After All These Years – Excerpt
That’s not what conventional wisdom would have us believe. Conventional wisdom says that privileged young people-be they the flappers of the twenties or the hippies of the sixties-will sow their wild oats but ultimately settle down to become pillars of the established order. It happened to Jerry Rubin, the fun-loving anarchist of the sixties who became the moneygrubbing stockbroker of the eighties. It happened to ex-Ramparts editors Peter Collier and David Horowitz, now unabashed right-wing apologists. The media tell us it has happened to almost everyone. “Many former radicals or dropouts have become entrepreneurs,” a 1978 U.S. News and World Report article states with confidence. In another late seventies report, 60 Minutes reporter MorleySafer, whilestrolling down Berkeley’sTelegraph Avenue, observes, “there seems to be little here that’s counter about the counterculture.” And Collier and Horowitz, in The Destructive Generation, their enthusiastic trashing of the sixties, write: “When the revolution in the streets that the New Left yearned for failed to happen, most of its members disappeared-into health foods, jogging, business school, entrepreneurship and yuppiedom.”
On the small and wide screens, sixties hippies are eighties yuppies, yesterday’s activists are today’s narcissists. In two of the past decade’s most popular statements about the fate of baby boomers, The Big Chill and “thirtysomething,” characters rhapsodize about their romantic radical pasts while living self-centered, apolitical lives. The message is clear: Sixties radicals were just a bunch of kids out to have a good time.