The Age of Protest Will Be Remembered, but Not Repeated

The animal lovers gathered outside a bowling alley in the balmy Tarzana twilight to protest the use of Fido and Puss for medical research. Passively waving grainy color posters of mutilated dogs and cats, a dozen or so protesters stood on the pavement vying vainly for the attention of those headed inside.

For the most part, nobody was interested.

Sure, the occupants of the passing cars wore headbands and peace signs and fringe-dripping suede vests, but they zipped past--windows raised and air conditioners blasting--to join the party, a City of Hope fund-raiser with a 1960s theme.

Unlike the Jefferson Airplane album covers and paisley everything inside, the protesters were no props. They were for real, a genuine, if unwelcome, echo of the Age of Protest.

Perhaps passing party-goers saw a remembrance of themselves through the smoked windows of their Ultimate Driving Machines.

Saw themselves younger and thinner, waving signs only vaguely read and ignored by the luxury cars of another age. Saw themselves long ago, when they thought they could change the world if only they waved enough signs, chanted enough slogans, marched in enough protests, smoked enough dope.

So long ago, in fact, that some even today cannot believe that the ‘60s unfolded during their lifetime. The endlessly talked-of decade exists for many of its veterans as a purple haze, so fondly revered that when told by a young reporter--whose generation grew up in the shadow of the boomers--that he had not even been born, their almost automatic response was a dreamy: “Too bad.”

But, hey, “The ‘60s are over, man,” they say, snapping back to the present with its mortgage payments and dependable cars. Time to get on with life. Hadn’t anybody told the sign-wavers outside on the pavement? There are better ways to prove your point than getting flat feet on a Saturday night waving signs no one reads.

Social consciousness doesn’t have to be such a drag. It can be fun.

A party even.

For a hundred bucks a head, some former flower children and yippies--the angry young men and women of yesterday--traveled back to a Disneyfied version of the ‘60s. The anger was gone. So was the dope--”Just Say No”--and the sex--unless it’s “safe.”

And the current war was over. This time we “kicked some butt,” as the newborn patriots put it (with no trace of irony).

The ‘60s-for-a-night crowd bowled to the edgy organ music of The Doors and Jim Morrison’s Bacchic pleadings. Video games with names like Pit Fighter screeched and burped accompaniment.

A silent auction offered professional teeth whitening, a T-shirt autographed by Arnold Schwarzenegger and a hockey stick signed by skating great Wayne Gretzky. Minimum bids: $150, $500 and $400 respectively.

On Lane 12, Mike McLoughlin lackadaisically rolled balls toward the pins. He wore the fringed brown suede vest and the headband that saw him through many a protest march as a student at Syracuse University in Upstate New York.

McLoughlin is 40, and his life is not what he expected 20 years ago. Man, in those heady days, when his draft number was a relatively safe 330, he was cool. He burned his draft card. Went to rallies where Old Glory was torched. Smoked dope. Toted a musket in the Sexual Revolution.

The usual.

Now he is an accountant and lives in Thousand Oaks.

Reflecting on the decade that sticks in the American psyche like gooey candy in a molar, McLoughlin is more honest than most of his compatriots. “It was something to do,” he said. “I admit that now.”

“It was wonderful to be a young man at that time. We were irresponsible. Period. We thought we could get by on peace and love and that we could change the world.

“Now I know better.”

He changed his political affiliation in 1976 to vote for Ronald Reagan in the presidential primary. Reagan lost, but McLoughlin remained a Republican and now donates to the party. He said he agrees now with an adage that if you’re not a Democrat when you’re young, you haven’t got a heart, and if you’re not a Republican when you’re older, you haven’t got a brain.

Ben Weissbach, 51, “was too old for the ‘60s.” He had already graduated from college and done a stint in the service by the time the flower children began sticking daisies in the barrels of guns. He watched from the outside, reacting, but not understanding.

“I was a different generation,” he said. “We were the last of the innocents.”

Weissbach was only a couple of years older than the protesters and dope fiends, but in those days the generation gap could be a matter of months. To him, the ‘60s were as undecipherable as they are to the young men and women of Generation X, the name lately given to those now reaching adulthood and finding that the former flower children have left a world with no fewer weeds than the world they kept bellyaching about.

In a desperate homage to the decade of their parents, some young people are preaching the gospel of peace and love and wearing tie-dye and Birkenstocks, but they are no closer to understanding the ‘60s than Weissbach is after 20 years of trying. Their efforts are a sort of hopeless dress-up party, an Imagineered adventure of music and threads, a shindig without the dreams that ran like a backbeat through the ‘60s.

“It’s all cosmetic now,” McLoughlin said, shrugging his shoulders. “People are voguing now.”

It just ain’t the ‘60s anymore, man.