Yes It’s True: The 1960s went down with co-opting

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is another of a series columns examining why the decade and generation of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll went down so swiftly after the 1970s and ushered us all into another era of compliance and conformity.

Once again, essentially co-opting is the process by which the establishment, those in power, use ingenious methods to absorb the cosmetic and most innocuous ideas and concepts from the potentially dangerous leftist movement, use them for their own gains and put them into the mainstream of society.

This process showed up in many different ways.

Closest to home, it was demonstrated effectively by GVSC President Arend D. Lubbers, who wore his hair long, listened to the latest music and spent a lot of time having a rapport and dialogue with the students. He certainly had no use for the most radical and dangerous ideas of the New Left, but was affable enough and skillful in getting most students to believe he was on their side.

Those Madison Avenue types that Frank Zappa warned about were able to take long hair and make it chic, to take overused words like “far out,” “heavy,” “groovy” and “out of sight” and use them in ad campaigns directed at the Baby Boomer generation, to make peace a universal, but sadly unattainable pie-in-the-sky goal.

Who back then can forget Coca-Cola’s “I’d like to teach the world to sing” ad?

Who doesn’t remember the TV show, “The Mod Squad,” in which three young people, formerly drug users and troublemakers, became cops and “worked within the system” to change things for the better?

Even Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb) was suggesting on episodes of “Dragnet” that those crazy mixed up kids were really all right when they grew their hair and dressed weirdly, but they’d better stay away from false drugs.

The music that had led the way a few years before now was telling us that in addition to becoming self absorbed, we should feel good about ourselves because “Everything Is Beautiful” and “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” It was indeed the beginning of the “Me Decade.”

Politically, the West Michigan establishment picked up on the anti-Vietnam sentiment and finally made a few innocuous concessions. Congressman Gerald Ford, who during his visit to GVSC in 1968 had defended our involvement in Vietnam, was running ads for re-election in the fall of 1970 stating his opposition to the war, blaming it all on a Democratic administration led by Lyndon Johnson.

(Ironically, it was during Ford’s presidency in the spring of 1975, that South Vietnam eventually fell to the North.)

Conservative political commentator Paul Harvey was beating the drum to get out of Vietnam, not because it was wrong, but because we couldn’t win. His line of thinking became popular and helped Nixon extract the U.S. from the conflict eventually in 1973, but the moral lesson appeared to be lost. Nonetheless, here was a notorious and powerful right-winger (Harvey), who hated peace demonstrators, saying we should get out Vietnam.

Of all of the factors that killed the spirit of the ’60s, co-opting was the most insidious, the most evil. It was a deliberate effort by The Establishment to consolidate its power, crush dissent and continue the status quo. It was a drive to keep those rich and powerful enough to buy and dictate public policy to stay in positions of authority.

And it’s been going on ever since.