Friday, August 7, 2009

The year 1968

What the Beatles Gave Science
Their visit popularized the notion that the spiritual East has something to teach the rational West.
他们的到访使精神性的东方有一些东西可以教给理性的西方的这种观念受到很大欢迎。
Nov 19, 2007 Issue

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Like millions of others who believed there must be more to life than the libertine exuberance of the '60s, the Beatles hoped that the Hindu teacher Mahesh Yogi—known as the Maharishi, or "great saint"—would help them "fill some kind of hole," as Paul McCartney put it years later.
像数以百万计的人一样,披头士们相信对于生活肯定存在着比60年代的放荡不羁更多的东西,披头士们希望印度导师Mahesh Yogi——称作Maharishi,或“伟大的圣人”——能够帮助他们“填补一些空洞。,正如Paul McCartney在几年后说的。
So in the spring of 1968, the Fab Four traveled to the Maharishi's ashram overlooking the Ganges River in northern India, where they meditated(宗教上)沉思冥想 for hours each day in search of enlightenment, as Bob Spitz recounts in his exhaustive详尽 2005 biography, "The Beatles."
The high-profile visit still echoes 40 years later—in, of all places, science, for the trip popularized the notion that the spiritual East has something to teach the rational West.

Soon the Maharishi was on Time magazine next to the line "Meditation: The Answer to All Your Problems?"

It wasn't. But in the late 1960s a few intrepid scientists began dipping their toes into the exotic异国 new waters to study the effects of Transcendental Meditation超在禅定派 (TM), which the Maharishi developed, and other forms of mental training.
Most of that early research "was just not of high caliber,质量不高的" says B. Alan Wallace, president of the Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness Studies. "Reputable scientists were told, 'We can't study that; we'll be tarred and feathered'."

But just as meditation has become as mainstream as aerobics, research on it has achieved a respectability that astonishes those who remember the early floundering辗转、踌躇、挣扎.
With neuroscientists at the University of California, Davis, Wallace is leading a $1.4 million study of the effects of intensive meditation on attention, cognitive function and emotion regulation.
Prestigious有声望的 institutions such as the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center conduct studies on how Tibetan yoga improves sleep in patients with lymphoma, and top journals publish research on the brain waves of Buddhist monks. Studies of meditation are more than mainstream. They're expanding beyond the predictable—I mean, how surprising is it that meditating lowers stress?—into uncharted terrain, such as how different forms of meditation alter brain circuits in an enduring持久的、不朽的 way.

In large part, that research is making headway because it's much more rigorous than in the early days.
Then, few studies accounted for the annoying讨厌的 little fact that meditators' low levels of stress might reflect self-selection (maybe only mellow people chose to meditate and stuck with it) rather than the practice itself.
然而,一些研究表明出一令人讨厌的小事实,沉思的低水平压力可能反映的是自我选择(可能仅有那些沉稳的人去选择沉思并执着于它)而非实践本身。
Nor did they consider that the reduction in stress, blood pressure, heart rate and other measures between the beginning and the end of a meditation course might reflect the placebo effect: you expect something good to happen, and it does.
他们没考虑在压力、血压、心跳和其它一个沉思开始与结束之间的情况,所反映的安慰效应:你可能期望一些好的事情发生,但它已经发生了。
"You can't really control for that," says Robert Schneider of Marahishi University in Iowa, a center of research on TM, "but new studies come close."
Although relaxation techniques and TM both lower blood pressure, for instance, the effect of TM is twice as big.
Top hospitals from Stanford to Duke are convinced: they have instituted meditation programs for patients suffering chronic pain and other ailments.

Afraid to sully their reputations, it took three decades for scientists to ask the obvious: does meditation change the brain? But in the 1990s British psychiatrist John Teasdale became intrigued with mindfulness meditation, a Buddhist practice in which you sit quietly and observe whatever thoughts and perceptions arise in your consciousness, but without judging them. He and colleagues showed that mindfulness training halves the rate at which people treated for depression relapse.
That set the stage of studies showing that mere纯粹的 thought can alter brain activity in a long-lasting way that benefits other forms of mental illness.

