Sixties Hangover

"We have all been here before.         almost cut my hair;"         the refrain from Crosby, Stills. Nash & Young         reading more like a law firm letterhead than         any invocation for real social change.         Respectability, that first casualty of the eighties.         What, exactly, was a true child of the sixties?         Here's a few safe bets:         Valedictorians were few and difficult to find for their "irrelevant,"         high school peers. Are you listening Paul and Paula?         Cutoffs. Hitchhiking to California?         All is beautiful. Laid back. Beads.         The sixties were a jukebox that came of age.         Ponderosa shirts were destined to outlive their owners.         Thirty-three is perilously close to being afraid.         Elvis Presley, a blimp at forty, missed the sixties or rather         failed to live them down.         The hullabaloo of freedom was taken for granted, then shelved.         Amid a crescendo of killing only a year and one half of the present         decade duplicates the assassinations of the "violent sixties."         Even the cop troupe withered, crooned Eric Burton at Monterrey.         I think not.