Joyce Maynard, a Yale sophomore who'd written a promising book about growing up in the sixties, was on the Today show.  Barbara Walters dismissed her with a "We all felt that way, honey" and the cohost, when Maynard said she regretted catching only the tail end of the Beatles, snickered 'get serious'ly and implied that if we expect the grownups to take us seriously, we'll have to swear off rock and roll.  Nonsense.  I measure out my life in Beatlesongs.

Dick Cavett forgot how to follow a conversation and kept trying to make Abbie, Tom, Jerry and Rennie agree that the radicals had had little to do with the end of the war, that only when Middle America moved did the boys come home.  Nonsense.  Aside from the obvious problem with the status of the concept 'the end of the war' [this was before Saigon fell] and its rather casual equation with 'the boys coming home,' there is the larger possibility that if it had not been for the radicals, Middle America would have had no idea, that given the movement's idea, its movement was inevitable.

That would be a drastic stand to take and would have to be explored carefully, but it is enough for now that it suggests there are large questions unanswered, major conflicts unresolved.  What happened back there?  Was there a lesson to be learned?  Who learned it?  Who taught it?

Nat Hentoff dismisses Dylan as a hasbeen, but says a professor wants to know who were "the major agents of change during the 1960's" and that "Bob Dylan's name has been on many of the lists he's been getting back, including mine."  Nonsense.  It is truer to say that the sixties never happened, that it was all Dylan's fantasy.