Neuropsychologist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin had practiced meditation since the 1970s but didn't dare study it. Only in the 1990s did he "come out of the closet," he says.

Now Buddhist monks and yogis trek to his lab to have their brains scanned.
They look different from the brains of undergraduates (but then另一个方面, whose doesn't?), having stronger electrical waves of the kind that knit together disparate全异的 thoughts into the grand enterprise of consciousness.
现在佛教僧侣和瑜珈修行者艰难的参与了它的实验,并让他获得了他们的脑部扫描。
他们看上去不同于研究生的大脑(另一个方面,谁的不是了?),他们拥有较强的脑电波,这种脑电波编织起全异的思想,使其成为伟大的有意识的进取心。
Even in novices, meditation leaves its mark.
An eight-week course in compassion meditation, in which volunteers focus on the wish that all beings be free from suffering, shifted brain activity from the right prefrontal cortex to the left, a pattern associated with a greater sense of well-being.
即使对于初学者,冥想也会留下它的印记。
一个在同情上的冥想,志愿者需要集中在所有的生物都免于痛苦的愿望上,他们的脑活动从右前额皮层转到左前额皮层,这一方式是与一个幸福的较大感知相关的。

And three months of intensive training (10 to 12 hours a day) in mindfulness meditation had a remarkable effect on attention.
Usually, when something attracts your attention—in this study, a number interrupting a stream of letters on a screen—it takes the brain's attention machinery time to reset.
If two numbers flash less than 0.5 seconds apart, most people don't see the second one.
But after mindfulness meditation, with its focus on sharpening attention, volunteers detected many more numbers, Davidson's team reported this year.

What happened was that the meditators used fewer attention circuits to perceive the first number and therefore had enough left over to detect the second.

Meditation is still not "the answer to all your problems," but it's having a good run unveiling the brain's secrets.
沉思仍旧不是“你所有问题的答案”,但它很好的揭示了大脑的秘密。

© Newsweek, Inc.

CULTURE
A Century of Destiny

It is not just 1968—many years are jostling for starring roles in history.
不止1968年——历史上,有许多年就如天空中堆满的星星。
By Jerry Adler | NEWSWEEK
Nov 19, 2007 Issue
It was 1908, a year whose importance was certified at the very stroke of midnight, when, for the first time ever, a ball covered with light bulbs descended降下 a flagpole in Times Square, an event that would eventually give rise to Dick Clark.
Exactly 12 months later, Wilbur Wright astonished the world by flying an airplane for two hours and 20 minutes. This was America's year of destiny, although, of course, they almost all were.
In "America 1908," the journalist Jim Rasenberger assembles from a jumble of events—the sensational trial for the murder of the architect Stanford White,
the race to reach the North Pole,
the introduction of the Ford Model T—a grand and inspiring panoply that almost disguises the fact that these things have absolutely nothing to do with each other.


Like other narrative forms, history must have its stars and supporting players. Some years need no introduction, like 1492 or 1776.
The War of 1812, even if most Americans have forgotten why it was fought, nevertheless然而 guarantees immortality to its namesake year.

Amid the drab procession of centuries constituting the Middle Ages, 1066 stands out for the Norman conquest of England, an event that combines the two star qualities of consequentiality and contingency.
在由数世纪单调的进程中,1066年因为对英国的诺曼底征服而特别,这个事件整合了必然与偶然两种闪耀的性质。
The history of Europe down to the present day would look very different if the Battle of Hastings had gone the other way, as it might have.
如果Hastings战争以另外一种方式发生,它是有可能发生的,那么欧洲走向如今的历史就看起来不通了。
Battles and, even more so, assassinations represent the ne plus ultra至高点 of contingency.
One misfire and Lincoln lives;
a second, and Archduke Ferdinand survives and the first world war never happens.
The course of history swerved unpredictably in 1968;
replay the tape and jostle Sirhan Sirhan at just the right moment and see what happens then. The mind reels.
战斗、以及尤其像暗杀这些,代表了偶然的极端。
Some years demand a little more effort from the historian to justify a place in the spotlight.
多年来要求历史学家努力去确定这些事件的意义。但出版业已经从事于这一挑战了。
But the publishing industry is up to从事于 the challenge.
Authors have detected significant turning points in 1919 ("Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America," by Ann Hagedorn), 1920 ("The Year of the Six Presidents," by David Pietrusza), 1929 ("America Before the Crash," by Warren Sloat) and 1941 ("A Nation at the Crossroads," by Ross Gregory).

