Changing the Tune : Clinton: Truly a Man of His Generation

The famous bratty generation of the 1960s came to full political power this week. The Peter Pan generation--my generation--that had, 20 years ago, celebrated its moral authority with a warning against trusting anyone over 30, came at last of age.

All this week I have been thinking about Bill Clinton--this unlikely ‘60s hero, protege of John F. Kennedy. I wonder about the boy in the high-school photos--Billy Clinton or was it then William Clinton? He was the golden boy who won the medals and won the prizes and ran for student-body president. I can imagine the long-hairs in his high school rolling their eyes when Billy Clinton would get up to talk about the importance of “school spirit” with paraphrased illusions to JFK’s inaugural address.

Such a fresh face he had, such bright eyes in those boyish years, such determination in that boy who is shaking hands with President Kennedy on the White House lawn. Hardly the sort of face or ambition one now associates with the cynicism of the late ‘60s.

I am struck today by the energy. It is his best quality and what we will notice most, I think, in coming months, his movement, his charge. Dare I say, his vigor?

A friend of mine, an anti-war and gay activist from the ‘60s who moved from the street to foundation and academic jobs, was more appalled than pleased this week to see a newspaper list of possible Clinton appointees. “I know almost every one of those people by first name,” my friend said, bemused because he has lived his political life with a sense of being the outsider.

The notion on the college campus of the 1960s was nothing if not romantic when it came to such matters. The romance of the middle-class student was that he was an outsider and therefore in league with “the people.”

The truth was that the college campus was creating an upper-middle-class elite, male and female, white and black. What ‘60s types refuse to this day to recognize is that they belong to the culture of power. If you do not believe me, listen, for example, to the way white middle-class feminists obliterate considerations of social class where sexual oppression is concerned and portray themselves as one with their “working-class sisters.”

Clinton didn’t go to war (nor did I). Nor did most of my middle-class friends from the ‘60s. We went to graduate school. We went to places like Yale, with Anita and Hillary and Clarence and Bill.

When Joan Didion writes of the ‘60s, she talks of the Haight Ashbury and dead-end lives and rock stars with burnt-out eyes. It is hard to think of Clinton in those terms. Clinton strikes me as the sort of guy who dared--sort of--and then didn’t inhale the despair.

What Clinton knew as a young man, however, what places him truly within his generation, was the breakdown of the family. His stepfather an alcoholic, a brother on drugs, divorce, a “dysfunctional family,” to use the language of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Something happened in the ‘60s along with freeways, tract houses, drugs and the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War, some tragedy hit America we are still running from: My generation saw the breakdown of the private life.

There was mobility in the ‘60s. Mama got her driver’s license. Clinton could leave the shambles of his home for the bright public world of achievement. There was for my generation the consolation of the public life--in politics, in government--precisely as people talked less about home.

At the GOP convention last August, evangelical Protestants were at least remarkable for raising the subject of what they called “the crisis of family values.” As a Christian who does not share Pat Robertson’s versions of the moral life, I nonetheless give evangelical Christians this much: They properly sense the turmoil of our private lives.

It is everywhere apparent in this country, in suburb and in inner city. There is a great moan in the American heart. Something is wrong with the way we live. We have lost the knack or the gift of intimacy. We do not know how to love one another. All day on TV you can see and hear the lament, from Sally Jessie Raphael to Phil Donahue--Americans describe the chaos of their personal lives. Feuding mothers-in-law. Parents who do not speak to their children. Hateful children. Skins and druggies and Madonna lookalikes. It is a circus of pain, and it is turned in public into entertainment--a sort of verbal pro wrestling match.

How appropriate, of course, that when Clinton went on “Donahue,” Phil wanted to talk about the rumored infidelities, about the dark secrets. On such a show, what else was there to talk about?

But the crisis is not simply within the family, it is within the city. The inability of parents and children to embrace each other as family is matched by a civic inability of Americans to embrace people on the other side of town. The mistake the evangelical right makes is not just in expecting to legislate their morality on a multicultural nation. It is that, in the name of family reunification, they would divide the city against itself.

In their reliance on politics, the evangelicals remind me curiously of the secular feminists at the other end of the political spectrum. Both the evangelical right and the feminist left engage the struggle of values at the level of government. It is one thing, however, to enact laws to prevent child abuse. But how we behave toward each other will ultimately not be decided by government so much as by some conversion of the soul.

Clinton, of course, is a feminist. And though he portrays himself as a political moderate, his confidence in the role of government makes him truly a man of his generation. There was in the 1960s a notion that leadership attached inevitably to the best and the brightest. Within this notion was the faith that the new American political class could remake America and thus the world.

If the dark side of the ‘60s was despair, the bright side envisioned political power, “change” Kennedy called it then as Clinton calls it now. Clinton’s notion of government is a vertical design; change trickles down.

Clinton may turn out to be the best and brightest sort of person the ‘60s created. But do not expect from those ‘60s people he brings to power the solution to what ails us most deeply as a nation. The city exists on a horizontal axis. And in the horizontal city, families are going to have to learn the grace of loving one another and neighbors are going to have to learn to take care of each other. What the sentimental ballads about “love” in the ‘60s never taught us is that private life redeems the public realm, not the other way around.