Things changed in 1969, but underneath it all, we didn't http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/41004
02/17/2009 By MARK PATINKIN, The Providence Journal There's a new book out that brings an unsettling reminder. It's called "1969 -- The Year Everything Changed." It claims, credibly, that 1969 was the height of the youth culture. The grim reminder is that its publication comes on the year's 40th anniversary. I guess those of us who were part of it aren't youths anymore. The author, Rob Kirkpatrick, 41, examines the era as an observer. At the time, he was 1 year old. He does a fine job cataloguing the main events, like Chappaquiddick and student strikes, and makes a good case that while 1968 was more about politics, 1969 was about the culture. I was 16. Though it was a time of upheaval, it strikes me that many things were simpler. The closest anyone got to texting was passing notes in class. Playlists all came in pre-determined order on vinyl records. You did not have to take your shoes off before boarding an airplane. I didn't know a single woman who had a belly-button ring or a tattoo above her rear end. Typewriters occasionally jammed, but never wiped out your data. Toyota made tinny junk, no one had heard of AIDS and people did not walk around the mall talking out loud into Bluetooth earpieces. I understood things in 1969. Usually, when folks recall that year, they focus on the drama -- street demonstrations and Woodstock. There's an impression everyone was caught up in big events. But there was another side. At least for people around my age, if you looked past the bell-bottoms and long hair, young folks had the same concerns as in most times. I remember reading a book called "The Strawberry Statement," written at age 19 by James Simon Kunen, who was in the epicenter of student protests at Columbia. He fancied himself an heir to the great revolutionary movements in history, but paused during one fiery meeting to wonder whether Lenin paid as much attention to the chest size of his fellow female revolutionaries as he did. Boys, even the radical kind, remain boys. It was typical enough. You didn't turn on your lava lamp with your male friends and talk about rebelling against the Establishment, or if you did, you quickly moved on to the subject of girls, music and sports. Back then, Kareem Abdul Jabbar was still Lew Alcindor, and both the Mets and the Celtics were 1969 champions. Harmon Killebrew hit 49 home runs, presumably without the help of steroids. I'm still convinced it was not 40 years ago, but distance offers perspective, and it's clear my 1969 experience wasn't just about the counterculture. I did wear bell-bottoms and longish hair, but even as we rebelled against the more traditional 1950s era, we were influenced by it, and not in a bad way. One prominent movie of that year was "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice," which was all about free love and group therapy -- an early reflection of Tom Wolfe's "Me Decade." But 1969 was also the year that John Wayne starred in "True Grit," for which he won the Best Actor Oscar. I may have been listening to the Stones and Hendrix, but on some level, Wayne, a classic pre-'60s conservative icon, was a shaping influence, too. It's easy to forget that both "Gunsmoke" and "Bonanza" were Top 10 TV shows in 1969, and Clint Eastwood was a superstar. Even if you horrified your father by arriving home one day with love beads around your neck, there was something in the American male DNA back then that made you want to be a self-reliant cowboy. Similarly, I may have worn ripped jeans and sandals, but I often daydreamed about being a short-haired, tuxedoed James Bond. I don't think the two things were a contradiction. We were more normal than we looked. The year also embodied contrast in the way people my age saw America. Richard Nixon was president, and may have been embraced by what he that year called the "Silent Majority," but he was a reviled figure among the young. Most kids were vehemently against our foreign policies, not just the big one, Vietnam, but the sense that we backed dictators if it was good for American business. We were angry, and alienated. And yet. I went to a monthlong summer journalism program at Northwestern University for high-school students, and on July 20, dozens of us were crowded into a dorm lounge, watching a real-time black-and-white image of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the moon. I still remember the exhilaration. We resented America, but at certain moments, couldn't have been prouder of it. That was 1969. It was indeed a year in which everything changed; and yet the unwritten story is that, underneath, so much of it was the same. -- (mpatinkin(at)projo.com.) . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
