The Other Sixties
by Bruce Bawer
... It’s haunting to read chronologically through the confident newspapers and newsmagazines of the early 1960s while knowing the end of the story. The clock was winding down, and the America that people expected to continue along much the same path for years to come would soon be gone forever. Yet no one realized. “One knew in one’s bones,” observed the anonymous “Talk of the Town” columnist in The New Yorker’s issue of May 18, 1963, “that 1936 was prewar. . . . In 1963, we are surely . . . in the post-postwar period. It does not, though, have the feel of prewar days that 1936 had.”
But war was already under way. Though the conflict in Indochina was by 1963 a present reality, no one foresaw the consuming, destructive, all-transforming struggle it would become. No one foresaw the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the Paris Commune, the sit-ins, the riots, the Summer of Love, Woodstock. Those events would take place in, and shape, another world.
Nor did anyone foresee the Kennedy assassination—the event that, for everyone alive at the time, was decisively transitional. In retrospect, to be sure, the transition was presaged by several other developments in 1963: the death of John XXIII on June 2, the murder of Medgar Evers on June 12, the March on Washington for civil rights on August 28. Yet November 22, 1963, was the watershed. By December, Time was noting “a mounting tide of conservatism” in politics and religion; in February 1964 the Beatles arrived in New York; 1965 would see seizures of campus buildings by college students and riots in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. “Sixties” music, “Sixties” politics, “Sixties” culture took hold. And as they did so, the American consensus (or the illusion thereof) unwound, and centrist liberalism faded away, its adherents scattering to both left and right, becoming part of the nascent New Left, or of the movement that would come to be called neoconservatism, or, in some cases, just hovering between, uncertain, rudderless, alienated by the rhetoric on both sides. Americans who had marched together at Selma would be at each other’s throats, fighting over busing, food stamps, crime, affirmative action, “moral equivalence,” political correctness, prayer in the schools, abortion, homosexuality.
Though new issues occupy the front burner, that polarization endures today, and the concept of civic obligation—so central to the early 1960s—has long since been supplanted by a reflexive cynicism and a tendency to judge all public discourse by its entertainment value. Who, in the early 1960s, would have imagined that 40 years later the best-selling books on public affairs would be not earnest tracts on poverty and the environment but crude partisan rants by the likes of Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, Al Franken, and Michael Savage? Likewise, the respectably middlebrow common culture of the early 1960s is only a memory, as is the pipe dream of an America enchanted by serious literature and classical music; instead we have American mass culture, a worldwide economic powerhouse that transforms almost everything it touches. And though that mass culture is, admittedly, large and diverse—and fragmented—enough to include many bright spots, it also has staggering depths of vulgarity, is aimed (largely) at 12-year-olds, and has little regard for intelligence, seriousness, or wit. The early 1960s’ naiveté may be gone, but philistinism and ignorance thrive unashamed. In a time when many Americans appear far more eager to be coarsened than to be edified, the early 1960s look very attractive indeed. ...
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Carl