SPIRIT OF THE '60S LIVES ON THROUGH EULOGY AFTER EULOGY

This week, sadly and for obvious reasons, the Kennedy funeral procession
returned to American television screens - in particular, the still powerful
image of little John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's casket as it
rolled by. I was a Fresno third-grader the first time I saw this signature
moment of the '60s, live, on a black-and-white television. Then, as now, I
wondered if the 3-year-old boy knew what it was all about, this idea of
death, of his father never coming home.

Earlier this month, in Berkeley, an echo of the Free Speech Movement had
been receiving heavy media play. A lockout at KPFA, the alternative radio
station with roots deep in the lively turmoil of the '60s, had brought out
waves of street demonstrators - "the true graybeards of the '60s and '70s,"
as the San Francisco Chronicle described them.

"We want mediation, not facilitation," Larry Bensky, a displaced on-air
personality, identified by the Chronicle as "the God of KPFA," thundered to
the protesters, "and that doesn't mean sitting around a table, holding
hands and singing 'Kumbaya.' "

My childhood memories of Berkeley's contributions to the 1960s are not as
vivid as those of the Kennedy assassination. In fact, sometimes in Fresno
it seemed as though the '60s were something happening somewhere else, on
the other side of the Altamont Pass. I do recall, however, my older brother
getting caught once by my folks with a copy of the Berkeley Barb. The
results were not pleasant.

Also this week, the Apollo moon landing has been everywhere, with public
television specials and the newspaper recollections of various
participants, from Neil Armstrong on down. Again, I remember that July
night 30 years ago. What I remember most is standing in the back yard and
gazing through the Valley sky, as if the "fire on the moon," as Mailer
called it, could be seen with a teen-ager's naked eye. It could not.

Add to this list of ongoing '60s echoes the capture last month of
Symbionese Liberation Army fugitive Kathleen Ann Soliah (yes, the SLA was
of the '70s, but much of what is attributed to the '60s actually took place
in the next decade; it's part of the phenomenon)

And the ongoing political knee-jerkery over medicinal marijuana. And the
recent controversies in Orange County involving South Vietnamese refugees.
And the beginning of a presidential campaign in which, it seems, the
question of what candidates did, or did not do, in the Vietnam War once
more will be on the table.

And the pattern becomes clear: The '60s are not dead.

They are with us still, casting unshakeable shadows across life and public
discourse in this country, defining in many ways the national debate. And
with California being "America only more so" - Stegner's phrase - and also
the sound set for many moments known collectively as the '60s, the undying
decade seems especially alive in this state now.

A few years ago, upon the death of Jerry Garcia, I attempted to compile a
list of all the times the '60s were said to have died: At Altamont Pass,
with the Hells Angels raising lethal hell at a Rolling Stones concert; with
the Manson murders in the Los Feliz hills; with Jim Morrison in the bathtub
in Paris; on the embassy rooftop in Saigon, as the last American helicopter
lifted off; with the fiery assault on the SLA hideout in South Los Angeles;
and on and on.

It turned out to be quite a long list.

Why this almost comic effort to keep declaring the '60s dead? Certainly not
much ink and air time is wasted marking when, say, the '80s died. And, more
to the point, why do these dirges never seem to take? Why does this time
known as the '60s keep coming back, lingering on?

One possible answer rests not with the '60s themselves, but with what has
followed. Spike Lee's latest movie, "Summer of Sam," aside, there seems
little interest in reviving the '70s. Obtaining gobs of money was the theme
of the easily forgotten '80s; obtaining even bigger gobs of money seems to
be that of the present decade. This is, in fact, a time of great, yawning
normalcy.

A more straightforward explanation is that the '60s mattered - in many
ways, on many levels. They were, as a friend who lived in the thick of all
things '60s likes to say, no doubt with some overstatement, "the last great
time." Big stuff happened, some of it ugly, some of it wonderful. Basic
ideas - everything from the presumption of a national goodness to the
confines of earthly gravity - were challenged. To revisit the Berkeley
radio protester, it wasn't just "holding hands and singing 'Kumbaya.' "