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Theirs is an immediate philosophy, tailored to the immediacy of their lives.
The young no longer feel that they are merely preparing for life; they are living it. "Black Power now!" cries Stokely Carmichael. "Action now!" demands Mario Savio. "Drop out now!" urges Timothy Leary. As Buell Gallagher, president of the City College of New York, sees it: "This generation has no Utopia. Its idea is the Happening. Let it be concrete, let it be vivid, let it be personal. Let it be now!" With its sense of immediacy, the Now Generation couples a sense of values that is curiously compelling. It esteems inventiveness, eloquence, honesty, elegance and good looks—all qualities personified in the Now Generation's closest approximation of a hero, John F. Kennedy. "Heroism and villainy begin with fantasy," says Stephen Kates, 23, a brilliant concert cellist. "This generation has no fantasies."
In fact, as Harvard Sociologist Seymour Lipset observes, they are "caught up in the myth that J.F.K. was a radical President, and would have done all sorts of things, bypassing the older generation." By contrast, the Now People almost universally mock Lyndon Johnson —as Leonard laquinta, 22, of Kenosha, Wis., puts it, for his "bluffs, come-on gimmicks and intellectual dishonesty."
Snoopy for President. They admire consistency, even when it comes in a conservative wrapping such as that of William F. Buckley Jr. or Everett McKinley Dirksen (a sort of "camp" hero to the young for his hypersincere LP, Gallant Men). They deride extremists of all stripes—from Alabama's Wallaces to Mao Tse-tung. Whom would they nominate for President? The latest survey shows Bobby Kennedy and Mark Hatfield trailing Snoopy.
The vast majority of the Now Generation has little time for the far-out revels of the beatniks. In consequence, perhaps, its leisure time Happenings have an imaginative opulence that far transcends the entertainments of its parents. The result, as one authority puts it, is "a kind of hedonism of the moment." That hedonism was vibrantly evident last week on the beaches of Florida, where the vacationing young had arrived in force. While the sands thundered to the Big Beat of transistors at full blast, surfers leafed lightly over the waves, and girls in Bermuda-length "cutoffs" or gaudy minishifts strolled languidly down the strand. Mostly, they read: Hans Reichenbach's The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, giant Batman comics, In Cold Blood, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and a strategic paperback titled How to Get Ahead in the Army. For those who could not make the sun scene, there was a new crop of movies to catch, coffeehouses for conversation, or further out, a burgeoning of psychediscotheques tripping with lobster lights and the whining anti-melodies of Indian sitar music.
Positive Outlets. The Now Generation's hunger for sentience was honed in part by an adult invention: TV. From the tube they first acquired the almost frightening awareness and precocity that so often stuns adults. It is impossible for a youth who has stirred to Martin Luther King's rhetoric or the understated heroism of a