We're not even counting 1900 ("1900," by Edward Tannenbaum), on the ground(在地上、当场、在决斗) that finding significance in a year that marks the turn of a century is like shooting fish in a barrel.

And what a mighty freight of history those years carry!
In the very year that the Allies hammered out苦心推出 the Treaty of Versailles, setting the stage for the rise of Hitler and the second world war, Jackie Robinson was born, dial telephones went into service and F. Scott Fitzgerald finished "This Side of Paradise."
The 9/11 attacks had a predecessor前辈 in the Wall Street terror bombing of 1920, one of the events that triggered the war against "radicals" that would dominate American politics for a generation.

Momentous events were bearing down on冲向 America in 1929 and 1941, unforeseen except by a prescient few, in light of which even the most inane snatch of dialogue from an "Amos 'n Andy" show can be invested with as much portent征兆 as "The Waste Land."
许多重大事件在1929年和1941年冲向了美国,这些除了一些可预知的之外,都是无法预料的。在这些可预知的事情中,来自于“Amos’n Andy”的极具空洞性的预言显示了如”The Waste Land”一样所具有的大多征兆。

Certain themes come up again and again as writers survey that eventful century. Baseball, for one(作为其中之一、或举例), as a mirror of society in all its corruption, or purity, as the case may be.
You can't talk about 1908 without evoking Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, or 1919 without the "Black Sox" scandal, or leave Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak out of a book about 1941.
More somberly阴暗地, the state of race relations makes for a continuing, dirgeful theme throughout the century: blacks who failed to keep the place to which society consigned them, particularly around white women, were being lynched in 1908, and again in 1919 (when soldiers who had fought in the world war rebelled at returning to a country that treated them as second-class citizens).

We are living in the world they made, for better and worse, these jitterbugging, gin-swilling, spats-wearing ancestors of ours, blundering浮躁笨拙 their way through a century whose worst horrors still lay before them.
作者的态度是轻视、否定它们这些先辈的行为的。
They looked up at the sky at an airplane (or, more likely, read about one in a magazine) and saw a machine that, as Scientific American wrote, would put an end to international aggression by making it impossible to launch a surprise attack without being observed.
它们仰望天空中的飞机,看到的是一台机器,就如科学美国所写到的,但它会在他们没有遵守的情况下用来发起奇袭去进行国际侵略是不可能的。
Or, in a New York Times editorial quoted by Rasenberger—and we looked it up ourselves, because we couldn't believe it, either—they looked at the automobile and saw a machine destined to be used for many purposes, including warfare, "if, as we hope, the wars of the world have not all been fought." That was just about a hundred years ago, and we know now that the Times' wish was granted many times over.
或者,就如纽约时报编辑Rasenberger所引用的——我们自己查证了它,因为我们也不相信——他们看着汽车,看到的是一台机器,注定要被用来为了许多目的,包括战争,“如果,正如我们希望的,世界战争一直没有打起来。”那仅是100年前的事情,而现在我们知道时报的希望是被同意了许多次了。

The lesson is that we just can't stop ourselves from making history. Even when it might be a good idea.

© Newsweek, Inc.


It’s Ms. America To You
They did not burn their bras, but feminists ignited点燃 a global movement.

Courtesy谦恭礼貌 of Robin Morgan
Liberation解放: Activist Robin Morgan (center) protesting at the 1968 Miss America Pageant
By Barbara Kantrowitz | NEWSWEEK
Nov 19, 2007 Issue

