pants & fire exits.
Fascism was taken over and made respectable by Ronald Reagan.
Jewish mothers and landladies outguessed the War on Poverty.
Strobe lights were said to cause cultural myopia.
The Just Society lost another Vietnam.
Rock music recycled itself in "meaningful dialogue."
Innocence learned a lot from experience.
Contemplation of one's navel was resurrected by phenomena
of the eager and job hunting corporate executive.
Long hair became a symbol of displacement.
Au pair girls received a new lease on life.
Tofu and herbal teas survived even the commune experience.
Primal scream, therapy, in the crunch, outdistanced everything else.

SIXTIES HANGOVER

"We have all been here before.
almost cut my hair;"
the refrain from Crosby, Stills. Nash & Young
reading more like a law firm letterhead than
any invocation for real social change.
Respectability, that first casualty of the eighties.
What, exactly, was a true child of the sixties?

Here's a few safe bets:
Valedictorians were few and difficult to find for their "irrelevant,"
high school peers. Are you listening Paul and Paula?
Cutoffs. Hitchhiking to California?
All is beautiful. Laid back. Beads.
The sixties were a jukebox that came of age.
Ponderosa shirts were destined to outlive their owners.
Thirty-three is perilously close to being afraid.
Elvis Presley, a blimp at forty, missed the sixties or rather
failed to live them down.
The hullabaloo of freedom was taken for granted, then shelved.
Amid a crescendo of killing only a year and one half of the present
decade duplicates the assassinations of the "violent sixties."
Even the cop troupe withered, crooned Eric Burton at Monterrey.
I think not.

DASH INTO REALISM: ESCAPE PAD FROM THE SIXTIES

For one, street argot became tougher.
You had to distinguish between what you meant by calling someone
a mother.
The Black Panther influence, no doubt, but a rejuvenation of the
language. Street fighting man. Butchery at My Lai.
House arrest for Lieutenant Calley so strangely appropriate for the times.
So middle class and a tribute to "doing one's own thing":
Rampant, militant individualism, the hallmarks of expression.
Sit-ins, love-ins, peace-ins. The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test,
anyone? The sixties were the highwater meritocracy from the
foremost "me decade".
Getting right on target for the narcissism o