The '60s as the Good Old Days

Here's an interesting piece about what seems to be a bit of a trend. Advertisers are using imagery and music from the '60s to sell what seem to be pretty mainstream products: retirement planning with Dennis Hopper, Total cereal, Geico car insurance, U.S. Trust bank. Apparently a lot of people have pleasant nostalgic feelings about an era that featured a lot of divisiveness and controversy.

As somebody who lived through the '60s and viewed things from several places on the ideological matrix -- I thought of myself as a conservative and a supporter of the Vietnam war until maybe 1965 or 1966, became disillusioned with the war and became more libertarian, participated in some and saw plenty of protests, in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago -- I have mixed feelings. Much of the political thinking was jejune in that era, but there was an openness and feeling of liberation -- great huge numbers of people smoking pot in public and the cops not doing anything, in part because arrests would have been bad for an image already severely tarnished -- that I don't think the country has had since, and that I really miss.