Society

Similar things had happened before: antiwar certitude (Harvard students’ in 1940 booing any suggestion of saving Europe after the fall of France), literate radicalism (John Milton in the 17th century), public nudity (15th century Adamite Christians on islands in the Elbe), and drug advocacy (Aldous Huxley extolling the joys of mescaline in 1954). The generation of 1968 — the first baby boomers — may have been innocent of historical memory, but that did not bother them. What was important was that they felt new and different and, man, it was us vs. them, young vs. old, hip vs. square, revolutionaries against the bourgeoisie.

Dislocating cultural rebellions are not unusual, especially when population curves bulge and mature. The difference in 1968 was that the whole world seemed to be in the midst of a great proletarian revolution, determined to establish an alternative elite complete with attendant counterculture. The Beatle George Harrison voiced his side of the civil war in February 1968. “It doesn’t really matter about the older people now because they’re finished anyway,” he said. “There’s still going to be years of having all these old fools who are governing us and who are bombing us and doin’ all that because, you know, it’s always them. I don’t expect to see the world in a perfect state of bliss — you know, like 100%. But it doesn’t matter. It’s on the way now.”

So the young were seeing visions as the old stumbled into dreamland. To induce transcendence, the children of 1968 borrowed buzzwords from the East: ; karma, Rama, Krishna, om and the sound of one hand clapping. Other equally euphonic names would waken the third eye: marijuana and lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. “The deep psychedelic experience is a death-rebirth flip,” said Timothy Leary, the great snake-oil salesman of LSD. “There is no death . . . There is just off-on, in-out, start-stop, light-dark, flash- delay.” Jailed in San Luis Obispo, Calif., on a marijuana charge, Leary escaped with the help of the Weathermen. The radical political group praised Leary, saying “LSD and grass will help us make a future world where it will be possible to live in peace.” Indeed, the title for The Whole Earth Catalog, the how-to manual first published in 1968 for this imminent garden of earthly delights, came to its editor with the help of 100 micrograms of LSD.

While man was gaining on the angels, woman was still marking time. Late in the year at a conference on women’s liberation, Kate Millett gave a landmark speech on “Sexual Politics” that was the germ of her seminal 1970 book. However, exponents of such views were widely derided as “bra burners.” Even in the antiwar and civil rights movements, women were relegated to subordinate roles. Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael went as far as to say that “the only position for women in the Movement is prone.” Some things refused to change.

The paradise envisioned in 1968 was not for everyone and would not last, refusing be found. The journey toward utopia would end up, like all others before it, a bad trip.