We failed to found a Paris Review, and left without hope of becoming famous.

Everyone journeyed there. It was the place to go and live cheaply, a surprising concern, for all the money it took for the flight. On the continent, we acted like Ben Franklin amoung the peasants.

“Didja go to Torremolinos? Was it cheap?”

While some still founded communes and envisioned successful Brook Farms, those who voyaged to Europe expressed the age-old frontier urge to move and move and move: with past soil exhausted, depleted of sustenance, something, somewhere must be more captivating. more fertile — a sowing place for bigger and better dreams. Scratch a student and he’ll say he’s been in 10 countries, each for four days. Going, going, moving. Fulltime movement: as the most restless entrepreneur bought art or corporations, like ski area patches, we acquired campaign stamps from hostels in various cities: London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rome, Athens, Heraklion and Tel Aviv. Europe allowed bumming with an escape hatch: a return ticket home. It wasn’t a life-style but an experience which said nothing of future status, as did the hard work on a commune or meandering up and down the California coast, in fact, it enhanced status: it was seen as enriching where travel in the West was “fooling around.” Americans feel shamelessly inferior to European culture and so the institution of dogging a summer's menial labor passed itself off, tail between its legs, as the laboratory of humanism: my kid in Paris, my daughter among the Michelangelos. They went. Daddy, but how much they saw, one can't be sure. Culture is the rock age's secret midnight masturbation: Janis Joplin feared that her fans would learn she had read Look Homeward. Angel.

There was no determined pilgrimage in the footsteps of Van Gogh or Monet: rather, traveling around was watching the most varied set of television shows ever transmitted by Eurailpass. Changing the channel from period piece to period piece, from country to country, a generation of video addicts, the offspring of the kinescope, were allowed to watch and watch and watch to their heart's content and for once, their indulgence met with approval.

Look at our snapshots, ma! There I am in Paris, in la rive gauche. I loved that old $1.20-a-day room which formerly housed a bathtub and looked out over a courtyard where Vietnamese did their wash.

But, alas, my friends did not speak the language and had to leave soon. It didn't matter, though. Now that Gaullist nationalism exposes us as barbarians, French girls no longer fancy Gl Joe. So we headed up to the fjords and. with that done, returned to Amsterdam and sat for too many hours in Dam Square, brushing off panhandling Dutch kids who thought we had all the money in the world. We littered the beaches of Spain and Greece and filled the orange groves of the Israeli kibbutzim as long as we could take it. We took the train to Barcelona and Zaragossa, to the festival at Pamplona and travelled without George Plimpton and Sadruddin Aga Khan. We failed to found a Paris Review, and left without hope of becoming famous later even though we shook hands with the guy who impersonates Papa and explains Hemingway's “bull as tragic actor” theory.

Still, it wasn't all cheap bread and wine and a gay, lost life. There was a war on, lest you forget it. You should have seen the precarious adolescent egos tumble as we were press-ganged into Nixon’s unpaid consular service. We did not have to explain ourselves to local Italians, French or Portuguese who spoke no English and understood very well that the light of the dollar made their economies shine. But the Dutch. Canadians, Australians and even Israelis spoke English and fought to unfurl the largest flags yet run up the nationalist's new pole.

“Your lousy war," they’d say. “Imperialists ... The defenseless Vietnamese."

What the .,.? Well, they were right except that, we stammered, uh ... it was their war. They liked it. Nixon, not us. We were ... uh ... the Foreign Ministers of the Movement, the counterculture's plenipotentiaries, not some third secretary with a press handout from some crappy old desk at State. We were CO's, anti-war from the word go ... resistors ... Right From The Start! But to them, we were no such thing. We were a part of the big American glob. Part of the culture that brought you the Cadillac and B-52. How painful was that head-on collision and subsequent whiplash of discovery. It hurt. Once America was hip: Dylan represented one generation and, roughly, John Lindsay, the other. Now a foreigner's view of an American image stopped down to focus on John Mitchell, David Eisenhower, or, for chrissakes, brush-head Haldeman’s boys! Somebody you couldn't distinguish from a narcotics detective or an IBM salesman. Indeed! The sun had set on our sullied old whore, America, and we believed it was still rising over Europe.

It was time to go home.

And a very sad time it was.

We maintained the fantasy that Nixon wasn't really Nixon and hence not serious until his vicars on earth Judge Julius Hoffman, the National Guard at Kent State, Rockefeller at Attica convinced us with deadly force. Nixon resurrected the good old American sport, total victory over enemies, and America was theirs again.

Even the youth fare had rattled and expired.

All that glorious emphasis on youth was pushed aside as the rainclouds Nixon ordered up finally covered our blue sky and the possibility of thunderstorms rose to 90 per cent. Powerlessness became a fact of life as Nixon maintained that America belonged to the fading rather than the coming. Although his disgrace will minimize their influence. Nixon's policies did wreak profound changes on us all. They will maintain a momentum of their own, even after their time has passed: inflation won't wane, the youth fare won't come back, grants to the liberals in academia won’t be re-instituted, not for many years. Never, maybe. It takes depressions, appeasement, endless Indochina Wars and viscous oil in our beaches to make Americans believe that calamities are a regular part of the perfect “American way of life." And even then, they wait until the shot has been fired to control the gun. Who will believe 20 years from now that a quiet campus which fails in its primary mission, the stimulation of new ideas and methods, is an unprecedented disaster? What kind of revolutionary will it take to cry out that the status quo is antithetical to all that is good in American life, and part of the characteristics of decay?