In a tumultuous喧嚣的 year, a demonstration by 100 women on the boardwalk in Atlantic City seemed relatively tame沉闷乏味.
There were no riots. Some of those protesting the Miss America pageant美国小姐游行 were briefly arrested for spraying a "noxious liquid," which was actually Toni hair spray喷雾 (a sponsor of the pageant), but they were free before morning. 这些反对美国小姐盛典人中的一些因为喷洒有害液体而被捕,实际上是Toni头发喷雾,但它们在第二天早上之前就给放了。
[作者引用这一实例要说明:美国女权运动解放后,女性自我解放发展迅速,但仍然还有一些人反对女性的如此开放。这之间形成了一个差别、对比(下文comparisons)。即美国女权运动发生几十年了,可如今,并非全部人都接受这些思想。这是一个事例。从一些行为而言,女权解放者:将压抑女性的象征物品入腰带等扔进了自由垃圾桶。乳罩也是,但却没有什么东西是被烧掉的。]
The women dumped symbols of female oppression压抑—girdles, steno pads, stilettos—into a "freedom trash can."
Bras went in, too, but none were burned.[ Burned 和dumped 是相对而言的。故用了but]
That myth began when [同位语]a sympathetic female New York Post reporter thought that a juicy first line conjuring up想象、追忆 comparisons to burning draft cards might get more attention for the event.
当一个同情女性的纽约邮报记者认为一个有趣的富有想象首要草图相比烧掉那些卡片草样可能会获得更多的对事件的注意力时,神话就开始了。
As the organizers headed home, they had few expectations.
当那些组织者回到家的时候,它们就很少有期望了。
How could they know then that their little bit of guerrilla theater helped kick-start a revolution?
之后,它们怎能知道它们的带有一点点游击式的戏剧是否会引发一个革命?
Every time Robin Morgan that hears the Miss America protests get credit for 获得好评taking the women's liberation movement mainstream, she smiles because she remembers how it started so modestly.
每一次,robin morgan在听到美国小姐的反对者因将妇女解放运动视为主流而获得好评的时候,她就笑了,因为她记起了女权运动时如何谨慎开始的。
Morgan was part of a group called New York Radical Women that had been meeting for what would later be called "consciousness raising."
Someone came up with the idea of picketing the pageant, which was held over the Labor Day weekend.
"I immediately got fired up," says Morgan, an activist and writer.
"It seemed to be the perfect coming together in terms of so many things." Miss America was always white and spent the year selling sponsors' products and entertaining the troops, which made her a perfect symbol of racism, capitalism and militarism.

And there was what Morgan calls "the ridiculous objectification of women女性可笑的行为." (As for bra burning, Morgan scoffs: "We were radicals, but we were very elegant," she says. "Burning rubber smells dreadful!")

In 2007, Miss America might seem a paltry target, but back then it was a very big deal. "She represented the pinnacle of beauty outside of the movies她代表了电影活动之外选美事件的顶尖," says novelist Alix Kates Shulman, also part of New York Radical Women.

The fact that the pageant was televised live made it particularly appealing. Shulman, who would later write the feminist classic "Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen," paid $70 for the tickets that allowed about a dozen women inside the convention center.

The nation was watching as they unfurled a bedsheet proclaiming WOMEN'S LIBERATION shortly before Miss Illinois, 18-year-old Judith Ford, was crowned Miss America. 伊利诺斯小姐,18岁的judith ford被戴上美国小姐桂冠前短暂时刻,她们展开一个传单上面打着女性解放,而此时全国观众都在收看。
Now Judi Ford Nash, she has no clear memory of that pivotal关键的 moment. "When the spotlight is on you," she says, "you can't see."
At the next meeting of New York Radical Women, hundreds showed up instead of the usual few dozen.

Women's liberation groups sprang up in big cities and small towns across America. Once-secure bastions of male power and privilege were forced to open their doors to women—first Yale and Princeton, then medical and law schools, the astronaut corps and the Supreme Court.

Some issues have remained disturbingly contentious.

Winning the right to choose an abortion was a major goal of the women's movement, but almost from the moment of the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion activists have been fighting ferociously[表明了作者的态度]to get at least portions of it rolled back击退.
赢得权力去选择堕胎时女权运动的一个主要目标,但几乎自从1973年roe v. wade案件裁决事件之后,反堕胎分子就一直激烈战斗,试图去获得击退该法案的机会。
Lesbian and gay rights, already on the agenda in 1968, are still the subject of emotional[表明了作者的态度] debate.

