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Entry: Forty Years Later, Undoing '68 Link: http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/forty_years_later_undoing_68#25166 Post contents: If indeed anyone who remembers the ‘60s wasn’t really there – why are there so many tottering relics now unwilling to shut up about the Love Generation? Unfortunately for the rest of us, 2008 brings a milestone – and an excuse for more endless, pompous prattle. (…Although the significance of a 40th anniversary escapes me.) The “uprising” of 1968 provides these grizzled candle-dippers one last chance to relive that time – now strangled in myth - when their unlikely revolution appeared… likely. Imminent, even. For a dwindling selection of dreary, misfit younger folk who grow misty-eyed over long-ago idylls of sex, drugs and manifestoes, this cultural pow-wow affords an excuse to turn all mushy and faux-nostalgic over second-hand oral history and broken-down pop totems. (Our unyielding national reverence for this junk costs us dearly.) But, fact is, by 1968 all the fun had piddled out of the ‘60s, and the jarring turn to what seemed a bright, new path – in Day-Glo – had been co-opted by the tired old dictums of the traditional American left. Forty years down the line, the picture gets a little clearer: The foot-soldiers of the 1968 “revolution” may have mutinied against their parents, mostly – and the perceived corruption and failures of an older, traditional social vision. But I wonder if, for the brainstormers of ’68, this was not about repudiation, but instead was an affirmation of their forebears’ relentless animosity toward all things Not Them, and as so was, for some, at least tacitly understood as a much older covenant with an even hoarier fairy tale. Sent at: 2008 08 29