So the mood of the young today is part obedience from menacing signals on high, part real fatigue from a frenetic past and part the inevitable aftermath of the bandwagon's progress through town. The happy music and incredible excitement of something new, the bandwagon's arrival, calls everybody out. fans and players alike: one man’s nirvana belongs to everybody. Then, by the time the noisy truck heads out of the main square, the message has sunk in.

The truly committed race along to the edge of the town, as the crowd disperses in the square. But at the border, the young devotees must begin the long trudge back to await the next wonder. Americans hate to be second to anybody, especially their own generation and my generation is no exception to that gospel.

Except that right now we don't particularly care that it will be a while before the hoopla begins anew: we can still hear a muffled, though different drummer. Hiking back to town, we have taken a detour through the woods; we need time to think, something adults seldom understand. We engage in self-analysis, avoiding the thought that such a need does not exist because Americans are always right.

The present is a vacation from action, not something consciously planned, like Nixon's post-1962 exile, but something born of relief and paramount necessity. Besides, it's not so much fun proclaiming that liberty is here two years after its arrival, in whatever form it look. All that false community proclaimed by middle-class kids raised in detached houses with full-time mothers had to have been a cover-up for unacceptable true feelings. Personal idealism is the true flowering of the hope of the sixties, not a mass movement of any sort. Change is whittled down to a manageable level, compartmentalized into an incremental task with a visible goal and then it can be sent up for the old guys to deal with. Let the Vietnam veterans bitch about their pittance for education, we’ll start a day-care center, work for Ramsey Clark, or get a student on the board of trustees. You affect your world. I’ll affect mine. In Nixon's America, the danger is in numbers.

A pity? Yes, but absolutely necessary - there are so goddamned many of us. You must be grade-grubber, a mercenary academic parasite when everyone has an “A” average. As we grow toward gestation, the womb contracting on our soft heads, it's awfully scary ... holy christ, our inexhaustible supply makes the competition so stiff! Where students once clamored for class discussion and shouted down lecturing professors, now they prefer lectures only, please. They must absorb the maximum to be possibly one notch ahead of that guy with the exact same record. You should have seen the art history class guffaw when somebody blatantly cheated: one person actually got up and fetched the instructor. It’s that uptight — locked up!

The rush is on, vocations come out smelling like a rose, humanism wilts. It takes money to live out in that crazy world, we find out. And students aim in all directions: the star literature student goes to law school; a poet applies both for a Stegner fellowship at Stanford and a place at the University of Chicago Business School; and the campus politician directs himself toward a seat in Congress or one on the Stock Exchange.

Confusion is everywhere as no end is seen as desirable. Everyone soon feels corrupted — it's just that money, you see, allows you to help more, something this generation is particularly stuck on. Unless you are Stewart Mott or Mac Palevsky, it’s no good. We, the Catholics, Jews, Irish, Italians, Puerto Ricans and Blacks of this nation, are still a bunch of WASPs. The implications are astounding: even the most fair-haired preppie jock has been into protest, drugs, sex and rock and roll.

Even though people may not do as much about the goals of the sixties an end to militarism, a semblance of democracy in politics, concern with minorities — they still care as much. That I can tell you. Their first chance, they’ll move right in and throw the recalcitrants out. They won’t issue press releases or appear on the Dick Cavett show. Like the Great Vowel Shift which revamped the sound of English after Chaucer, the changes will be fulminating — but only apparent over time. Then they won’t seem like changes: America, will have always been that way. In the way that the Depression lasted as the permanent scar and shock of today’s adults, the corruption of affluence will remain the memories of the ’48 to ’54’s. And by good works, we will fight to eradicate the terror of our Depression, our reeling embarrassing horror.

We could buy anything, no matter the cost, for our parents loved giving us what they did not have. We could travel anywhere, rarely having to decide alternatives, often picking both. And now we can’t decide between the purity of humanism and the virtue of wealth. In the future, you may look for a little of both: your lawyer may be a scholar of Dante and a devotee of Rolling Stones nostalgia; the MBA-advocate of free enterprise, a former collective member; and the old board chairman’s son, now president, laughing over his arrest for second-degree-riot in the good old days of the late sixties, all possibly remembering their concerns for the workers they once lustily supported and now employ.

I hope I’m right.

I hope we don’t blow it.

If we do, and they make America catch on again, for their purposes, watch out! We’ll find ourselves part of the tale of the Prince and the Frog: the Prince walks into a tavern with a frog on top of his head and the barkeeper says: “Hey, where’d you get that thing?” and the frog says, “I dunno ... a pimple just started growing.”

Better we should be the prince who gives birth to the frog and not the other way around.

Well, the music has started, the line’s moving now, and it’s time to receive my diploma.

Reprinted from the Chicago Reader