I’m writing this to put into words, no matter how faltering and naive, the immense longing I have for the 1960s and 70s. Yesterday, I got another poignant reminder of those days listening to Joan Baez sing “We Shall Overcome.” Tears ran down my cheeks in exquisite nostalgia not only for those days but also for what they heralded for our future. I think everyone who took part in our counterculture movement knows what I mean.
Hunter Thompson, the most tapped-in journalist of those years, said it best, prophesying that we were on the cusp of a new day, an “inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…”
But the wave broke too soon: “So now … you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Tragically, our vision receded into a nightmarish parody of itself — one that is still continuing, even in the privacy of my home. For example, when I recently sought out Joan’s haunting voice to remind me of the magic of those days, I got more than I bargained for.
Like Alice in Wonderland, I got sucked down the internet rabbit hole controlled by corporate Big Brother and found myself buried in an avalanche of YouTube clips about 60s music and anything remotely connected to those times.
But it didn’t stop there.
That same day, Russet ordered watercolor paints on her separate internet account. Wouldn’t you know it: soon thereafter, watercolor tutorials started popping up on my screen like a rash of teenage pimples.
The experience reminded me of “The Truman Show,” one of the most disturbing movies I have ever seen. It stars Jim Carrey as Truman, who was unaware, until he was 30, that he had lived his entire life on a constructed reality television show.
Reconnecting to that movie reminded me in Living Technicolor that I, like Truman, have become a pawn in someone else’s game.
It’s true the 1960s counterculture did not achieve the utopian transformation we had hoped for, but, on the other hand, we never received credit for what we did accomplish: jump-starting the environmental movement, the women’s movement, gay liberation, the organic food movement and a fundamental shift in attitudes toward authority, conformity and individual expression. All of these trace their modern forms to the 1960s counterculture.
Trump is correct: we are “woke!” We awakened from the nightmare of the 1950s. We saw through the veneer of white, middle-class prosperity and corny sitcoms, sensing that a reckoning was near.
We intuited that the 1950s version of middle-class life we grew up in was a fantasy, a cozy white-cloud projection based on massive denial about what was really happening.
Women were discriminated against and largely confined to domestic roles; systemic racism was alive and well; the fear of communism fueled widespread paranoia, ruining many lives and careers through unfounded accusations; a strong emphasis on conformity stifled individuality and creativity; and the heightened threat of nuclear war led some parents to build bomb shelters while we kids practiced “duck-and-cover,” cowering under our school desks during air-raid drills.
Trump’s whole schtick is to outlaw our “wokeness” and turn the clock back to the 1950s. But as Kamala Harris proclaimed, laying down a marker: “We are not going back.”