But it isn't the fault of executive producer Lynda Obst, director Mark Piznarski, screenwriters Bill Couturie, Robert Greenfield, and Jeffrey Fiskin, or even such odd-couple consultants as Stanley Crouch and Wavy Gravy that those of us of a certain age have our own sixties tapes in our own loopy heads. Nor that sometimes those tapes aren't even our own: Not so long ago, at the "No Regrets" memorial for Abbie Hoffman at the Palladium, watching home movies (of Brandeis, Mississippi, the Lower East Side, the Stock Exchange caper, the Grand Central Yip-In, and crossing state lines in an illegal frame of mind), I concluded that Abbie's memory tapes had displaced my own. I remember Abbie, or Mailer, or Ginsberg, better than I remember me. This, too, is television: a kind of flushing.
Anyway, these memories, vintage newsreel snippets, and, above all, the astonishing music comb metaphors over bald spots in the mini-series. Not much of historical or symbolic importance has been omitted, except for maybe the Manson gang. As if on cue, Dutton integrates a lunch counter; Jeremy Sisto reads Frantz Fanon; Mario Savio and Cassius Clay hyperventilate; Lenny Bruce appears at Cafe Figaro or the Bitter End; Columbia is seized again, and so, bound and gagged, is Bobby Seale; LBJ calls it quits and Nixon is elected. And if, reeling from the ferocious right-wing counterassault in the current Culture Wars, we are inclined to blame ourselves for the fact that one portion of the New Left subscribing to a Castroite delusional system went Baader-Meinof and bananas, The '60s at least reminds us that they kept killing our best people; that after Jack, they murdered Malcolm, and after Malcolm, Martin, and after Martin, Bobby. That in Chicago it was guitars and bubble gum against guys in baby-blue riot helmets with flamethrowers and bazookas.
Even if we talked a lot of trash -- and there's no denying that it hurts to hear the recapitulations here -- we have only to consult the Pentagon Papers to find out what the other side was saying so euphemistically about "sustained reprisal" and "mutually assured destruction." You might recall the secret bombing of Cambodia. You might even compare the health-care policy of the Diggers with that of your HMO. For every Jerry Rubin ("Sirhan Sirhan was a Yippie!") who went from shucking on the barricades to hustling on Wall Street, there were dozens of others like Michael and Sarah who would end up in tenants' associations, ecology groups, and feminist co-ops; as disenthralled journalists, public-interest lawyers, and teachers in independent schools -- even, perhaps, as executive producers of television series.
So what if The '60s is slick nostalgia? At least it's Grace Slick nostalgia. And I can think of worse things to be nostalgic about than a generation of young people who refused to measure everybody by his or her ability to produce wealth, who were disinclined to punish or morally condemn anyone who neglected to prosper.
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The Transformation of TV Into an Art Form
The Draw of Dream Worlds in Film
Gosselin, Prince of the Professional Nobodies
A Decade of Defining Moments in Pop-Culture
The Invention of New York's Local Cuisine 
Thirty-Five Short-Lived Looks of the Decade
Two Views of a Swath of the Upper West Side
An Older Generation Moves Into Williamsburg
Ten Years That Changed Everything
A Generation of Overparenting
The Sports Rivalry of the Decade
What Is the Point of the United States Senate? 
