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On and on. Nineteen sixty-eight was a perverse genius of a year: a masterpiece of shatterings. The year had heroic historical size, and everything except Tiny Tim's falsetto seemed momentous. Temperaments grew addicted to apocalypse. The printer's ink from the papers that announced it all would smudge and smudge the fingers: history every day dirtied the hands.
Some of the events of the year -- the starvation in Biafra, for example, or the seizure of the American intelligence ship Pueblo -- might have occurred in some other year. The events were significant but not central to the drama. For the essential 1968 was mythic. It proceeded chaotically and yet finally had the coherence and force of tragedy. And if it was the end of some things (of the civil rights movement, of Lyndon Johnson's generous social vision, of the liberals' hope to keep government on its trajectory), it prepared the way for other beginnings: the women's movement, the environmental movement, the complex reverberant life that the '60s would have in the American mind long after the melodrama was over and those previously on fire went to tend their gardens.
Nineteen sixty-eight was a knife blade that severed past from future, Then from Now: the Then of triumphant postwar American power in the world, the Then of the nation's illusions of innocence and virtue, from the more complicated Now that began when the U.S. saw that it was losing a war it should not have been fighting in the first place, when the huge tribe of the young revolted against the nation's elders and authority, and when the nation finished killing its heroes. The old Then meant an American exceptionalism, the divine dispensation that the nation thought it enjoyed in the world. In 1968 the American exceptionalism perished, but it was reborn in a generational exceptionalism -- the divine dispensation thought to be granted to the children of the great baby boom. The young were special, even sacred, in the way that America once was special and sacred. American innocence and virtue found new forms, new skins.
The great size of the baby boom generation also encouraged a sort of subliminal illusion. When time flows from father to son, from past through present into future, the generations have their orderly procession, moving vertically through time. But it was a metaphysical conceit of the baby boomers that the present expanded horizontally, into a kind of earthly eternity. "We want the world, and we want it now!" In the great collision of the generations, the young created their own world, a "counter culture" as Historian Theodore Roszak first called it, and endowed it with the significances and pseudo profundities of a New World. No one had ever had sex before. No one had ever had the Dionysian music, the sacramental drugs, the world struggling back to its protomagical state.
In the extravagant, dangerous, ridiculous garden of the '60s, when the young were "forever young," as Bob Dylan's later anthem said, fierce and primal juices fired through the nerves. Complexity fell away. Deferrals of pleasure and deferences to age, the old Confucian virtues that had made their way into America through the Protestant ethic, blew away at the concussion of youth. "Don't trust anyone over 30" became the slogan of the conspiracy.