Take Me Back to the Sixties

Take Me Back To The Sixties is a look back at a time when the values I learned from '50s TV were still in force. Enjoy the presentation!

Life was simpler then. Percy Faith's "Theme from a Summer Place" was ubiquitous on the radio. Everyone listened to the same three stations, heard the same songs on the car radio as they drove around on 31-cent gas. The car, if it was a brand new Chevy, cost about $2,500. You didn't have to lock its doors, and everyone picked up hitchhikers.

TV shows were not afraid to portray strong parental role models. Movies had heroes, not antiheroes.

To borrow language from postmodern philosophy, we all believed in one overarching meta-narrative, whose sub-themes included the victories to be won by individuals of conscience who stand up to the bitter end for what they believe in. Reluctant warriors all, there were in the movies of the era secular heroes (Shane, 1953; Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men, 1957), religious heroes (A Man for All Seasons, 1966), and heroes who were somewhere in the middle (Christopher Plummer as Baron von Trapp in The Sound of Music, 1965, who led his Nazi-menaced family to a Catholic abbey for sanctuary).

The meta-narrative was straight from the Bible: goodness defeats evil, with all but the truly lost redeemed in the end.

Most Americans were quietly religious. No matter your creed or denomination, you believed in the good-defeats-evil master narrative — that it was somehow able to shape outcomes in this world. Even if you were not religious, for that matter, you still tended to believe that.

You may or may not have recognized the fact, if you were around back then, but our various enemies — first the Nazis and then the Communists — were tuned into one and the same meta-narrative: totalitarianism. According to their story line, justice and individual conscience were opposed. Justice was collective, imposed on unruly individuals from the top down. So the time-honored Judeo-Christian belief in freedom of conscience and in the independence of the personal soul was anathema to totalitarians.

Our heroes never put a foot wrong in serving their overarching meta-narrative ... but we as a country did exactly that when we got in too deep in the Vietnam War. Billed as a necessary war against Communist evil, it did little to hurt the enemy, even as it was undermining our own faith in truth, justice, and the American way.

The year was 1968. The two national leaders who had the best chance of changing Americans' minds about Vietnam without compromising their idealism were both assassinated within months of one another: Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Riots broke out in major cities after King was shot, and not long after the RFK killing cynical radicals turned the streets of Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was being held, into a playground for chaos.

The antiwar movement became a demonic parody of itself, as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and the rest of the Chicago Seven, put on trial for organizing the violent DNC protests, turned the courtroom proceedings into a mockery. Judge Julius Hoffman (no relation to Abbie) was ridiculed as a "fascist dog," a "pig," and a "racist" by co-defendant Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers ... when he wasn't doing his best to turn the courthouse into a circus, that is.

It was as if these radical leftists were saying that the powers that be had played our Western, Judeo-Christian, quintessentially American meta-narrative so false, in pursuing an unjust war and in making second-class citizens of black Americans, that all bets were now off. Henceforth, there would be no controlling meta-narrative whatsoever, no master story whose flag we all would salute with pride, in the name of human progress.

It was their nihilism that ushered in the cynicism that still besets us today. That's why I say, too, "Take me back to the Sixties" — to a time before the wheels came off the cart of heroism, idealism, and the dictates of personal conscience in 1968.