The 1960s were defined by hippies, pot, acid and free love. San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury was the epicenter of flower power, things were groovy and the entire culture loosened,  allowing for the sexual revolution, women’s liberation and the movement toward racial equality.

The 1960s were so dramatic that it may have been easy to describe them. Among the handful of American writers who were able to take the pulse of the 1960s, Joan Didion wrote long-form magazine pieces for Vanity Fair, Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post and her style produced a new way of reporting referred to as the New Journalism or  immersive journalism, which meant you virtually would live with your subject in their environment for weeks at a time to discover the reality of the story. Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Truman Capote and Gay Talese also created this new genre.

Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was a compilation of her articles written between 1965 and 1969 while living in California. The title of this compilation comes from the famous W.B. Yeats poem  “The Second Coming,” which was written in 1919 and begins with the lines:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer:

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,……

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

’Slouching towards Bethlehem, to be born?”

And to read her essays from  that decade  is to sense her growing concern and paranoia about “things falling apart” and how “the center cannot hold.” Didion wrote that the definitive end of the 1960s came on Aug. 9, 1969, when members of Charles Manson’s cult killed the pregnant Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger and others at her home in Los Angeles.

The ’60s were a wild and crazy time, obviously too crazy for its own good and with the shutdown of that decade, America slowly sobered up.   It is now 60 years later and it’s a shame we don’t have any writers who are able to capture the tone and tenor of the 2020s. My sense is that the New Journalism died a slow death due to the speed of our brave new TikTok, YouTube , internet world which has neither the time, patience nor the attention span for long-form, immersive essays.

And that’s a shame because  we need someone to assess these stressful, speedy, angry times we now live in.  I’m privy to the world of competitive youth sports and that world is a good microcosm of the world at large. There is not a day goes by where I am not asked about the loss of fun, joy and playfulness in sports.

Sports is supposed to be primarily about play, but play is the last thing kids are thinking about.  Thanks to the presence of social media, rankings, scouting, analytics and the grim business of earning scholarship money to get into a college, fun and play are the last thing on anyone’s mind.  Many athlete players talk to me about quitting the game they once loved because of pressure created by social media, overzealous coaches and over-involved parents.

Burnout is as common occurrence in youth sports, but it’s my guess that burnout is a common occurrence in America overall.  Income inequality has turned middle-class America into an overworked, angry group, desperate to find some joy and fun and at the same time trying to get their kids into college. Information overload has everyone exhausted and sleepless. Artificial Intelligence is a force to be reckoned with and if films like “The Terminator” are in any way predictive, we as humans have much to be concerned about.

My guess is the strange evaporation of manpower after COVID is a sign that large numbers of folks have already given up.

We need a new poet on the level of a W. B. Yeats to write a poem which may in turn inspire a writer to write about this stress filled  life of the 2020s.  I cannot write poetry, but if I could, it would be titled “The Third Coming” and go like this:

“Speeding and speeding into the shrinking void

The human can no longer hear his fellow man,

Things implode upon themselves, falling into some heavy black hole:

Mere nothingness loosed upon the world,…

And what giant Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man, its hour come round at last,

Gazing at a cell phone, demanding its right to be born or at least entertained?”