TURN ON, TUNE IN, TRASH IT!

By LANCE MORROW

First, Prince Yusupov and the others fed poisoned cakes and wine to Rasputin. The Czarina's dissolute monk seemed to thrive on them. He called for more wine and went on with the party.

Next, the conspirators shot the starets a few times, and that slowed him down. He was still alive, but less chipper. Assassination as low comedy: now they doggedly carried Rasputin out to the frozen Neva and shoved him through a hole in the ice. He kept bobbing to the surface.

Finally, at the end of the assassins' long night of work, the old charlatan got worn out and sank, reluctantly, for the last time.

I like to think that Rasputin stayed dead for a half-century and then, irrepressible, achieved reincarnation, not as one person this time, but as an entire decade--the '60s. This expansive metaphysics would have allowed him to show off all his facets: as holy man and party boy, as faith healer, sexual omnivore, purveyor of mystic salvations and bogus profundities, enemy of soap, hairy narcissist...

And survivor. In any event, the '60s have proved to be just as difficult to eliminate as Rasputin was. Or, to be bipartisan, as hard to dispose of as Richard Nixon, who went down into the frozen river a hundred times during his career and always bobbed back. Nixon and the '60s, though they hated each other, were each driven by a fierce relentlessness. Nixon finally died. The '60s go on and on.

Three events in recent days, however, have breathed hope into a nation that has lived long under the baby boom's army of occupation. If you look, you know that the '60s had a core of nobility and tragedy. It breaks the heart still to think of Medgar Evers or Martin Luther King Jr., or the night Bobby Kennedy was shot. But so much of the time turned to meretricious junk, an idealism gone clueless and narcissistic. We saw traces of the pattern again in the case of the Unabomber, for example--Rasputin with a chemistry set. Or we felt the vibration in the dreamy, New Age utterances of poor seven-year-old Jessica Dubroff's mother.

And then last week came Sotheby's yard sale of Jacqueline Kennedy's bric-a-brac. Jackie belonged to the founding myth of the '60s. Now the saint's relics of Camelot have turned to kitsch. The gavel-banging crassness of the sell-off may help bring Americans to that objectivity and even disillusionment necessary for what grief specialists refer to as "closure."

Any decade seems ridiculous in retrospect, its absurdities left exposed after the smoke has cleared. In memory, the '70s seem wincingly stupid--that idiot disco music, those haircuts, those shirts and ties. Why pick on the '60s?

For this reason: most decades have the good grace to die of their own accord, a natural and seemly death. The old decade goes into the dustbin precisely because in looking back, we see its follies and feel a healthy eagerness to get on with something better.

The '20s went off the cliff and pinwheeled onto the rocks below, a world economic crash that seemed a retribution for too much heedlessness and gin. By the time the '30s, W.H. Auden's "low, dishonest decade," gave out, the Nazis were spreading out all over Western civilization. And so on. The '40s--the first half of them given over to world war, the second half hardening into cold war and nuclear anxiety--did not make anyone want to linger.

Intellectuals finished off the lamentable '50s even before Eisenhower left office. Each decade gets reduced to a formula. The '50s were conformity, McCarthyism, the Silent Generation, Ike in senility, cold war, suburban ticky-tacky. By 1960 America's thinkers had taken the '50s to the ice floe and abandoned them there; we saw young John Kennedy on the horizon.

But with the '60s, something different happened. We've been over this material before, but the baby boomers, born of the pent-up desires and deferred domesticity enforced by World War II, were so numerous that they transformed their coming of age into the genesis of an entire new culture, or so they thought. It was not merely a new version of the old motifs but instead a new consciousness, wired to television, a new sexuality, a new music, a new spiritual way. It was a new universe altogether, all the ghastly nonsense of Woodstock, the simultaneous arrogance and ignorance: overprivileged, pretentious, self-righteous, self-important, artificially proliferated by its own electronic imaging, and, as the years have passed, sadly resistant to the usual generational cleansing. They came to cultural power unnaturally early, when still adolescents, really, and now they hold the institutional power for real, from the White House on down.

Once demographers liked to use the disgusting pig-in-the-python image to describe the boomers moving through the stages of their lives. It would be more accurate to say that the pig (that huge generation) tried to swallow the snake of history--a messy and unappetizing spectacle.

What a fate: the American story turned into a continuous sequel to The Big Chill. I am ranting, of course. But will this movie ever end?