The sixties, then and now.

Will the real Grateful Dead please stand up? And when they do, will they please point us toward the real 1960s? Because I for one--a veteran of that infamous decade, and a sometime Dead fan (I have copies of Workingman's Dead and American Beauty in both vinyl and CD)--am getting very confused. The first hint that things were getting seriously twisted in the public mind was the endless prattle, upon the death of Dead leader Jerry Garcia, about "an era" having "ended." Why were people being led to believe that the success of the Dead meant that "the sixties" was, until a couple of months ago, alive and well in Newt Gingrich's America? What had "the sixties" become, anyway?

I kept listening and reading and watching TV, hoping to figure it out, but things just got curiouser and curiouser. For one thing, the parade of well-known public figures who felt the need to publicly declare their personal grief at the death of this "counterculture hero" boggled the mind, politically and culturally. Of course Bill Clinton had to tell us he shared our collective pain. And Peter Jennings seemed sort of plausible if you stretched your imagination. (Think 1968, bell bottoms, long hair and beads; it could work.) But Senator Pat Leahy? And Al and Tipper Gore? Wasn't she the founder, a few years back, of the group that started the now--raging war against socially offensive music lyrics, and the author of a parent's guide to fighting them? Did she perhaps write the thing while listening to the Dead sing "Drivin' that train/high on cocaine"? And there were even Republicans--William Weld and John Kasich--in the public mix of grief and eulogy.

But before I could get my mind around this madness, the next phase of public remembering took place, and things got even murkier. Somebody remembered, inevitably, that these guys were into drugs, that Garcia had in fact died in a rehab center trying to kick a heroin habit. "Oh, that sixties," it suddenly dawned on everyone, "the one we all are supposed to hate now. Well, thank goodness it's finally over, and good riddance to bad ideas and worse music." Forget good old, yuppified "Uncle Jerry Garcia," designer of chic neckwear and namesake of an upscale ice-cream flavor.

George Will's Time magazine column was typical. Decrying "the hot tub of bathos about the sixties occasioned by the death of Jerry Garcia," with its nonsensical evocations of "idealism" and "freedom," Will told of a young couple, Wolfgang and Lisa Von Nester, who abandoned their three-year-old son at a mall, sold their van, and took off for a Dead concert. The point, to Will, was that the Dead and the sixties were responsible for today's cultural and social decline.

"The spirit of the sixties," he wrote, "was, strictly speaking, infantile," based on a refusal of responsibility and an endless quest for cheap thrills and permanent highs through--what else?--sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. "Infantile" as this sixties spirit was, however, Will credited it with enormous power. According to him, the "disdain for inhibitions" and invocation to "do your own thing" have been responsible for "millions of shattered lives and miles of devastated cities." Those are some tough, determined infants.

These two reactions to Garcia's death--the meaningless mourning and the vicious trashing--represent the two dominant media attitudes toward the sixties. The first happily sells "the sixties" as a brand name and pretends not to notice that this product has been processed beyond recognition as it follows the bouncing ball of profits to a place where no hint of the true significance of the era is allowed to follow. In keeping with the mawkish corporate liberalism of the Clintons, and of events like Woodstock '94, this version happily sheds the radical demands of the era and reconfigures it as a time of vaguely longed-for "peace" and "love." Strains of "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine There's No Countries (It's Easy If You Try)" drown out the angrier chants of "Bring the War Home" and "Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker," less cheery, perhaps, but truer to the spirit of the times.

So what was that spirit? And why are the media and other powerful folk working so hard to mystify and obscure it?

First, let's be clear on one thing: despite the lack of political content in media versions of the era, the only reason everyone feels forced to endlessly recall, expound upon, and explain away the sixties at all is that it was, remarkably, even miraculously, an era of enormous, often spontaneous, political activism of a very radical kind. This was the era that gave birth, after all, to the civil-rights, anti-war, student, women's liberation, gay-liberation, and environmental movements, among others. Gender relations, race relations, foreign policy, military matters, issues of sexuality and family dynamics, and matters of personal and political ethics--all of these and more were radically challenged and transformed in the public mind and in public discourse.

Did the Grateful Dead have anything to do with all this? Well, sort of, but not nearly as much as we are being led to believe these days.

The problem is that current ideas about the sixties deliberately focus on music and musicians that were not in fact the most important or influential voices or sounds of the time. And even the voices and sounds they choose to focus on are being ripped from their political and social contexts.

Just what is the appeal of the Grateful Dead to so many people who never attended a love--in or protest march--who never even inhaled, for heaven's sake? It's nice music to relax to. It doesn't seem to be about anything in particular. It's neither too musically complex nor too Top 40 cloying. It holds up; it comforts; it does not demand.

But what has that to do with the sixties? Out of political and cultural context, nothing at all. But in the context of San Francisco in the sixties, and the rise of the social movements of the day, and the vastly rich process of musical cross-fertilization that era spawned, it means a lot more than meets the contemporary ear.

What Garcia and his band members did was meld together a mix of various kinds of roots music--bluegrass, rhythm and blues, jazz, and more--in ways which played a perfect counterpoint to many strands of political and cultural activism. The drugs, the sexual rule-breaking, the valorization of music and clothing and food and recreational drugs that were considered "trashy" at best, dangerous at worst, all went hand in hand with a world-shocking movement of political protest against all sorts of other institutionalized repressions around race, sexuality, consumer culture, even technological progress.

