Legacy of the Sixties.

"If you remember the sixties, you weren't there," a now forgotten rockstar once quipped.

Well, I was there. I remember that decade well.

In fact, it was 1968 when I first realised I was a conservative.

It was not a good year.

In 1968, I was a lapsed student living in a tiny apartment with a newborn baby watching the world tear itself apart. In January of that year, American troops launched the TET offensive in Vietnam. In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis by "lone gunman" James Earl Ray. The same month, Pope Paul VI condemned birth control in his encyclical Humanae vitae and Pierre Trudeau became prime minister of Canada.

In May in Paris, rioting students brought the city to a standstill as frightened police and an amazed Charles de Gaulle looked on.

In June in Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy was shot in the head by another "lone gunman," Sirhan Sirhan. Then came the Democratic convention which gave rise to the Chicago Seven, the rebellious tip of my generation who, convinced our parents and the system were stupid, repressive, and corrupt, were out to change the world.

It was also during that summer that Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to quell the "spring" of freedom that had been sweeping Czechoslovakia.

Finally, in November 1968, Richard Milhous Nixon became president, replacing Lyndon Johnson who, exhausted by the apparently unwinnable Vietnam war, had refused to run for a second term.

Through all these tumultuous events, two things were constant - rebellion and violence, most of it groundless.

During that time, I watched friends at Canadian universities participate in what I saw then - and still do - as mass delusion. At the heart of their political activism - which consisted mainly of badmouthing university presidents and attempting to paralyse the "system" by behaving badly - was the belief that we, the babyboomers, were somehow morally superior to our parents.

It was as if Wally and Beaver Cleaver woke up one morning and decided that Ward and June were idiots.

Now thirty years later, my generation - appropriately led by Bill Clinton - is in power. We are the new bourgeoisie. We are the generation that believed we could be moral without morality. We are the generation that sired a world in which rebellion has become the norm. We are the generation that believes there are no absolute truths, that conscience is an oppressor, and that we will never be called to final account. In short, we are the generation that never grew up.

"What are you rebelling against?" the leather-clad Marlon Brando was asked in the 1954 film The Wild One. "Whadya got?" he responds.

While the blame for such incorrigibility can be laid at many feet, the spirit of soixante-huitards is epitomised in Les Mots and Les Choses, a book by French philosopher Michel Foucault, the text of which seemed to justify all forms of transgression by promoting the notion that obedience is the posture of the victim. It's a clever book, packed with diabolical arguments to persuade its readers that culture and civilisation are merely the "discourses" of power and therefore bad. Wherever you find power, Foucault instructed, you will find oppresion which must be overthrown. Particularly sexual, financial, and religious oppression.

Unfortunately, for all our intellectual pretensions, my generation was incredibly naive when it came to assessing "leaders" such as Foucault who was, in fact, the enemy of critical thought. Rather than pursuing truth, Foucault's agenda was political and destructive. Stupidly, despite all protestations of love and brotherhood to the contrary, my generation failed to notice that the revolutionary spirit we so eagerly espoused is driven, not by what it can love, but by what it can hate. Hence the violence. Nor, it seems to me, have the boomers ever understood the inconsistency, even the lunacy, of a philosophy that preached love through violence and immorality.

Worse, three decades later, our folly continues unchecked and unabated. So far, not only have we managed to escape without a scratch the hell we caused, but we still carry our rebellious fictions with us, content to live in comfort at public expense.

Do I exaggerate?

In 1998, the works of Michel Foucault top the reading lists in North American universities followed by the writings of that other equally hateful deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida, who similarly preaches that civilisation equals order equals obedience equals oppression which necessitates rebellion.

More than two centuries later, the spirit of the French Revolution is so alive and well, it has becom institutionalised in universities where upcoming generations are now being taught to rebel mindlessly, without question and without intelligence, against "the notion of God" (and the "oppressive" traditional morality such a belief engenders) and, though they don't realise it, against civilisation itself.

What will history say about us?

That we were a generation willing to die for what we believed in? Or that we were a spoiled, arrogant, self-indulgent, unloving lot who rejected the beliefs that might have saved us and embraced murderous lies and high-minded fatuities instead?

Thankfully, it is not I who must judge.