On August 25, 1992, Rosebud Abigail Denovo, armed with a machete, broke into the home of Chang-Lin Tien, chancellor of the University of California. The nineteen-year-old Denovo, a member of the People’s Will Direct Action Committee, had come to execute Tien—enemy of the people. A police officer arrived just in time. She lunged at him, and he shot her dead.
On Denovo’s body was a note: “We are willing to die for this land. Are you?” By “land,” she meant People’s Park, the sacred ground of Sixties throwbacks. Denovo’s career as a terrorist began in the summer of 1991, in response to the university’s decision to build volleyball courts in the park. At the time of her death she was on bail awaiting trial for possession of explosives, which police found at her home, along with a hit list of campus officials responsible for that decision. Her death caused 150 supporters to riot on Telegraph Avenue. Denovo, born in 1973, died in the Sixties.1
After Reagan won his little war in 1969, People’s Park became Berkeley’s ugliest and most important open space—informally dedicated to James Rector, the slain protester. Eventually, however, the communal spirit that had inspired the park—and which was supposed to change the world—dissipated in the “me” decade of the 1970s. Sybarites took over: it became a place for drug deals, loud music, and sex, the last of these not always consensual. Creating a better life gave way to reaching a better high.
In the Eighties, that old demon Reagan returned to haunt the park. Now president, his economic experiment created a tide of homeless people. Those in Berkeley camped out under the scrubby trees in People’s Park. It was still a place for drugs, but those of despair, not decadence. Heroin and crack replaced pot and LSD. For most people in Berkeley, the park seemed an embarrassing relic. For the sentimental, it remained a shrine.
In most cities, a generation is long enough for emotions to cool. Not so in Berkeley. In 1991, the city and the university decided to make something of the park. It would still be a park, but an improved one. When, however, workers started constructing volleyball courts, Berkeley radicals revolted, with histrionics on high. Volleyball, it seemed, was a rape of memory. Trouble erupted on August 3. A huge crowd surged down Telegraph Avenue, colliding with 200 police in full riot gear, armed with rubber bullets, stun guns, and truncheons. Helicopters whirred overhead; tear gas blew on the wind. Nostalgia was played out in real time.
The police won the battle, as the police always did. With the park cleared, construction began. Once finished, the courts became a surreal oasis of urban improvement in a desert of anger, poverty, and despair. Sheepish athletes occasionally made use of them, more to make a political point than to have fun. On the sidelines, Sixties sentimentalists shot withering glances and threw sand. Huge political significance was assigned to the simple question of whether or not to play volleyball in People’s Park.
For Denovo, volleyball seemed a desecration—an evil so terrible it had to be crushed. She stood at the lunatic fringe of a Berkeley movement which continues to feed voraciously on the myths of the heavenly decade. Every September, new recruits are drawn from pimply-faced freshmen who now listen to “Maggie’s Farm” on iPods. They share the ideals, if not the psychotic self-destructiveness, of Denovo. They keep on keepin’ on, clinging to the tawdry symbols of an imaginary era of peace, love, and goodwill.
When history repeats itself, it does so in digital sound and color. In 1999, crowds gathered for a celebration to mark the thirtieth birthday of the park. On the surface it seemed that nothing had changed, except for the fact that the ponytails were gray and the pot, thanks to advances in plant husbandry, was a great deal stronger than when Grace Slick sang “White Rabbit.” Predictably present was that group of exhibitionists who believe that protesting is best performed in the nude. Young activists, their tie-dyed shirts of recent vintage, sat cross-legged at the feet of venerated heroes who told tales and showed scars of 1969.
Eloquence had not improved. “Right on!” passed for profundity, while “Far out!” was still the hyperbole of choice. Lentils were fresh, but slogans stale. “Who are the cops or the UC, or anyone for that matter, to think anyone has a right to say they ‘own’ People’s Park? Because, hey, the Indians were here first, right?” One speaker tried vainly to inject the present into the past by bringing up the war in Kosovo. “They shouldn’t be dropping bombs on Yugoslavia, they should be dropping joints on them, man,” he shouted. The crowd cheered this new version of a familiar refrain.2
To those gathered on that day in 1999, the Sixties is People’s Park. For them, venerating the decade has meant turning it into dogma. Trapped within a cliché, they cannot accept the passage of time. Everything wonderful about that decade is contained in a few shabby acres of dirt. But what is the Sixties and what the park? To hippies old and new, venerating the past means resisting all forms of change. The radicals of old are conservatives now. Defending the park is their way of staying forever young. In the 1960s, those radicals wanted sincerely to improve their world and believed in the power of people to do so. Today, the dream is shabby artifact, something worshiped for itself rather than for what it might inspire.
If the park is seen instead as one point on a historical continuum, then a decidedly different Sixties emerges. Berkeley’s decision to improve the park in 1991 was made after a lengthy democratic planning process which arose out of the 1960s campaign for participatory democracy. The decade popularized ideas about beautifying one’s living space, protecting nature, and creating public leisure sites for everyone to enjoy. It also saw the beginnings of the health-consciousness movement—all that macrobiotic food, relaxation, yoga, and exercise. Perhaps, then, it is not entirely sacrilege that the people should play volleyball in People’s Park.
The music was great, the drugs colorful, the dreams transcendent. Unfortunately that was not enough. The counterculture started from the assumption that changing the world begins with changing oneself. Metamorphosis is not, however, as easy as lighting a stick of incense. In any case, the soul is seldom a match for machines. In the Sixties, fantasy worlds were built on a flimsy understanding of how the real world works; in consequence, they had as much logic as a drawing by M. C. Escher. No wonder, then, that “Reality sucks” became a popular expression in the Seventies.
