We Are All Still Prisoners of the Sixties
31st March 2022
And it’s not a good look.
In her 1970 essay “On the Morning After the Sixties,” author Joan Didion recalled a Berkeley autumn weekend seventeen years earlier when she was reading Lionel Trilling in a fraternity house instead of going to the football game, a collegiate occasion fixed in the memory of an earlier era, “so exotic as to be almost czarist.” It suggested “the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies,” Didion observed in her crisp, distinctive tone.
Before the Sixties, youthful elites were close enough to their patrimony to respect its intellect, energy, values and travail. Liberal guilt, such as it was, rarely went further left than Rockefeller Republican.
Even for all the disjunction and soul-searching, the Sixties retained a silent and stolid majority. The most whacked-out mid-centurion could not escape a model, a norm, and, if one sought entrée into prestigious or powerful circles, a style and a persona. A perimeter of the imaginable fenced in the id and its extremes.