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Another adult worry is that the pervasive Pill will give rise to mindless, heartless promiscuity among the young.
They do, it is true, subscribe to a more tolerant morality than their elders, but their mating habits have changed little.
"The old submarine—the girl who's under all the time—that's wrong," says a Southern coed. "So is being a professional virgin." Reasons Elizabeth Crosby, a sophomore at New College in Sarasota, Fla.: "Our attitudes are more an emphasis on relationship, and sex is bound up in this."
Out of Rhythm. For all their skepticism and hedonism, the Now Generation's folk art reflects a uniquely lyrical view of the world. Music is its basic medium, having evolved from the brassy early days of rock 'n' roll into the poignant, pithy beat of folk-rock (or "Rock-Bach" as the West Coast enthusiasts call it). From the controlled venom of the Beatles in a song like Eleanor Rigby ("Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door") to the Eliotesque elegance of Simon & Garfunkel's Dangling Conversation ("Like a poem poorly written/We are verses out of rhythm/ Couplets out of rhyme . . ."), the subject matter goes far beyond the moon-June lyrics of the past in pop.
Says Lyricist Paul Simon, 24: "It's become out of style to lay yourself open, to approach people with your arms open. Everybody nowadays is closed up —the put-on, the putdown. It's tough to come on with your arms wide, knowing you may get kicked in the groin.
That's why I can look at Lyndon Johnson one day and despise him and another day I'll love him. Like that time he pulled up his shirt to show his scar —that was so human! I loved him for that."
The generation's other folkways are equally expressive. The no-touch, deadpan dances that so intrigue and sometimes repel adults are, to the Now People, not a sex rite but a form of emancipation from sex. "After all," says Jordan Christopher, "the beginning of dance was self-expression. It began without physical contact, and it wasn't for centuries that dancing went into the drawing room and became stiff and formal."
Shunning the novel and the theater, the Now People have a flair for film in keeping with their flickering values.
John MacKenzie, an 18-year-old college sophomore from Stockton, Calif., won this year's Kodak Senior Teen-Age Movie Award with an evocative, camera-of-the-absurd put-on that showed two leather-jacketed, switch-bladed punks running up and down crumbling ladders, dancing on rooftops, beating up little kids, being chased by two other hoods, and finally escaping to lean wearily, ecstatically, on one another saying, "Oh, boy! Oh, boy!" National Student Film Award Winner Eric Camiel, 23, evokes the sympathy most Now People feel for the underdog in his Riff '65, a deadpan portrait of a 15-year-old Manhattan dweller with artistic talent who loses his fingers under a subway train. "I can take all they can dish out," insists Riff.
Commitment to Change. Riff's stoic statement could stand as a self-definition of the entire generation—or as a self-deception. Can the Now