Fantasies of a Generation That Can't Forget Its Past

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

By Anthony M. Casale and Philip Lerman

Andrews and McNeel

$16.95, 233 pp.

THIS week has seen an orgy of Woodstock nostalgia. The three-day-long music festival that ended 20 years ago today was the last major event of the 1960s, and it supposedly defined a generation.

Now that this one is past us, hopefully we can stop marking these silly 20-year anniversaries. Baby Boomers have reveled in these memorials to their youth, remembering the '60s as a time of watershed events and unbridled idealism.

It is only natural to feel nostalgic about the events of one's youth, but somehow I don't think members of my generation will get misty-eyed nothing the 20th anniversary of, say, the Shuttle explosion or the Live Aid concert.

But the '60s were radically different, and the generation that came of age then has always felt it was something special. More than a demographic phenomenon, it was the generation that was going to pick up a decaying world, invigorate it with a shot of energy and mold it to its liking.

Of course, they never did. The Baby Boomers have been the decisive voters putting three straight Republican administrations in office. The slide of the Flower Children of the '60s into hedonistic complacency is well-documented.

But many cannot seem to shed the nagging feeling that they went wrong somewhere, that they have betrayed the ideals of their youth. This is exactly the kind of emotion Anthony M. Casale and Phillip Lerman tap into in their new book Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: The Fall and Rise of the Woodstock Generation.

THE authors have put together a feel-good anthology, tracing the "Woodstock Generation" from the concert itself to the present, and even projecting it into the next decade.

The book's premise is that the generation became splintered and cynical in the '70s, but now that it has achieved status and wealth, the Woodstock Generation is poised for a comeback and a resurgence of idealism. If anyone can have it all, it is the Woodstock Generation, the chosen people.

However, Casale and Lerman are utterly unconvincing in supporting their thesis. Their attempt amounts to nothing more than another salve applied to the sore consciences of the jaded children of the '60s.

For evidence of this impending rebirth of vigor and social activism, the authors point to a motley hodge-podge of completely unrelated events. They cite the politicization of comic strips like "Bloom County" and "Cathy." They herald the social conscience of Rain Man and the The Good Mother.

They tell a story about some guy named Ralph who demanded that his Wall Street firm hire more "good minority people."

A compilation of bizarre snippets is enough for the authors. "Signposts are everywhere," Casale and Phillip Lerman croon. Over and over again. We can be young again. It's not too late--we can still change the world. Just click your heels three times and say....

UNFORTUNATELY, it's simply not true. The Baby Boomers put George Bush into office less than a year ago. They continue to spend themselves and the country into oblivion, leaving the next generation to pick up the pieces.

Casale and Lerman think it is highly significant that Baby Boomers are becoming increasingly concerned with protecting the environment. But green politics, while important, is more or less concerned with quality of life issues. It entails no sacrifice and is not really an effort to assist those who have been screwed over by life.

If the pollyanish theme of this book is not enough to make you cringe, the way it is written will. Casale is a pollster for USA Today, and Lerman is an editor there.

They seemed to have no difficulty adapting their newspaper's vapid and juvenile writing style into book form. They incessantly refer to the Woodstock Generation as if it were a single organism, with all its parts reacting the same way to events--much as USA Today refers to "the USA."

Here's an example of how the authors say the entire generation reacted after news of John Lennon's death: "The Woodstock generation was dumbfounded, got up, walked across the room and called itself on the phone." Wow.

The authors repeatedly refer to something called The Force, which they never really explain, but seems to have something to do with the karma of those who lived the '60s. Casale and Lerman have an annoying habit of capitalizing Things They Think Are Cute And Important.

THE bulk of the book is simply a year-by-year account of what happened in the U.S. between 1969 and 1989 and how it impacted the generation's collective psyche, usually making it more cynical.

But the news events, interspersed with inane chatter about "cultural" developments like disco and the pet rock phenomenon, are related with an incredible degree of shallowness. It's as if the two authors had pretended that USA Today had been around for the last 20 years, and compressed each year's top stories into bite size, retrospective nuggets.

Each random death--John Belushi's, Andy Warhol's, Rock Hudson's--is tied to the generation's mental state and imbued with cultural and sociological significance. Belushi's taught the generation of the danger of drugs, Hudson's of the need to come together to fight AIDS. Previously, the deaths of '60s heros (the Kennedys and Martin Luther King) made the generation cynical.

It is ironic then that Abbie Hoffman, quoted throughout the book as the conscience of the generation and the one who could lead it back to its roots, committed suicide while the authors were completing their work.

According to the previously set-up formula, activist Hoffman's self-induced end should have sounded the death knell for the generations' hopes. The beacon of idealism, the one who, unlike so many others, never sold out, had admited defeat and in a fit of exhaustion slid into death's enticing embrace.

BUT the authors were presumably already committed too deeply to their upbeat thesis when they heard of Abbie's death. I can imagine the crisis control meeting betweent the authors and their editors: "How the hell can we make this positive and still sell lots of books?"

They decided to close the book with a passage about Hoffman's funeral, chock-full of warm, touchy-feely stories about those assembled there. Included are upbeat lyrics of a Pete Seeger song about Abbie's spirt living on and a nice blurb about Abbie's mom clapping.

The book ends with a passage from Hoffman's writing. "No, sir, Flower Power ain't dead at all, brother, all we gotta do is get our shit together...and grow some thorns...Power to the People! Power to the Woodstock Nation!"

Admittedly, an engaging passage. But Abbie wrote it the afternoon after Woodstock--20 years ago tomorrow. The world has irreversibly changed since then. The '60s are gone, and they are not coming back. It's about time "The Woodstock Generation"--and authors Casale and Lerman--realized it.