History is a funky thing, Ron. In retrospect, certain periods and places (Paris in the twenties, Berlin in the thirties) appear monolithic, but they weren’t. Every individual experienced them differently.
I’m a prime time Boomer, born in 1951. I literally came of age in the sixties. I got rained on at the fantasy of Woodstock and shot at in the reality of Vietnam.
Personally, I loved the drugs, Free Love, and the amazing music. In other words, The Party.
Perhaps my perspective is skewed because I was a lower class kid from a nowhere Pennsylvania town who attended the war before I went to college. I didn’t experience the sixties as a college kid. I never belonged to any elite.
I remember those days as exciting and exuberant. But that’s probably how most people recall their youth. It’s a wonderful thing to be young at any time.
But now, with 50 years of experience, I can see clearly the bad things that grew out of that time.
Sadly, even the good things have led to bad things. The current ubiquity of divorce, the obstinate political division, the militarization of society, the obsession with youth, the demise of American higher education, and more can all be traced back to those days.
As for your take on leftism, I agree. But at the time, there was no real ideology to the counter culture. The New Left grew out of a political vacuum and was of little interest to most of us who were caught up in The Party. It got attention because the mainstream media was more comfortable discussing politics than what was to them incomprehensible lifestyles.
Marxism is by definition joyless. Economics in Marxism is god. It is wholly deterministic. It is the exact opposite of the anarchistic spirit that made the sixties fun for most of us. I knew very few people who cared about it or took it seriously. What can LSD and Marxism possibly have in common? The “if it feels good, do it,” ethic of the time was anathema to leftism.
Reds did a good job of showing the roots of what would become the New Left. But it also shows the anarchic Bohemianism that would become the counter culture. My favorite part of the movie was the cameos by people (The Witnesses) like Scott Nearing, Henry Miller, Roger Nash, Will Durant, and Hamilton Fish. The best thing about the film was that John Reed was portrayed as a boring drudge while Louise Bryant is shown as much more alive and human. I have no trouble believing that. Reed was at best a pathetic dupe.
As Boomers fade away and the sixties leave living memory, the time will become ever more difficult to define even as more historians attempt to do so.
I’m glad, even considering the poor outcomes, that I was there and got to be a small part of it. It was a hell of a party. Whatever else it was, it wasn’t bland. Now, with the absolute victory of consumer capitalism, the surveillance state, and the centralization of nearly everything, bland rules our days. America is now 99% homogenized. Smart phone zombies stumble through the land. Even if the times didn’t really change (at least, as we imagined they would), for a while it felt like they might, and that felt good. :)
