TALKIN' & TALKIN' 'BOUT MY GENERATION

Enough already with self-congratulatory retrospectives analyzing the social
and political legacy of the '60s. What legacy? We didn't split the atom, we
invented the roach clip.

How long can we talk about ourselves? My God, we're almost in our 60s.

You see the Rolling Stones still touring, trying to still do the same act
- -- their weathered faces now ghastly -- and you think, "At least Brian
Jones had the good sense to die."

This was all startlingly clear to me watching the hideous miniseries "The
'60s."

Dying is too good for the people who produced that swill. They should be
made to listen to the phrase "Far freakin' out, man!" until the blood clots
in their brains.

"The '60s" was about a white family in Chicago who suffered a '60s triple
whammy -- one son who served in Vietnam and came back shellshocked, another
son who became a peacenik and was gassed and clubbed at many chic antiwar
demonstrations, and a daughter who got pregnant, became a hippie and named
her son Rainbow.

Oh, and Marilyn Manson as the Beaver.

There was a subplot involving a black family. The son became a Black
Panther. But he was never fully developed. So when my friend Mike, who just
watched the first night, asked me, "How did the Panthers make out?" I was
able to say only, "They were in the NFC title game in their second season."

In one particularly "heavy" scene, the hippie daughter is holding the
runny-nosed Rainbow, and confronting the child's father, a musician with
the attention span of fish food.

She: "I've got a sick child here."

He: "Oh, bummer, man."

She: "I need some money for medicine."

He (Reaching into his pocket): "Here's all I've got. It's, wow, $6! I spent
the rest on that great lid, man. Want some?"

I would have kept the scene substantially like it was -- except I would
have had Cheech play the hippie girl, and Chong play the musician. And they
could have sold the baby for reds.

I don't want to suggest "The '60s" was four solid hours of cliches, but
they painted every kid in San Francisco as a tie-dye-wearing, pot-smoking,
LSD-tripping, love-beaded, mumbling moron. And if that was accurate -- if
there was such pervasive intellectual lethargy -- how would you explain a
cerebral song like "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" becoming such a hit?

I personally lived through the '60s. I even went to Haight-Ashbury -- on a
fact-finding tour for UNESCO, as I recall. As I tell my children: Not
everyone found free love in the '60s, and I have the canceled checks to
prove it. But seriously kids, I spent the '60s studying hard, staying well
groomed and being the recording secretary in my chapter of Young
Republicans for America. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

(You didn't really think I was going to tell my kids about the time I
listened to one side of the Moby Grape album for six straight hours,
believing I was having a religious experience as I ravenously ate
Oysterettes, did you? Or that I would tell them about the epiphany I had
sometime in the fifth hour: that the key to understanding the universe was
contained in the lightning bolt of insight that prompted me to scrawl these
three words on my pants legs in Magic Marker -- "everything is something"?
I'm a respected member of the community. I have two near-luxury cars and a
set of Big Bertha irons. I can't go back there.)

Of course, "The '60s" was the one TV show my children have ever wanted to
see with me. Most of the time when I walk into the room and they have the
TV on, they immediately grab the clicker and flip channels wildly so I'll
become disoriented and flee. But the '60s fascinate them anthropologically.
They wanted to see what life was like before I became fat and old and bald
- -- in what they call the "olden times." So they watched "The '60s" with me,
and asked me again and again, "Did you take drugs?" I repeatedly said,
"No," because I hadn't been given a legal definition of "take." They didn't
believe me, so they asked their mother, "Did Daddy take drugs?" She said
smartly, "I didn't see him take drugs," giving us both plausible
deniability. And I realized, minus their good luck in the commodities
market, we'd become Bill and Hillary!

I don't want to be too hard on "The '60s." There's just some stuff that
they had in there that I don't see as completely realistic.

Like the stuff from 1960 to 1969.

And the ending with the whole Irish family -- plus the Jewish girlfriend --
happily playing touch football on the lawn, like they were wrapping up an
episode of "The Wonder Years." (So that's how the '60s ended, huh? With
generational harmony and tolerance! What do you suppose caused Kent State
the next spring, bad shellfish?)

And the speech the father makes at the draft board to try and help his
peacenik son get a conscientious-objector exemption: "I don't know what a
conscientious objector is, but I know my son has a conscience." Oh, please.
The correct way to get your kid out of the draft was to say, "I don't know
what a conscientious objector is, but I know my kid wears women's
clothing." (What's really pathetic is when I watch stuff about the '60s
now, I identify with the fathers.)

And the charming coincidence that the three siblings stumbled onto one
another at Woodstock, among the 450,000 people who were rooting around in
the mud there. You'll recall the Vietnam vet had a psychotic episode, and
the very nurse who treated him in the "bummer tent" was his long-lost
sister! How lucky can you get?

I was at Woodstock myself, you know. And amazingly, I found my mother
there. It was after Santana and before Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. I
looked at her lovingly, and I told her, "Mom, lay off the brown acid."