Buy it here: PowellsKen Kesey lumbers through the door of his house, laughing, talking, harumphing, shaking the persistent Oregon rain from his plaid golfer's cap. He's wearing jeans, a fuchsia and yellow tie-dyed T-shirt and, under his work boots, fire engine red socks. Behind him trail Pranksters Zonk, Babbs and Hagen. In the kitchen, Faye is brewing tea.It could be 1964, when day-glo field marshal Kesey led his psychedelic troops on the cross-country bus trip that both symbolized and heralded the coming counterculture. It could be 1968, when Kesey, fresh out of jail from a marijuana conviction, returned to the family farm, parked the bus aIongside the barn, wired the trees for sound and gathered the Prankster survivors around him.But it isn't. It's 1988. And Ken Kesey-52, balding, with grown kids and a 60-acre farm-is still at it."I'm a member of the tie-dye mafia," he says. His grin is at once beatific and goofy. "And my belief is: Ya nevah quits da mob."Kesey's mob, in fact, is pretty much intact. The key Pranksters moved to Oregon with him twenty years ago, and they're still there, partying, picnicking, planning political stunts, musical extravaganzas and cultural blowouts. And there's plenty of evidence that the larger mob is also still around-in Berkeley, Boulder, Austin, Madison, New England, upstate New York and anywhere the seeds of the sixties rooted and took hold."I don't know anyone who has been involved in all this seriously who has ever quit," says Kesey. "All the people I know are working just as hard, and they're becoming very skillful at it." He thinks for a moment. "The Grateful Dead's a good example. These guys have never got off the elevator, saying, 'Okay, here's as high as we're gonna go. We gonna get off at Menswear.' They're still on the elevator, and they're going to go as high as they can."Kesey tips back in the rickety chair that's usually in front of Faye's sewing machine and puts his feet up on the couch. Through the thin walls of the old house you can hear Bahbs and Zonk laughing. "This isn't the throwing Molotov cocktails kind of revolution," he says. "But it is a revolution. It's psychedelic Christian philosophy, the belief that love and mercy are the most powerful things in the world, a belief in the old, traditional American dream."What the last two decades show is that if something really is beautiful, you can burn it and bury it and put it in jail, but it is more resilient than evil. Finally, the bad stuff does decay and goes back into the earth. Finally, it washes itself out. Listen," he says with his characteristic mixture of sincerity and mirth, "there is in the United States right now a cadre of revolutionaries just waiting for the cause."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. The experience was so superficial that they all soon outgrew it and went on to more important things like making money. There's another message out there, one that carne through loud and clear when Abbie Hoffman died in 1989: Unreconstructed sixties activists are tragic anachronisms. Demoralization, depression and suicide are the natural consequences of a life committed to political activism and social change.It may be convenient for economic interests to view the sixties as merely a fad. Trivialized, robbed of its soul, the sixties become no more than a marketing tool. And it may be comforting for mainstream political interests to dismiss the sixties as irrelevant. It makes it easy to forget the important (and still relevant) criticisms levelled against the political power structure during that time. But those who continue to work for social justice and live politically meaningful lives-and there are many who fit that description-know that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of their deaths are greatly exaggerated. Sociologists know it too. For the past fifteen years, a number of them have been charting the fate of sixties activists. Every few years, a study appears in scholarly journals, and the message is always the same: The sixties changed some people's lives. . . permanently. While few remain as untouched by time and travail as Ken Kesey, many serious activists are still committed reformers today.Civil rights activists were still "keeping the faith" thirteen years after Freedom Summer, writes a Florida State University sociologist who studied them. Activists accused of burning the Bank of America branch in Isla Vista, California, had not been coopted fourteen years later. "They are not the new narcissists," write researchers Richard Flacks and lack Whalen. "They want to live socially responsible lives. . . making at least some contribution to the public good." Two Catholic University sociologists who tracked Univer sity of Michigan radicals into the eighties conclude, "The activism of the 1960s was not a transitory event. It is associated with long-term values."What were the values of the sixties that made such a lasting impression on people's lives? "The definitive sixties idea," writes former SDS leader now Berkeley sociologist Todd Gitlin, "was that everything was at stake and anything might, just might, be possible-revolution on the public scale, transcendence on the private scale." Many of those who lived through the sixties and many of those who have since written about the era see the counterculture as