In the 1960s the torch was passed from age to youth, but in the 1970s the torch is being handed back again. Youth —the obsession of a few years ago, the hope of some, the fear of others —no longer makes great waves. While the 1969 rock festival at Woodstock was hailed as an epic event of liberated youth, the even bigger 1973 festival at Watkins Glen was considered a casual outing. Between these two festivals youth somehow lost its mystique.
Two years ago, Sociologist John Seeley wrote: "The young are seemingly America's Number One love, Number One enemy, Number One public problem and Number One private preoccupation." Today the young would rank way down on almost anybody's list of preoccupations.
The radical young firebrands of the '60s—the Mark Rudds, Mario Savios, Jerry Rubins, Tom Haydens—have all but dropped out of sight. Today's heroes have left their youth a long way behind them. Henry Kissinger (age 50) and Buckminster Fuller (78), Margaret Mead (71) and Dorothy Day (75), John Sirica (69) and Walter Cronkite (56) look and act their age. Surely no one has done more for age than 76-year old Sam Ervin, whose Watergate hearings are a parable of the times. One by one, bright young men who had gone astray filed before the aged patriarch to do penance and seek absolution. Nor was Ervin averse to providing them with a few homilies on conduct. "Ervin embodies wisdom, and he demonstrates that he knows how to cut it," says Atlanta Psychiatrist Alfred Messer. Teenagers have blossomed out in Sam Ervin T shirts, and Rolling Stone has put his jowly face on the cover.
Youth is not making the scene the way it used to. The gusher of books and articles glorifying the young has largely dried up, and younger people are writing more sympathetically about their elders. David Kaufelt's first novel is appropriately titled Six Months with an Older Woman—and they are comically instructive months. One of the best of the recent books on older people, Nobody Ever Died of Old Age, was written by 34-year-old Sharon Curtin, a '60s radical.
The youth cult films of the '60s catered to the grossest fantasies of the times. In Wild in the Streets, a 19-year-old becomes President and puts over-35s in concentration camps. In // ... rebel students gun down parents and teachers for no apparent reason. Today Hollywood vaults contain films of this sort that were made after the generation battle had cooled; they are no longer box office.
Current films seem to be putting youth back in its place. In his past roles, Steve McQueen often played the rebel —against home, hearth or system. But in Junior Banner he is a dutiful son who finally wins enough money to send his pa to his dreamland, Australia. In The Emperor of the North Pole Lee Marvin is trailed by a brash youth who wants to replace him as king of the hobos. But the crown stays squarely put on the gray head. At the end of the film Marvin boots the youth off the rails, shouting: "Kid, you got no class, you'll never make it!"