WHAT BECAME OF THE SIXTIES?
The "Haight," in Ashbury lived up to its name.
Sexual pioneers became commonplace.
Agribusiness consolidated the back to the land movement.
Joni Mitchell remortgaged all the tree museums.
Flower power became a snivelling joke.
Groovy and way out once again were associated with corduroy
pants & fire exits.
Fascism was taken over and made respectable by Ronald Reagan.
Jewish mothers and landladies outguessed the War on Poverty.
Strobe lights were said to cause cultural myopia.
The Just Society lost another Vietnam.
Rock music recycled itself in "meaningful dialogue."
Innocence learned a lot from experience.
Contemplation of one's navel was resurrected by phenomena
of the eager and job hunting corporate executive.
Long hair became a symbol of displacement.
Au pair girls received a new lease on life.
Tofu and herbal teas survived even the commune experience.
Primal scream, therapy, in the crunch, outdistanced everything else.
[24]
SIXTIES HANGOVER
"We have all been here before.
almost cut my hair;"
the refrain from Crosby, Stills. Nash & Young
reading more like a law firm letterhead than
any invocation for real social change.
Respectability, that first casualty of the eighties.
What, exactly, was a true child of the sixties?
Here's a few safe bets:
Valedictorians were few and difficult to find for their "irrelevant,"
high school peers. Are you listening Paul and Paula?
Cutoffs. Hitchhiking to California?
All is beautiful. Laid back. Beads.
The sixties were a jukebox that came of age.
Ponderosa shirts were destined to outlive their owners.
Thirty-three is perilously close to being afraid.
Elvis Presley, a blimp at forty, missed the sixties or rather
failed to live them down.
The hullabaloo of freedom was taken for granted, then shelved.
Amid a crescendo of killing only a year and one half of the present
decade duplicates the assassinations of the "violent sixties."
Even the cop troupe withered, crooned Eric Burton at Monterrey.
I think not.
[25]