neatly segmented into the public and the private, the public representing the political arm of the movement, the private representing the cultural contingent. Those whose major thrust was political-from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to the Black Panthers, from Vietnam Moratorium to the SDS-valued collective action, self-sacrifice and social responsibility. Much has been written lately about the self-defeating sectarianism of the New Left. But while anyone political group may have suffered bloody in-fights that ended in purges and seemingly endless splintering, something more basic than strategy, more basic even than ideology, united them: they saw the world, and their own lives, in political terms. Change to them meant an actual reconfiguration of power. On the other hand, to those compelled mainly by countercultural ideas-hippies, yippies, back-to-the-land utopianists-self-expression, autonomy and personal liberation were at the heart of the movement. The goal was to transcend the rules and roles of a society that labored mightily to manufacture consensus and conformity. Change was internal, a personal struggle to free oneself from the past.The values of the two contingents may seem contradictory, but in fact, there was amazingly little tension between rank and file "freaks" and "politicos" of twenty years ago. Leaders may have espoused doctrinaire positions, but many of their followers had feet in both camps. Most underground newspapers reported on, and pledged allegiance to, both scenes. But more than that, both contingents shared some very basic beliefs: They were committed to equality, both racial and, at least after the women's movement began to make an impact, sexual. They distrusted authority. They shared a humanitarian sense of social justice. They rooted for the underdog. They rejected what they saw as the moral and intellectual wasteland of American middle-class adulthood.Twenty years later, many of these people continue to refuse to settle for conventional identities and traditional institutional ties. Those who have married are struggling to redefine what has long been an inequitable institution; those with children are trying to become a new breed of parent. Many 'i of those who work in what used to be called "straight jobs" are laboring from ", within to reform, restructure and humanize their workplaces. Some have carved for themselves permanent channels outside the mainstream. All of the sociologists who have studied former sixties activists find they have gravitated toward the helping professions, shying away from business, management, large bureaucracies and formal politics. Not surprisingly, they are making significantly less money than their non-activist contemporaries.Of course, some did "quit the mob": not just media-hyped "turncoats" like Rubin or Eldridge Cleaver, but many investors, developers, corporados and cosmetic surgeons can (perhaps only privately) trace their roots to the sixties. The fashionably cynical "Woodstock Anniversary Calendar" for the year 1989 celebrates these people. The illustration for one month shows a balding, overweight man behind a desk telling his employee: "Not withstanding that we both dropped acid at Woodstock, I'm still going to have to fire you." In another illustration a conservatively dressed businessman sitting behind a desk-top computer has his eyes closed and a peaceful expression on his face. He is chanting to himself: "Buy low, sell high, buy low, sell high." The caption reads: "Update: The Mantra." But even those who moved back into the mainstream with a vengeance may not have completely escaped from or obliterated their ties to the past. In small ways that are sometimes easy to make fun of, their lives may be different: They recycle. They don't buy their kids plastic assault weapons. Maybe they think twice about doing something selfish or manipulative or, to use an old phrase, politically incorrect. That small voice, which they sometimes listen to, is the link to their past. The very defensiveness of some hard-core yuppies about their current lifestyles shows that the values of the sixties still hold some sway over their lives.Collier and Horowitz announce early on in their book that the sixties exist merely as a "nostalgic artifact," and that the only enduring legacy of that time is "a collection of splinter groups, special interest organizations and newly minted 'minorities' whose only common belief was that America was guilty and untrustworthy." They're wrong on both counts. The sixties exist in a very real and very important way as the sum of certain core countercultural values that continue to playa vital part in people's lives. The legacy of the sixties is people who have alternative political, social and personal agendas, and who find the energy to keep on working for them.This is what a former communard and activist says, referring to the knowledge about self and society she gained during the sixties: "Once you understand, that doesn't mean you're cool. It means you are responsible wherever you are to keep working in whatever way you can. Once you see how things work, you can't unsee it or ignore it. You can get fashionably cynical; you can cover it up with booze, with drugs, or with illness. But you can't forget it."On some level, ya nevah quits da mob.Buy it here: Powells