Maureen Dowd: The right's implacable war with the 60s [View All]

[acmavm]

http://www.iht.com/articles/528170.html

Wednesday, July 7, 2004

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I didn't appreciate the '60s in high school. I spurned the unisex style of dirty jeans. I was more under the influence of nuns than bongs. And I was frightened of the cost of free love. But as other decades passed - the bland, polyester '70s; the greedy, padded-shoulder '80s; the materialistic, designer '90s; the bullying, Botox '00s - I've become nostalgic for the idealistic passion of the '60s.

It's amazing, given how far we've come from the spirit of the '60s - with Bob Dylan hawking Victoria's Secret and Hillary Clinton a hawk - how obsessed conservatives still are with pulverizing that decade.

Their disgust with the '60s spurs oxymoronic - and moronic - behavior, as anti-big-government types conjure up audacious social engineering schemes to turn back the clock.

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W., who had tuned out during the '60s, preferring frat parties to war moratoriums and civil rights marches, and George Jones to "psychedelic" Beatles albums, was on board with his regents' retro concerns, like Star Wars and Saddam, and outdated cold war assumptions, like the idea that terrorists could thrive only if sponsored by a state.

On his book tour, Bill Clinton has been defending the '60s, noting that the polarization of American politics began with the civil rights, women's rights, gay rights and abortion rights struggles of the '60s and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. "If you look back on the '60s and on balance, you think there was more good than harm, then you're probably a Democrat," he told a Chicago audience. "If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

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