Return of the Thinkers

For those who, due to youth or chemical addiction, missed the 1960s, I have good news: They’re back.

I don’t mean the rioting or the perfume of the decade called tear gas, but those less boisterous elements that became a hallmark of an era that will live in, well, infamy.

A sense of the ‘60s, like Banquo’s ghost, is wafting over the city.

I began feeling that way with the passage of the marijuana initiative last November. L.A. embraced it with a 12% majority, which seemed a way of memorializing a drug so popular 30 years ago it threatened the ozone layer.

I recall thinking that all the pro-hype of the proposition had a familiar ring to it and remembered historian Arthur Schlesinger saying that the time was ripe for a rebirth of activism.

I’m not sure the decriminalization of grass is the harbinger of that rebirth, but it could be its symbol.

As I wondered about dope and detente, Tom Hayden, the basset-eyed radical from long ago, announced that he wanted to be the next mayor of L.A., and it was like I’m in Berkeley again in 1965 except that everybody’s old.

Then, wham, Mort Sahl, returns to knock ‘em dead at the Tiffany, Paul Krassner packs the house at the Ashgrove, Pete Seeger hits the road again and Art Kunkin goes online with the old Free Press.

All we’ve got to do to complete the decade is dig up Mario Savio, score a kilo and hold a hootenanny.

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I was an observer of the ‘60s more than a participant, although I did share a hash pipe once with an underground barber. Unlike Clinton, I inhaled the hell out of it and woke up 12 hours later wondering about cosmic truth.

Pete Seeger was the folk singer of the left back then and lived in Topanga for a while. He hung around with Woody Guthrie and wrote about the dispossessed, which immediately branded him as a dirty Commie and made him an icon of those who held hands, swayed and sang “We Shall Overcome.”

Mort Sahl, as everyone knows, was the sweatered gadfly who pierced the establishment with the skill of a musketeer at places like the old hungry i in San Francisco, then hung out with Hugh Hefner for a while and is now back doing what he does best.

Art Kunkin founded one of the country’s first alternative newspapers in 1964, the Los Angeles Free Press, and ran it for nine years until it more or less faded away, like street theater and draft card-burning.

Kunkin went on to become a kind of press agent for a nudist camp and then about 18 months ago founded World Wide Free Press on the Internet. Now he’s talking about endorsing Tom Hayden, which seems a little like a marriage made in hell, but who am I to criticize new love among the old left?

Then there’s Paul Krassner. I saw him the other night at the Ashgrove on the Santa Monica Pier and it was, to paraphrase one of those colorful old baseball people, deja vu all over again.

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Krassner was part of the crowd that invaded Chicago during the Democratic convention in 1968 and coined the term Yippie to describe the Youth International Party. Today he publishes the satirical Realist out of Venice, writes, thinks, worries and does stand-up comedy.

I saw him the other night at the Ashgrove doing topical shtick about Clinton and O.J. and other unindicted celebrities, but what really took me back was his stuff on the ’68 Chicago convention.

Krassner tells about how he got friendly with a cop assigned to follow him and ends up asking if he knows a good place to eat. The cop says, “Sure, follow me.” But when they get to the restaurant, they sit at separate tables because the protocol of revolution demands that follower and followee never eat together.

Krassner makes you laugh and think at the same time, leaving a residue of intelligence lingering in the room long after he’s left the stage and the last of the audience has straggled out.

He was preceded by a group called the Foremen who, while they sounded a little like the Kingston Trio, were really Tom Lehrer, probably the best musical satirist who ever lived. When they sang “Peace Is Out” and “Ain’t No Liberal,” you knew the fun was back and maybe the commitment too.

There was a kind of madness to the ‘60s, true, but there was also a perception of the ironies and a willingness to march against loaded guns with nothing more lethal than a new idea.

Maybe it’s not so much that the ‘60s are back, but that thinking is coming back, concealed in humor and music. If nothing else, that makes it a lot easier for the intellectually challenged to take.