselves lost after the promise of the Sixties had vanished. One year, they were poking daisies in the barrels of rifles held by National Guardsmen, smoking weed and making free love. A blink of an eye later and they were crunching numbers in cubicles, failing to lose weight, and fighting with exes over the kids.

Jefferson Airplane provides a good example. When Kantner and some other members of the group went on to form Jefferson Starship, a legal squabble over the name ensued. That's hardly the Woodstock spirit. And in her autobiography Somebody to Love?, Grace Slick herself describes her participation in Starship (yet a third band) as selling out. And as much as I love Starship, its music is all Mannequin while Jefferson Airplane’s lyrics sound more like a rant from the firebrand Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (previous post):

     We are forces of chaos and anarchy

     Everything they say we are we are

     And we are very proud of ourselves

     Up against the wall

     Up against the wall motherfucker

     Tear down the walls

          --“We Can Be Together,” Jefferson Airplane.

A 1970 performance:

 

Critics say the Sixties counterculture warriors were supposed to “tear down the walls,” but instead they caved on their ideals and became yet another generation of stiffs, the generation that created a good number of the messes facing the world today and continues to stand in the way of fixing them.

Allan Bloom offered scathing criticism in his book The Closing of the American Mind (1987). According to him, student protesters in the Sixties were a bunch of improperly educated, uncultured rowdies trying to disguise skipping school and taunting their elders as fighting for justice. When universities began caving to their demands, it was like adults ceding authority to children.

Much about Bloom’s criticism is ludicrous--like his running comparison of student protesters with Nazis--but is there not a hint of juvenile attitude in Jefferson Airplane’s interview with Dick Clark? The band members exchange glances and snicker like kids allowed to hang out with the adults, or like high schoolers smug over a prank in class. This suggests that the vision out of San Francisco may have been little more than hijinks. In retrospect, might we not see in this an indication of the movement’s quick demise?

So how should we judge the Sixties?

The answer is obvious: We need not judge any decade as wholly good or bad. The times deserve a full exploration in their complexity. This inquiry is one I will continue, but at the moment I feel that while the aspirations of the Sixties were a dream that has ended, that dream has not been forgotten and thus still holds potential. Perhaps, looking back to the Sixties for inspiration, we can still do what our forbearers didn’t, and in so doing take the world, if not to utopia, then at least a step closer.