Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 30, 1993 TAG: 9312010331
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TODD GITLIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But the fugitive of the week, former underground radical Katherine Ann Power, is a special fugitive - pursued by her conscience, not by Tommy Lee Jones. Our fascination with her goes to the heart of deeply unresolved questions: Whatever happened to ``those '60s people?" Aren't they all bankers or (Grateful) Deadheads? Won't we ever be free of the Rolling Stones? (Or alternately, do we get to wear bell-bottoms again?)
Meanwhile Generations X, Y and Z, the current crop of the people who feel like the world's first young, wonder whether those aging folks who write the articles and produce the evening news will ever shut up about the bell-bottomed, flowing-haired, flag-burning, love-prattling, pre-AIDS, stoned old days.
Surely the remarkable coverage of the Power story (photographs on the front page of The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as well as the cover of Newsweek) suggests that ``the '60s'' are of more than antiquarian interest. We may all be sick unto death of the instant documentary history crammed full of recycled images of tie-dyes, peace signs, police riots and Viet Cong flags - but it is those unresolved, deeply contested questions about the worth and impact and ethics of the passion and pain of the '60s that surface yet again as Kathy Power comes in from the cold.
Some of our fascination with Power is the light that she casts on the Big Chill. Didn't the '60s activists trade our ideals in for Guccis? Didn't we graduate from J'accuse to Jacuzzi? Well, I know - or know of - hundreds of onetime activists. I can't think of any whose political views have not changed since then. I know a grand total of one who became a banker - and his job is to inject American capital into the republics of the former Soviet Union.
Anecdotes aside, every study of the afterlife of New Left activists shows that they are, on average, more socially concerned than their peers; that they are less prosperous; and they are more likely to be left of center on the American political spectrum. They are more likely feminist, civil libertarian, supportive of gay rights and disinclined to use military force. No doubt, by and large, they like organic vegetables and Volvos and they can sound mighty New Aged.
Of course they have tempered their dreams. They are influential in the media and in the liberal-left wing of the Democratic Party, but their presence in the American political system is basically negligible.
Their ranks include doctors and lawyers and teachers and social workers and garage mechanics and politicians. They are also in business, and unions, and religions, cultish and otherwise. If they are lawyers, they are more likely than their peers to work for labor and feminist or civil rights causes. They have families and jobs and normal anxieties.
One of them, a 1969 draft evader who wrote at the time that he didn't want to ``kill or die'' in a dreadful war, lives in the White House. In seeking to advance his mildly reformist agenda, Bill Clinton faces and often yields to many a potent self-seeking interest that a real left-wing movement could help him defeat. Politically, the whole of the '60s activist generation is less than the parts.
And yet another side of the '60s might have a good deal to offer in the face of today's political standoffs. When many people think of "the '60s'' they think only of rage and confrontation, not of the passion for dialogue, for argument, for democratic awakening. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, when social conservatives put a measure on the Oregon ballot last year opposing gay rights, Kathy Power (using her pseudonym of Alice Metzinger) called a friend in Corvallis and proposed that they bring religious conservatives and gays together to ``get to know each other.''
Conservatives tend to crow or bemoan - we told you those kids would come to naught. Having presided over the gold-leafed decay of the 1980s, they cannot grant that the antiwar movement, for all its (relatively few) sins, its many failings and its occasional fugitive, saved the soul of America.
As long as high-level war criminals are still lionized in Washington, and war veterans beg for work on the street corner, as long as Americans wrestle with questions about authority and materialism and violence and whether the world can be saved, the antiwar movement as a whole remains one of the most successful such democratic movements in history. It saved lives, limbs and minds. It was a lousy revolution, but it was, on the whole, a remarkable human triumph - and a hard act to follow.
\ Todd Gitlin, president of Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-64, is now professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Washington Post
by CNB