Is the image of the sixties as presented in today's sound-bite media an overgeneralised and unfair stereotype? Probably. Yet Taylor should be careful in asking us to take second glances at the often overshadowed strains of goodness and decency in that decade. Those unfamiliar with that period are likely to be shocked to discover just how conservative most of the political ideals and icons of that age really were.

Also, doesn’t Taylor have any sense of irony? She's written a piece bemoaning how the stink of the sixties haunts the modern liberal. Her solution - return to the rhetoric of the sixties.

It is all very simple. The Democrats tried to conduct a war of policy with draftees--insanity.

The result was an orgy of contrarian resistance, as cowardice became the handmaiden of treason.

Fear so corrupted the debased of the worst generation that they cheered for enemy victories and American losses. They waived enemy flags, carried little red enemy tracts, and betrayed theirt country's traditions.

"Progressives," you call them? Pfui! We have seen what kind of progress they embraced to rationalize their disgrace.

My mother was the first person in her family to ever go to college and she had to bust her butt to do so, as well as to deal with all sorts of family crises. And she nearly lost a semester of work because some idiots decided to "take over" campus during finals week. This Astra Taylor and her ilk were and are scum.

Astra hmm? Let's all guess which kind of parents she had, poor thing? The 60's and 70's? Yeah, I lived through it and being young and foolish myself at the time, I had little faith We, the People would be able to survive.

Then it became morning again in America, and I no longer despaired. Now my faith that we can weather anything is very strong. No matter what come may, we'll be the last people standing.

The Sixties is typified by the 'Summer of Love' in San Francisco. In fact, that 'phenomenom' lasted literally a summer, before devolving into heroin junkies ripping off everything in sight. Oh, what could have been.

oj: You're correct about the '70s. Most of the rock'n'roll associated with the 60's is from the early 70's.

David Frum's How We Got Here did a terrific job diagramming how so many of today's issues first arose in the 1970s, not the 1960s. This 2000 review by Sean Hackbarth does a good job of explaining Frum's thesis.

What strikes me about the 60's is not that the young revolted and partied, which has happened before, but that authority reacted so timidly to it all and just gave in. Churches, schools, governments and parents from the most prosperous, free and and successful era in history all just threw up their hands in self-doubt and stayed quiet. Aside from Buckley and the odd Hayakawa, almost no one challenged it head-on for quite a few years. Can anyone recall a major mainstream book from the 60's that did?

Peter: I thought it was a common interpretation that the WWII generation made a "deal" with the Boomers (to the extent that generations can make "deals" with each other)--the "Greatest Generation" got complete financial security for their entire lives via whatever tweaks were necessary to keep SS solvent this long, and the Boomers got to do whatever they wanted with social & moral norms.

Hey b. we're the folks between the greatest and the boomers. What do we get, other than agida, I mean?

Peter:

Yes, it was the fault of the parents, not the children.

erp

Maybe Astra is a mormon

Maybe there was some kind of implied deal, as b says. But maybe much of the generation of the Depression, WWII, Korea was too tired to contend with their kids. Not all, of course, but too many. Just a thought.

erp:

So far from glory and so close to arthritis.

jd:

Close. Rather they felt that the Depression and WWII had entitled them not to bother parenting well. They are the generatioon that consciously dodged responsibiliy--they just bred that into their kids.

A lot of people at the time blamed it all on Dr Benjamin Spock, who back in the 1940s wrote the playbook for rearing the Boomers. Spock's text advocated what later became known as permissiveness.

In the late 60s Spock was in the forefront of the anti-war protests.

OJ: yes, I've always thought of them as the worst generation.

Great, you lived spent yur childhood in the depression and your young adulthood fighting Nazis and Japs. But the most important responsibility you had was raising the next generation. And you screwed it up.

Peter: though this isn't a book, there were some adults who stood up to the punk kid bullies:

In January 1969, after demands were rebuffed to reappoint sociology professor Marlene Dixon and allow students to participate in faculty hiring decisions, a group of students took over the Administration Building. Levi's [UChicago Prez] actions were watched closely since many campuses faced similar protests. While refusing to call in police or use force to get the students to leave, Levi also refused to capitulate to their demands. He consistently referred to the higher goals of academic freedom and discussion which should govern action on campus. After two weeks of occupation without result, the students voted to leave the building. University disciplinary committees summoned 165 students for hearings, expelling 42 and suspending 81 more. Reflecting later, Levi commented, "There are values to be maintained. We are not bought and sold and transformed by that kind of pressure.

I remember Levi as being still held in high regard when he left to become Ford's Atty General.

And yes, the "Greatest Generation" should not get a pass for being lousy parents just because they had a hard start and did a good job during the 1940s. And I think that's what makes a Baby Boomer, not the year of your birth, but whether or not your parents were young adults during that period. If your parents actually went to sock hops in the '50, you aren't a Boomer, but if you are the last of a family of six, born in 1958, you are.

Second of nine. 1947. Guess my parents were not part of the greatest generation. Except they really were. Held the fort. Bless 'em.

At the height of the 60's I was living in the middle of downtown Baltimore. They had the things going on at the universities which seemed to me as a college grad in 1960 and Army vet from 1960-1963 like Little Jack Horner. They were so damned proud of themselves for burning everything down and taking over everything. What did not get played up so much was the group that was not in college and was tagging along for the drugs and the music. They used to hang out in the parks downtown and do drugs. They spend their days tripping out and stealing from each other and following the postmen around to steal the social security checks and welfare checks. It got so bad in Baltimore that the city paid cab fare for the welfare recipients to come down for their checks. That is what I remember from the 1960's. The Boomers remember the Woodstock and the college stuff. What about the rest of that generation. They were lost and ripped off by their friends. You would see the kids from the suburbs who would go home to steal from their parents and come back down and get ripped off for their stash. You would see them sniffing Weldwood (?) or airplane glue, smoking banana skins because it was supposed to get them high. My neighbors, 2 student nurses, kept telling me that sex was fantastic on LSD, then one of them tried to jump out of a 10th story window while on LSD because her boyfriend had screwed her roommate. The druggies terrorized the old people to the point that the old people were afraid to go out of their homes. What a miserable bunch of years.

I still remember a guy who taught where I did at college. He was canned because he spent the class time dealing pot to his students and lecturing them on Country Joe and the Fish. I got his classes and had to almost whip them to get them back to where they needed to be. A couple of months later I saw him selling mens clothing on Wisconsin Ave. Then a couple of years after that there was an article in Time Magazine about the new fad of religion. That schmuck was photographed baptizing kids in the swimming pool and he was supposedly their new guru. The man was a total sleaze but that didn't matter. He was the wave of the future.

To sum up, my recollections of the 1960's was a bunch of kids pushing the limits and nobody having the guts to tell them enough was enough, so they just kept pushing and believing if it feels good, it is good. The adults failed them then and we are still paying the price for that. Luckily I think this new generation is trying to make up for the previous one and is rejecting their values. I am totally in awe of the young men and women in uniform and what they are proving themselves capable of doing. I just wish we had taught them more and I just wish our Boomer generation supported them better. I am afraid that the Boomers will lose another one by not supporting the truth. Lord knows we aren't getting it from the media.