It was not enough just to imagine, as John Lennon once urged. Nor, it seems, was love all you needed. “It was important to explain to over-wrought eighteen-year-olds that the world crushes naive idealists,” writes William McGill, chancellor of the University of California at San Diego, who witnessed a student setting fire to himself in protest against the Vietnam War. While McGill admits he did not remotely succeed in steering the young away from their quest for simplistic Utopias, he still believes that “there was something undeniably beautiful about their crusade.”3
McGill nevertheless objects to the nostalgia merchants who have turned the Sixties into a decade of glorious achievement. “There is a special problem for participants in any era of dramatic upheaval when they attempt to distil the significance of what they lived through. Temptation is strong to rewrite history in order to justify our own beliefs and actions. Memory can be very deceptive. Unerringly it seeks respectability for things done in ignorance and confusion. We all prefer to think of ourselves as moral agents rather than muddled actors in a theater of the absurd.” The Sixties was an era of magnificent futility. What seemed profound to the actors in this drama often seemed absurd to those who watched them. Quite frequently the sound and fury signified nothing.4
Rudi Dutschke invested hope in what he called the “long march through the institutions.” The concept, an intentional homage to Mao’s legendary march across China (itself a sordid myth), was loosely based on the ideas of the philosopher Ernst Bloch. According to the plan, radicals who had been forced into joining the Establishment for reasons of survival could still contribute to the revolution by undermining institutions from within. Dutschke had in mind an army of infiltrators slowly chipping away at every pillar holding up the Establishment.
Sixties romantics find it comforting to imagine that the long march is succeeding, albeit not quite as profoundly or quickly as Dutschke hoped. Yet the four decades since the end of the 1960s have actually demonstrated just how resilient institutions are to the leftists tunneling within. The individualism and freedom fostered by Sixties rebels became not a philosophy but a tool, used by disparate groups in idiosyncratic ways. Writing in the 1990s, Todd Gitlin bitterly observed: “Today pony-tailed ranchers rail against government regulation; antiabortionists claim the mantle of Martin Luther King, Jr.; antifeminists leave their children at home to travel the country giving speeches or blocking abortion clinics.”5
Those of the Sixties generation who have risen to positions of prominence have not behaved distinctly differently from those who preceded them. Bill Clinton may have been a draft dodger, but he turned out to be a president quite capable of waging war. Tony Blair once played electric guitar, but otherwise he showed little harmony with the Sixties spirit. New Labour—a collection of earnest baby boomers—took Britain closer to the Orwellian nightmare than any government that preceded it. Likewise, the odious intolerance of right-wing parties in Holland is nowadays shouted by men and women who once supported Provo.
After the decade died, it rose again as religion. For quite a few people, the Sixties is neither memory nor myth, but faith. Religions do not require a foundation of logic—indeed, they defy logic. So it is with the religion of the Sixties. Believers in the gospel cling faithfully to a dream that ignores the laws of economics, politics, and human nature. They imagine into existence a world where everyone is rendered peaceful by the power of love and where greed, ambition, and duplicity are banished. Reality itself is suspended.
The believers worship a few martyred gods (Che, Lennon, Kennedy, King, Lumumba) and seek truth in the teachings of an assortment of sometimes competing prophets (Malcolm X, Leary, Hoffman, Hendrix, Dylan, Dutschke, Muhammad Ali, et al.). Their reliquary includes the incense, hash pipes, beads, buttons, tie-dyed shirts, and Day-Glo posters still sold at sacred sites in Berkeley, Greenwich Village, Soho, and Amsterdam. Their gospel is peppered with stock slogans from the Heavenly Decade: “All you need is love,” “Make love not war,” “Power to the people,” “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
The power of the faith, and the equal and opposite zealotry of those who reject it, have impeded rational assessment of the decade. Quite simply, the Sixties has been invested with far too much uniqueness. For the faithful, it was a time of hope and promise, an example to us all. Thus, every glowing ember of that spirit is carefully nurtured, in the vain hope that it will someday flare again. On the other side, the Sixties is used as a morality tale, an example of what happens when freedom is allowed to run amok, and as a convenient scapegoat for all the ills that followed.
Books and documentaries devoted to the decade seldom mention Biafra, Jakarta, the Cultural Revolution, Curt Flood, Telstar, or the Six-Day War. In other words, the links to our times have been cut, allowing the decade to float like a balloon. Those who bemoan the betrayal of the Sixties spirit are in effect arguing that the decade had no effect on our present, that it was a delightful interlude between the conformist Fifties and the self-indulgent Seventies. Yet this denies the law of historical continuity—the fact that everything develops from that which precedes it. No decade is unimportant; no period exists as anomaly. The Sixties was important, but not in ways that worshipers (or critics) of the myth like to admit. If the Sixties seems strange to us today, it is probably because we tend to look at the wrong things. By paying so much attention to what was happening on Maggie’s Farm, we failed to notice the emergence of Maggie Thatcher.
The survival of the Sixties myth says something about the resilience of our spirit, if not about the reality of our world. The decade brought flowers, music, love, and good times. It also brought hatred, murder, greed, dangerous drugs, needless deaths, ethnic cleansing, neocolonialist exploitation, soundbite politics, sensationalism, a warped sense of equality, a bizarre notion of freedom, the decline of liberalism, and the end of innocence. Bearing all that in mind, the decade should seem neither unfamiliar nor all that special.