Through a bong, darkly

A new book argues that the '60s counterculture achieved nothing of lasting importance. So why does the era continue to fascinate us?

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Books, Politics, History, Vietnam War, Gary Kamiya, '60s, Reviews, Book reviews

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Concert-goers sit on the roof of a Volkswagen bus at the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair at Bethel, N.Y., in mid-August, 1969.

April 9, 2008 | The '60s refuse to go away. Like a weird long-lost love affair that has half-faded from memory, a mysterious sun that is always setting, they lurk perpetually just over our national horizon, emitting a strange glow. They have become a myth -- perhaps they were a myth even when they were happening -- and like all myths, their effect can be stultifying. One of that era's dangerous icons, Friedrich Nietzsche, warned his nonexistent disciples against uncritical veneration. "You revere me: but what if your reverence tumbles one day?" he wrote in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." "Beware lest a statue slay you!"

A number of revisionists have challenged the romantic view of the '60s. In his bestselling 1987 book "The Closing of the American Mind," Allan Bloom attacked the era's signal artistic achievement, rock music, as a debased form of pseudo-revolt. More recently, in his laudatory book about the boomers, Leonard Steinhorn drew a distinction between their real achievements and what he sees as the anarchic excesses of the '60s. In "The Conquest of Cool," Thomas Frank went further, arguing that the '60s were a gigantic fraud. "The relics of the counterculture reek of affectation and phoniness, the leisure-dreams of white suburban children like those who made up so much of the Grateful Dead's audience throughout the 1970s and 1980s," Frank writes.

Gerard DeGroot is thus not the first '60s debunker, but he may be the most thorough. In "The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade," he sets out to demolish once and for all the cant, hyperbole, romanticism, wishful thinking and just plain stupidity that continue to swirl around that era like a giant light-show blob. "For too long, the Sixties has been a sacred zone," DeGroot, a historian at the University of St. Andrews, writes. "But cast aside the rose-tinted spectacles and we see mindless mayhem, shallow commercialism, and unbridled cruelty ... Revolution was never on the cards. Chauvinism and cynicism got the better of hope and tolerance."

"The '60s" means two things: a decade, and the counterculture that made that decade famous. DeGroot deals with both, but his main, polemical interest is the second: He aims to cut the counterculture down to size. Much of his approach is straightforward: He chronicles what its heroes, leaders, groups and movements actually said, did and achieved, as opposed to what later observers believed they did. He has done a prodigious amount of research: His biblography cites more than 400 books and articles. DeGroot offers a lively tour of the various permutations of yippie doctrine, how Bernadine Dohrn used sex to manipulate her fellow revolutionaries, the history of the Diggers and what set off the 1968 French student protests (it involved a charge that government policy was creating "sexual misery").

Along the way, DeGroot unearths some fascinating and often hilarious historical nuggets. After a 1963 Beatles concert in Cambridge, England, for example, "the seats and floor were soaked with urine," leading to all sorts of serious explanations: One doctor opined that "this sort of activity was important for young women because it made the pains of pregnancy easier ... when they grew up and got married." No less a personage than Noel Coward likened Beatlemania to "a mass masturbation orgy." Another eye-opening morsel involves '60s fashion: After the miniskirt hit America, the San Diego Padres baseball team "desperately tried to boost attendance by hosting Miniskirt Days, with free admission to women so attired."

But DeGroot also employs a more ambitious and unorthodox technique, using what he considers the decade's truly important events to reveal the ultimate insignificance of the counterculture. His book is broken into 67 shortish sections, most of them dealing directly or indirectly with the counterculture, but a number covering extraneous subjects: the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, the Vatican's "Humanae Vitae" encyclical, the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, the Watts riots, the Vietnam War and so on. By placing the decade's cultural convulsions in a global perspective, DeGroot makes them look considerably less monumental, and a lot more irresponsible, than they did when examined through the glass of a bong, darkly.

This may make DeGroot sound like a finger-wagging moralist. He is, a little, but he doesn't get carried away -- and his critique comes from the left, not the right. Unlike Bloom or many conservative critics, DeGroot doesn't see the '60s as the decade when everything went wrong. He regards the counterculture as a sometimes innovative, often fun but essentially superficial phenomenon, one that achieved very little and may have actually backfired.

On the scanty plus side of the '60s ledger, DeGroot lists the "longterm effects of the sexual revolution," which resulted in "sexual relations [being] accepted as the business of the individual rather than the state." He sees gay liberation as the most impressive outcome of the sexual revolution: Although he acknowledges that women gained sexual freedom as a result of the '60s, he is harshly critical of what he sees as the era's decoupling of sex from love (in which he echoes Bloom), as well as what he claims was its rampant sexism.

DeGroot's overall attitude toward the counterculture is illustrated by his qualified praise for the British mods and the Dutch Provos, two '60s movements. What DeGroot likes about them, tellingly, is that they were superficial, basically just interested in having fun, and were utterly unpretentious about their superficiality. As this predilection suggests, what irritates DeGroot the most about the counterculture is its pretentiousness and self-delusion. Much of his book is dedicated to chronicling the intellectual confusion, grandiosity and ineffectiveness that plagued the decade's youth movements.

DeGroot's evil eye is particularly acute when it comes to dissecting the archetypal '60s conflation of personal liberation, murky spirituality and "revolutionary" politics: He reminds anyone who needs reminding that much of '60s political radicalism was half-baked, self-indulgent, and almost insanely pie-in-the-sky. For example, he cites the fact that during one 1967 antiwar march on Washington, participants "decided it would be fun to levitate the Pentagon. Quite a few hippies were sufficiently stoned to convince themselves that America's biggest building actually did rise." But worse than that silliness, in DeGroot's view, was yippie leader Jerry Rubin's solemn belief that "theatrics of this sort could end a war." "It was a total cultural attack on the Pentagon," Rubin said. "The media communicated this all over the country, and lots of people identified with us, the besiegers." DeGroot comments, "In truth, self-indulgence undermined otherwise impressive commitment."

DeGroot argues, accurately in my view, that student and radical protests against the Vietnam War did not end the war or even change the minds of most Americans, who began turning against the war for their own reasons. The fact that Nixon narrowly beat Humphrey in 1968 is the strongest evidence that the antiwar movement did not achieve its goals. DeGroot praises the antiwar movement insofar as it was serious, dedicated and willing to do the hard, unglamorous work of organizing and winning over Middle Americans. But as he documents, the crazy self-indulgence of the counterculture and the limitations of its leaders prevented it from doing that necessary work. What DeGroot says about the German radical leader Rudi Dutschke could apply to the counterculture as a whole: "The demonstrations showed that Dutschke had a remarkable talent for focusing people's outrage and transforming it into a willingness to take to the streets. But, like hundreds of would-be revolutionaries, he made the mistake of confusing a mass march with a mass movement ... The difficulty lay in converting a momentary fondness for protest into a commitment to protracted struggle."

Next page: Was the hippie celebration of pure freedom a dead end?