Peace, love, understanding

The 60s just won’t go away. Many Boomers have idealized the period beyond recognition. To them, it was a period of making love, not war, of telling it like it is, of truth and beauty, of honesty and openness.

The dirty little secret of it all, known by those of us who lived through it, is that the 60s had more than its fair share of pedestrian hypocrites. "All you need is love," advised John Lennon at roughly the same time he abandoned his own son. His holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as the Beatles found out, was interested in more than merely transcendentally meditating with hot babes. Children of privilege such as Vietcong cheerleader Jane Fonda demanded power to the people when about the only real "people" they knew were their servants.

"We of the Sixties accomplished more than most generations in American history." This modest assessment comes from Fonda’s ex-husband, Tom Hayden, who moved from founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society to Democrat politician, admittedly not that immense a leap. Precisely what did the 60s’ Leftists accomplish?

The fall of South Vietnam and Communist enslavement for millions. Increased acceptance of drug usage. An explosion of sexually transmitted diseases. Reduced patriotism. A coarsened culture. Diminished respect for one another and ourselves. Increasing paranoia that an undefined "they" are orchestrating conspiracies galore.

Some will argue that the self-styled idealists of the 60s aren’t responsible for all this. My response is if they’re not, they hugely contributed to plenty of the pathologies with which we’re plagued.

One notable charlatan of the peace and love set is currently on trial for murder in Philadelphia. Ira Einhorn, now 62, was a 60s’ anti-war campaigner who, like others, by the 70s had made a smooth transition into another form of Hate America, the wacky environmentalist movement. He ran for mayor as a "planetary enzyme - catalyst for change." Embraced by the Establishment he purportedly loathed, he became a corporate consultant and won a fellowship to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

His holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi could only have envied Einhorn’s chick magnet talents. Ira preached the gospel of free love to naïve girl after naïve girl. One of his shack up honeys disappeared in 1977. In 1979, her mummified remains were found in his apartment. Gosh darn, he didn’t even realize they were there.

His trial was scheduled to begin in 1981. But what’s a guy to do when, as Ira claimed, the CIA, or was it the KGB, had killed your girlfriend and framed you because you knew too much about classified mind control experiments?

According to Einhorn, "When you’re in my situation, it is very difficult when you have large forces operating against you to come to any secure conclusion." Can you say "persecution complex," boys and girls?

So Ira did what any Age of Aquarius guru would do. The only thing that the 60s’ version of honor, openness, integrity and truth permitted. He ran away, ending up in France. There the people, many of whom nostalgically look back on when a substantial segment of Americans were anti-American, didn’t think Einhorn’s alleged crime was that big a deal.

Sympathized one neighbor: "If he was the Oklahoma City bomber, I mean I would understand that (they) really badly need him. But in this he’s only accused of killing one person." Yet another view was that, "Maybe she (the murdered girl) deserved it." Those Frenchies can be so sophisticated.

France, after getting demanded concessions, finally sent Ira home for a trial. He was scheduled to testify this week, and no doubt will hang onto his everybody’s against him defense. We can only hope the jury doesn’t have any unreconstructed 60s peaceniks on it. They may turn the killer creep loose. For some, it’s still power to the people, man.

Brace yourself, Mike - the principal upshot of the Iraq debate so far is that it's given the greying, self-absorbed morons who typified the worst of my generation a chance to relive their glory days with every illusion and self-deception intact, and their ideological followers-on too young to have missed the excitement a chance to mimic them. It's all there just as it was thirty years ago - the same self-aggrandizement, paranoia, and delusions of persecution and grandeur, the same cloying self-righteousness, the same juvenile reduction of international political complexity to the level of bumper-sticker shallowness, the same sanctimony, the same mindless sloganeering, the same demonization of anyone who disagrees with the official party line du jour, and the same untimate destruction and enslavement of those in whose name the peace and love types are ostensibly acting. If Santayana was right and "those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it," then what shall we say of those who deliberately subscribe to a self-congratulatory mythos and a largescale selective amnesia?

Another woman, a former ballerina and self-described "psychic archaeologist," testified that she met Einhorn through his research into mind-control experiments including "psychotronic warfare" and "remote viewing."

That's what we need. More psychic archaeologists. Preferably at taxpayer expense.

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