And although rigid beauty standards were a major target of the Miss America pageant, more and more women resort to injecting poison into their foreheads or boosting their bra sizes to make themselves more appealing.
虽然美国小姐选举将苛刻的选美标准作为一个主要目标,但越来越多的妇女还是采取注射药物她们的胸部或增大她们的乳房尺寸以使她们自己更加吸引人。

But back to Atlantic City for a moment. The young woman in the spotlight that night never expected to find a crown on her head. She thought of herself as "kind of a tomboy," the only woman on the men's trampoline team at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and the first woman to win a varsity letter there.

Miss Illinois officials had told her that her chances of winning were slim because at 18, she was too young and a blonde in a contest dominated by brunettes. Even worse, she says, her talent, the trampoline, was "a little too athletic, a little too masculine because Miss America is not supposed to sweat."

Today, Nash, an elementary-school physical-education teacher, is grateful for the Miss America scholarship money as well as the opportunities the pageant gave her to travel and meet all kinds of people.
She is especially proud of entertaining the troops in Vietnam.
But she also understands the goals of the women on the boardwalk. As a recently divorced single mother in 1987, she struggled to get a credit card in her own name. She has always worked, just as her mother did.
"I think the feminist movement has done a lot for women," she says. "We wouldn't be where we are if it hadn't started out that way." Crowned or uncrowned, sisterhood姐妹 is powerful.
“我想女权运动已经为妇女做了很多了,”她说,“如果它没有开启那种方式,我们不会在我们现在所处的位置。”夺冠或没夺冠,姐妹之谊是伟大的。
© Newsweek, Inc.


1968: The Year That Changed Everything
The 1968 election is four decades old, and yet we're still rehashing that moment—that era—in the 2008 contest. Why do we come back to it? And why won't it leave us alone?


By Jonathan Darman | NEWSWEEK
Nov 19, 2007 Issue

Barack Obama was born in the 1960s but is not of them.
Such is the constant promise of his presidential campaign. Announcing his candidacy last January, he vowed to lead a "new generation" unencumbered by the divisive struggles of the past.
By last week, when a Fox News reporter asked him to define the difference between him and the Democratic front runner, Hillary Clinton, he had grown more pointed.

"Senator Clinton and others have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s," Obama replied. "It makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."

Obama's promise—I am not the'60s—is heartfelt真心真意, but ultimately hard to believe.
Just look at the gray-haired '60s idealists inside the senator's own brain trust 只智囊团who see him as the fulfillment of 40 years' worth of hard work.
Or look at the throbbing crowds that mob the young senator, reminiscent in so many ways of the crowds that mobbed Bobby Kennedy 40 years ago.
或看看那些骚动的支持年轻参议员的人群,让人回忆起40年前人们以多种方式用户bobby kennedy的情景。
Or look at the Secret Service detail that trails Obama, a reminder of the old '60s lesson that assassination is a real threat. Obama is the '60s, whether he likes it or not.
或看看特务机关跟踪保护obama的情况,很容易提醒人们想起60年代的事件,足以让人记住即使在目前暗杀还是一个真正的威胁。Obama是六十年代的,不敢他是否喜欢。

John McCain is also the '60s. A former naval aviator who spent the latter part of the decade in a North Vietnamese POW camp, McCain uttered the best line of the 2008 presidential campaign last month in a Republican primary debate.

"A few days ago, Senator Clinton tried to spend $1 million on the Woodstock Concert Museum," McCain announced. "Now, my friends, I wasn't there … I was tied up at the time." The Republican room erupted, not in laughter, but in applause. His campaign quickly took the debate clip and cut a television ad.
共和党人爆发了,不是在笑声种,而是在欢呼声中。它的竞选迅速的缩减了辩论降低了电视广告费。
McCain knows what Obama should have learned by now: the '60s are impossible to escape.
They will define the 2008 presidential election, just as they have defined American politics, and American culture, for the past 40 years.
她们将定义2008年总统选举,正象他们定义40年来美国的政治、美国的文化
It is fashionable to see the boomers' '60s obsession as a reflection of their own narcissism, their inability to get over themselves.
将他们自己的自恋、他们难以克服自己的不足看作新人的对60年代的困惑是很普遍的。