This is not to say that everyone--even Garcia and his band members themselves--understood all of this. They didn't have to. It was enough that the people who were doing politics and the people who were doing music felt themselves to be a part of a community. You need only watch the film Woodstock and see how a throng of ragtag teenagers rose in unison to vigorously, angrily protest an American war along with Country Joe and the Fish to understand that the music reflected more than the media--obsessed with their sensationalized clips of nude, drug-crazed hippies writhing orgiastically in the mud--let on.

But where is Country Joe today--the guy who sang, "If you're broke and you need some cash/rip it off from the ruling class"

Where are the other songs about revolution and protest that, back then, were played openly on alternative radio every day?

Does anyone remember Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, who urged everyone to "Please Come to Chicago" to protest the binding and gagging of Black Panther Bobby Seale during the trial of the Chicago Eight?

The artist/musician who most profoundly represents the ways in which culture and politics went together in those days is, of course, Bob Dylan, called "the voice of his generation" back then, although it would be hard for today's teenagers to understand that.

Still, you can't read a book about the political sixties without running across phrases and verses from Dylan. The most politically radical, and serious, figures of the sixties political scene, from Huey Newton to the Weather Underground, were inspired, in their best moments, by Dylan. Even Herbert Marcuse, no lover of popular culture, found in Dylan's words and music a cause for revolutionary optimism.

For Dylan took the roots and traditions the Dead understood so well musically and superimposed upon them a sense of moral outrage at social injustice that he learned from Woody Guthrie and the tradition of folk protest. And then he went electric and added an attitude to the mix that allowed the rage and indignation that fueled the revolutionary movements of the day to come through in all their raw, righteous fury.

So where is he today? A lot of people think he's been dead longer than Garcia. Those who know he isn't, generally write him off as a fossil. Every once in a while he gets a Lifetime Achievement Award or something, and you catch a glimpse of him, cryptic and eccentric as ever, mumbling something meant to thwart the media's effort to get him in their frame.

It was only in the sixties--when mass movements had the power to anoint their own superstars--that a guy like Dylan could become the voice of his generation even though the mass media hated him because he gave few interviews (and insulted those interviewers to whom he did speak) and had even fewer Top 40 hits.

In today's world, when the media tell us exactly who matters and why in such constant, repetitive drones as to make dissent near impossible, someone like Dylan was bound to be "disappeared." Even the fancy new rock museum in Cleveland barely takes note of this ground-breaking genius, displaying only a few posters, while the likes of Rod Stewart are given huge blocks of floor space to display their glammed-up stage artifacts.

In this world of MTV, of rap and grunge and skinheads and mosh pits, the music of the sixties must seem as dated and irrelevant to today's kids as Frank Sinatra seemed to me in 1965. But is it?

If there is any musical genre that grows directly, if surely at an acutely depressing angle, out of the tradition of protest music--dating back at least to the 1930s talkin'-blues tradition that so influenced Dylan--it's rap. With all its well-known faults and offenses, rap (the best of it anyway, not the most horrifying examples which the media endlessly quote) taps into political and social reality and finds within it a rottenness that evokes rage.

And it's a rage that is significantly different from that of even the best white youth music of the day. Groups like Pearl Jam and Hole are full of rage, too, of course. But unlike rap artists, these groups most often express an excruciating self-absorbed, narcissistic anger, made up of self-pity and adolescent temper tantrums, directed aimlessly at anything in sight--often their own audiences. For all their talent and power, they lack a sense of social and political context for their much-vaunted suffering, a context that rap, in its own grandiose, excessive, often misguided way, most certainly has.

The comparison is politically instructive. Rap is now an endangered species: Time-Warner has just sold off its rap-label stock in an effort to appease the right and smooth the way for its recent merger negotiations, while Courtney Love is on her way to becoming the next Madonna. Everyone from Bill Bennett to Bill Clinton has demanded an end to rap because the truths it tells about the streets and prisons where black males live and die are threatening.

The endless attacks on rap music are related to the "disappearing" of the political sixties. Both are attempts to squelch authentic cultural rebellions against injustice. But rap will not die; nor will the sixties.

The right is very much threatened, still, by the ghost of sixties rebellion, and the ideas that fueled it. If they weren't, there would not be such an effort to rewrite history so that only those figures and ideas hat were politically unthreatening were allowed to survive.

In fact, the sixties and its real spirit is very much with us--subtextually--in virtually every headline and debate of the day: affirmative action, sexual harassment, abuse and violence; the canon wars and hysteria over "political correctness" on campuses; the issues of gays in the military and elsewhere; the assaults on abortion clinics; and the truly ferocious attack on feminism and women's rights from all sides.

The politics of the sixties rocked our universe of thought and value, and the right--even now, with all its apparent triumphs--is truly desperate to keep it in check.

Jerry Garcia was part of it, all right. But he only provided some of the soundtrack. Unfortunately, that is all we are permitted to hear about the sixties these days.

Elayne Rapping, most recently the author of "The Culture of Recovery" (Beacon), appears in this space every other month.