Do you, like, y'know, not relate to the Sixties?

The rockabilly revival did not start with Brian Setzer's Stray Cats. Robert Gordon was the neo-rockabilly pioneer in the mid-1970s. The liner notes of this album, Robert Gordon with Link Wray, contains this telling snippet of conversation:

Robert, how did you relate to the Sixties?

He replied, "I didn't."

Although Gordon was speaking of the music of that decade, politically, there are a lot of people who feel the same way as the celebrated singer.

In middle of the Eighties, Peter Collier and David Horowitz wrote Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties.

Of course, the Sixties were sacrosanct then--as they are now; when this book came out it was certainly perceived by some people as a heresy, just as the 16th century Catholic hierarchy viewed Martin Luther's 95 Theses.

Still, the book perseveres--it was reprinted three times in the last decade. This year an expanded edition is out.

In the most recent FrontPage Magazine, Horowitz and Collier write:

We wrote Destructive Generation in the mid-Eighties because of the way that Sixties radicalism was continuing to influence how America thought and felt twenty years after the fact. Today, another twenty years further on, the Sixties is still the undead decade. Far from being yesterday's news, as it should be, it is still the white sound of our intellectual life, decanting its poisonous old wine into new bottles, fomenting our culture wars, and picking the scabs off the angry social wounds that have been with us now for a generation. A new edition of this book, which some commentators have been kind enough to refer to as a "classic," seems entirely appropriate.

All kinds of Sixties human icons are pilloried in this article; they're certainly given the same treatment in Destructive Generation. The authors save their best denunciations for last, and wouldn't you know, they pile-on (not unmercifully) former terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who are now tenured university professors teaching in the Chicago area. For more on them, read the FrontPage article, or scroll down this blog, as I've been busy in the last couple days with that Terror two-some.

And if you don't relate to the Sixties, you must scroll down. It's like, a far out trip, man, you'll dig it.

Technorati tags Robert Gordon Link Wray Rockabilly David Horowitz Education Bill Ayers Bernardine Dohrn