SPARE US THE SIXTIES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403570001-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 12, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: May 1, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000403570001-5
ARTICLE APPEARED 1 May 1987
ON PA_E..
Charles Krauthammer
Spare Us the Sixties
Life is not a sound track.
Washington was treated this degree, the better to make it."
week to a nostalgic whiff of the I can't quite figure it out. The
Sixties: an antiwar march, a =~s? great cliche of 1987 is
sit-down at CIA headquarters, F, wa competitiveness. Everyone is for
Daniel Ellsberg, Philip Berrigan. , . 3 it: left, right and neoliberal. On
Only Amy Carter, heir to this great Mondays and Wednesdays, teeth
traditi0tt, was mites school gnash over America's lack of
obligations intervened, it seems. competitiveness. Then, Tuesdays
Right down to the mooning of the and Thursdays clothes are rent
CIA (eight bare bottoms spelling over the ambition and greed of
N-0 R-E-A-G-A-N), the great April American youth. Keeping up with
25th Mobilization for Justice and t~ i the Nakasones is a national goal.
Peace was a melancholy affair, an lc~ ` C Keeping up with the Joneses is
indication of just how spent is the national disgrace.
spirit of the Sixties. You can't have it both ways. A
And not just spent, but sold. society cannot lionize
Bottled and canned. Auctioned off. entrepreneurship and then look
To whom? To the heroes of the down its nose at those who switch
Eighties, the men of enterprise. from liberal arts to business. It
"The City of New Orleans," a cannot deplore the fact that we
catchy, mellow Arlo Guthrie tune, turn out lawyers and sociologists
has now been licensed to General while the Japanese turn out
Motors. With a minor change-it engineers and managers, and then
is now "The Spirit of Cutlass consider our young engineers and
Ciera"-it moves cars on TV. managers to be sellouts.
Worse, for Sixties' fans, the We have been losing the
great Beatles' anthem competition with the Japanese not
"Revolution" has been sold to for lack of scientific creativity. We
Nike. "Revolution" now moves BY JAMES A. PARCELL-THE WASHINOTONPOST ire far superior in our
shoes. For some, this is going too technological inventiveness. What
far. Rock critic Chris Morris is A sunny Kennedyesque version we lack is their talent for rote
quoted (by The New Republic) in of this idea (minus any implied productivity, their grim-faced
particular distress: "It bugs the criticism of potential voters) is a efficiency, their assembly-line
hell out of me that it has been featured theme of several discipline. Americans are not good
turned into a shoe ad." Why? Democratic presidential at singing the company song. Do
Because "when 'Revolution' came candidates, most notably Sen. we really want to compete with
out in 1968 1 was getting J _ ph Biden. Liberal writers are the Japanese in business? Then we
tear-gassed in the streets of also yearning for "committed" had better cultivate more green
Madison. That song is part of the youth and disgusted with the eyeshades. Competitiveness is the
sound track of my political life." somnolent, materialistic majority pursuit of material values. It will
The sound track of my political who are not. On the one hand is not do then to be siaocked to find
life. What a lovely phrase, capturing Amy Carter, hailed by Mary our youth in hot pursuit.
perfectly the mood of Sixties McGrory as the only noncomatose, It is time to get our decades
politics: recreation mistaking itself morally serious kid in America, straight. The Nineties have
for commitment. "Modernism in the trying to "rouse her torpid peers already started, declares Esquire.
streets," Lionel Trilling called the from their, self-absorption." (It redesigned its magazine to
Sixties youth movement. It has On the other hand is Mary (last mark the occasion, writes the
become a music video. name withheld), one of a group of publisher, to disabuse those who
Not much to mourn here, you Tennessee students found by suspect that it declared the
would think. Think again. Through Haynes Johnson to be shockingly occasion to mark the redesign.)
the have of the Eighties, Sixties ambitious, money-conscious and And even if the Eighties aren't
nostalgia grows. We are in a advancement-oriented: "Meet over yet, they soon will be.
Sixties boomlet. It is not just the Mary, class of '87, member of the What is to replace them? I don't
miniskirts and antiwar marches. cynical society.... Mary wants to know. Only Max Headroom knows.
More important is the recent make it.... Like Mary, many have But spare us the Sixties. They
post-irangate, post-Boesky switched majors from liberal arts were fun the first time around,
celebration of Sixties-style to business. They plan to get a but, as the first Marxist once said,
"commitment" and a master of business administration the second time around is farce.
corresponding disdain of
Eighties-style materialism.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000403570001-5