Can’t get no satisfaction

The Sixties, that recidivist naughty schoolboy, is in the dock again. And this time the charge sheet is longer than usual.

"For too long the Sixties has been a sacred zone," writes Gerard DeGroot, professor of modern history at St Andrew's University, in The 60s Unplugged. "Cast aside the rose-tinted spectacles and we see mindless mayhem, shallow commercialism and unbridled cruelty." While the decade brought "flowers, music, love and good times... It also brought hatred, murder, greed, dangerous drugs, needless deaths, ethnic cleansing, neo-colonialist exploitation, sound-bite politics, sensationalism, a warped sense of equality, a bizarre notion of freedom, the decline of liberalism and the end of innocence."

Wow. Even if one accepts that hatred, murder and greed barely existed before the Sixties, that's still quite a case to answer. The big problem is that, far from being a 'sacred zone', the Sixties, like 'political correctness', has long been the refuge of the lazy commentator short of an idea. Barely a week passes without some sad sack in the Mail venting about it and its supposedly baleful legacy. What's to demystify?

DeGroot's intention was to look over the top of those mythical rose-tinted specs at the whole decade so there are chapters on the Six Day War and Biafra and a welcome nod to Cesar Chavez and the farm-labourers of California, as well as the usual riffs on Woodstock and Weathermen, Beatles and Berkeley. He's right to suggest that 'sexual liberation' often exploited women, that drugs caused casualties and much self-important tosh was spoken and written, but none of that is exactly new.

What is largely missing is the Sixties' sense of optimism and possibility, political, personal and cultural, whether misplaced or not. One of the best illustrations of the mood of the decade comes in DeGroot's description of the Beatles: "The British... fell instantly in love, thanks in part to Fleet Street's conspiracy of adoration." Contrast that with the conspiracy of vilification directed today against Amy Winehouse.

The point is that the Sixties generation - in Britain, anyway - was not braver, brighter or better, but luckier. Post-war austerity had ended, jobs were plentiful, further education becoming universally available and Britain was, briefly, the cultural centre of the world. AIDS, recession, and the divisive Thatcher years had yet to arrive. A young Labour government presided over the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion and the abolition of the death penalty (some 'decline of liberalism'). When US news magazines put Britain on their covers it was in admiration rather than, as today, in disdain.

In his chapter on Paris '68, DeGroot quotes a popular slogan of the time: "I have something to say, but I'm not sure what." Not a problem limited to that decade.
The 60s Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade by Gerard DeGroot, (Macmillan £20) ·