[Author’s Name]
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Essay on The events of 1960
The sixties were an exciting, revolutionary, turbulent time of great social and technological change: assassination, unforgettable fashion, new musical styles, Camelot, civil rights, gay and women's liberation, a controversial and divisive war in Vietnam, the first manned landing on the moon, peace marches, World's Fairs, flower power, great TV and film and sexual freedom. There were allot of ways to get hurt in the sixties, from firefights in Vietnam to drug overdoses in student apartments. Most of us survived, to face a different kind of sixties risk: nostalgia. Nostalgia is probably as hallucinatory as any drug, and certainly more dangerous to the memory than any LSD induced "flashback." As a means of resisting its effects, let's evoke the skepticism of someone born after 1970, someone who might be more receptively curious about the sixties if there weren't already so many oldies stations on the radio, someone whose voice has no trace of a lump in it when pronouncing the word Woodstock.
The process of rewriting history that has taken place since the Sixties is instructive, for it involves a combination of explicitly ideological Sixties-bashing and the implicitly ideological commodification of the era. Sixties bashing has been almost formulaic in its use of propaganda techniques. First, the most excessive forms of mindless militancy, drugged euphoria, or narcissistic self-indulgence (and, as noted, these did exist) are detached from the lived histories that help to explain them historically or personally (a process helped by mass media accounts of the '60s). This is rather like seeing man in the street screaming and gesturing wildly, then ridiculing his behavior without noticing that behind him his house was burning down. (Piedmont Triad, NC)
These images or selective personal memories are then held out as representative of "the Sixties." Only through such a process could Jonathan Yardley write in 1987......
