Replies

A very interesting if somewhat meandering article, and thanks for posting. One gets the sense of disillusion that resulted from the fall of that great tabula rasa the Soviet Union, on which so much youthful political naivete was projected. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 should have served as a wake-up call, but the street parties had started and everything was groovy, baby. Except, of course, for the Czechs.

What is most marked about this period is not the degree of self-delusion indulged in by youth, because youth is always self-deluding, but rather how long it kept hold of those who have grown old enough to know better but wish, instead of wisdom, to be eternally youthful, passionate, and unquestionably right. That's actually very sad.

I loved the music and the dressing up but I couldn’t take to the dialogue: a reductive argot of comrade-jargon and bogus wisdom derived from misunderstood eastern religions.

There's an awful lot of that still going about, isn't there? The eternal child in politics mouths platitudes and goes straight for raw power. It's a heady and fantastically self-destructive combination. For all the fear of secret government bureaus and closed company boardrooms, the most dangerous person in politics is one who simpers "our diversity is our strength" while attempting to cut the throat of anyone he doesn't like. He'd be right at home in the street in 1968 - Paris's, not Prague's.

"jargon"

I considered myself a liberal in those days, but even then most of friends loved the music but hated the politics. I didn't know one person who was interested in revolution. All we talked about was the music. When a big sixties groups like The Jefferson Airplane decided to go all out radical with their "Volunteers" album in 1969, I knew they were done for. (Besides all their albums since "Surrealistic Pillow" were self-indulgent pieces of garbage.) I suspect that most groups who championed radical causes lost most of their fans. When politics gets involved, art always suffers.