SAME OLD SUMMER OF LOVE

That the generation coming of age in the late ‘60s are the me-first yuppies of today should be obvious by now, despite the clever distinctions of the Sunday supplements (“1967, the Summer of Love,” by Judith Sims, Aug. 2).

The generations who have come of age since the war are no different, basically, from their fathers and mothers, other than the fact that they have more money to spend and are, if possible, even more other-directed and less thoughtful than the so-called squares who entered their prime in the ‘50s.

If Sims doesn’t prove the point, she certainly offers nothing to refute it. Under the veneer of marketed rebellion and marketed decade-identification, the post-war generation is the same old middle-class made famous in the literature of the early century: the hollow men, the Babbitry, the booboisie.

That their cultural tastes show more diversity and, in some cases, more sophistication, is attributable not to superior critical taste or greater individualism but to their insatiable search for status through consumption.

But I must thank Sims for laying bare the substance behind the myth that has arrested, perhaps permanently, our whole generation at the stage of adolescence.

Thanks for telling us how great and goofy all the street life was on Haight in ’67 and how groovy the music was then. Only problem is I have aunts and parents and such who talk just as moony-eyed about the music and dances and street scenes of their college-age years. Everyone revels in those special years of coming out.

I suspect something special was happening in the streets of America in 1967 and 1968, but nobody will ever know what it was until someone puts his or her finger on it. Sims hasn’t come close. In fact, testimony like hers makes older critics like Allan Bloom (“Closing of the American Mind”) bloom.

Sims was not even talking about the ‘60s, really; she is talking about herself. It is an appeal to status through affiliation, much like name-dropping. That so many of us, 20 years later and with hair beginning to gray, can make this claim only proves that we have not yet come to terms with our adolescence.

GEORGE GOODE

Athens, Greece