But this does not do justice to a truly traumatic decade. In the midst of adolescence, an entire generation was presented with repeated reminders of its own mortality: the Cuban missile crisis; the assassinations of Jack Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; the violence in the cities; the 58,193 Vietnam War dead.
但是这个不能公平对待一个真正有创伤的10年。在年轻人中间,一整代人始终重复回想着那个时代的价值:古巴导弹危机;jack kennedy、robert kennedy Martin Luther king Jr的暗杀;城市中的暴力;58,193名越战阵亡军人。
So much death and killing, too much to simply put aside.如此多的死亡与被杀,很难简单的放到一边去。
But what about the rest of us? Nearly 162 million Americans were born after Dec. 31, 1969. More than half the country, then, knows the decade only through mythology (peace, love and liberation) or through marketing (tie-dyed T shirts at tourist shops, the Rolling Stones on oldies radio, Dennis Hopper in Ameriprise Financial ads).
They rightly question what makes the '60s so special: What, after all, did the baby boomers really achieve 40 years ago? Why does NEWSWEEK commemorate 1968 instead of 1918 or 1941?

The answer:
because all of us, young and old, are stuck in the '60s, hostages to a decade we define ourselves as for or against. 因为,我们所有人、年轻的、老的,都陷入了60年代,成为了我们定义我们自己时要关涉的或反对的那个时代的人质,
As the pages that follow demonstrate, the '60s were not necessarily, as some baby boomers would have it, America's defining moment. 就如下面几页所要描述的,六十年代,就如婴儿潮那时一样,必要地来说,不是美国所谓的瞬间。
But they were an era when a generation held sustained argument over the things that have always mattered most: How should America show its power in the world? What rights were owed to African-Americans, to women, to gays? What is America and what does it want to be?
但他们是一个纪元,那时候一代人都在对那些事情进行持久的争论,涉及的这些事情主要有:美国应当怎样在世界上展示自己的力量?什么权利应当给予非裔美国人、妇女、同性恋者?美国是什么以及他想成为什么样?
These were noble questions. The debate they brought on was not. Rather, it was personal, hysterical and often terrifying. Father fought with son, black fought with white, the young fought with the old. By the end of the decade, consensus was clearly not possible, and simply restoring civilization became the goal. Subsequent generations would have to answer those essential questions.

And so the cycle has repeated itself, almost every four years. "America is back," Ronald Reagan promised in the 1980s.

Blessed with the can-do attitude of the Greatest Generation and a congenital optimism, Reagan was well positioned to move the country beyond the '60s.
Ronald Reagan带着最伟大一代人的祝福,以及天生乐观的热诚态度,很好的将自己定位在要使这个国家超越60年代。
But baby boomers saw only the Reagan who served as California governor in the 1960s, hated by young liberals, worshiped by young conservatives.
Reagan and his successor as president, George H.W. Bush, ended the cold war, making the '60s dream of a peaceful world seem, for a moment, possible.

But the vernacular of the 1992 presidential race, the first election after the fall of the Iron Curtain铁幕, was vintage '60s: marijuana, draft dodgers逃兵役者, trips to the Kremlin, San Francisco gays.
但1992年本国的总统选举,铁幕落下后的第一次选举,却是过时的60年代的东西:大麻、逃兵役者、去克里姆林宫、San Francisco的同性恋。

Assuming the presidency from Bush, the last of the World War II presidents, Bill Clinton promised that a "new generation" was ready for "new responsibilities." His message: the strife of the '60s was over, the decade's promises finally could be fulfilled.
But it(60年代) wasn't and they(希望) weren't.
For the next eight years, Clinton and a cast of conservative boomer antagonists ensured that the first child of the '60s in the White House would be remembered as a '60s caricature(拙劣的模仿): ambivalent矛盾的 toward the military, sexually promiscuous, wrapped up in himself.

