Memoir Of a Merry Prankster

As the 1960s generation ages and begins to disappear, it might have seemed natural that the death grip which the decade holds on the American imagination would start to loosen. Nearly 40 years after the summer of love, however, the ’60s have not quite faded into history. Instead, like a few other decisive epochs — the revolutionary 1790s, the low, dishonest 1930s — they have graduated into memory, serving as a repository of symbol and emotion for people who never lived through them. The ’60s still matter because they reveal certain possibilities of human nature in extreme form: above all, the beauty and danger of utopianism. For the ahistorical children of the American Empire, the ’60s held out the same hope, and offered the same chastening lesson, that Wordsworth found in the French Revolution, when he witnessed “France standing on the top of golden hours, / And human nature seeming born again.”