In George W. Bush, Republicans found their own boomer ideal: a reactionary child of Yale in the '60s who despised轻视 that decade's elites.
But he, too, promised a new way forward—a compassionate domestic policy that sought conservative means to achieve some of the '60s idealists' goals.
Abroad, he promised a foreign policy that learned the lessons of Vietnam. Instead, he has delivered only divisive cultural conflict at home and a war in Iraq that miraculously奇迹、不可思议地 managed to make every Vietnam mistake over again.
然而,他在国内仅阐述将多样性的文化冲突,在伊拉克则不可思议地使越战地错误得以避免。

Already, the old '60s fault lines are emerging in the 2008 campaign. Earlier this fall, Mitt Romney released a Web advertisement starring the candidate's wife, talking about the trials she faced as a stay-at-home mother to five sons. "Sometimes I'd be home with those five boys, and it was rough," Ann Romney says in the ad. "He'd call home and remind me that what I was doing was much more important than what he was doing." The ad was meant to introduce Republican primary voters to Romney's family, but it shows what could be a compelling narrative for a general election campaign: family values versus free love, the order and comfort of the '50s versus the trauma损伤 and extremism of the '60s.

This old choice will not be hard for Republicans to revive if the Democratic candidate is Hillary Clinton.
Clinton's '60s baggage包袱 is all around her—her 1969 Wellesley commencement speech, the pictures of big glasses and love beads, the libertine husband, the daughter they named after a Joni Mitchell song.
Fifteen years in the national spotlight has taught Clinton to be wary of提防 invoking the '60s, lest唯恐 she seem like the feminist agitator her critics have made her out to be.
But when provoked, she, too, falls back on '60s vernacular俗语习惯 as she demonstrated earlier this month, when she called presidential politics an "all-boys club" after a weak performance in a Democratic debate.

So how do we finally escape the '60s in time for the election of the next president, 40 years after 1968?
Not, as Obama would have it, by simply declaring the '60s done. Too many politicians have tried that before, only to be proved wrong, either by the boomer electorate选民 or their own lingering '60s souls.
The real way to move beyond the '60s is to have political leaders who are finally willing to do an honest accounting of what that fateful decade was truly about. If the civil-rights movement truly transformed America, why are our cities still segregated?
If women were liberated by the '60s, why do working mothers still feel so chained down?
If Vietnam taught us how to be a humble superpower, why are we still bogged down in Iraq?
These will all be vital questions facing the next president.
The story of 1968 demonstrates that the truly brave presidential candidate will be he, or she, who finally acknowledges the '60s have everything, not nothing, to do with us.
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1968 Ripping:FRANCE
In May 1968, students ripped up the cobblestones along the rue Gay-Lussac in Paris to build barricades and, in the process, exposed the sand foundation that lay under them.

It was one episode in an orgy of confrontation with stolid authority that started out partly as protesting, partly as partying, and grew into a chaotic nationwide strike that shut down France.

They were heady times. Fractious left-wing ideologues filled the air with strident declamations—Marxist, Trotskyite, Maoist, anarchist, situationist and more.

But the reigning sentiment was simple enough: strip away the edifices of established order.
Get to a better—and above all, a fairer—future. Of the slogans shouted by the barricade builders on Left Bank streets that May, those best remembered almost 40 years on are "It is forbidden to forbid" and the weirdly frivolous but expressive, "Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!"
争取一个更好的——并且首要的是,一个更公平的——未来。在左案的街道上,“五月”,那些设置路障的人喊出那些可以记忆近达40年之久的标语“去禁止是被禁止的了”以及古怪琐碎但有表达力的,“鹅卵石之下的海滩。”

What happened in France that spring was inspired by, and inspired, a global season of rude awakenings that resounds still, even if it comes back to us now summed up in the singular date "1968."

在法国,那个被一个全球的猛然性所惊醒的,即使它现在回到我们身边,听起来也是寂静的春天,可以用单一的“1968”这个日期来总结。
America's Vietnam War rumbled as a raging undercurrent, prompting the first protests of the French uprising.
美国的越战那时正轰轰烈烈,而它成为了一股潜流,激起了法国的第一波起义。

But in Czechoslovakia, the "Prague Spring" that began in March 1968 pushed aside the Iron Curtain铁幕—until Moscow sent troops to crush the opposition. Ghettos burned and assassinations changed the political landscape of the United States.
But at the end of the year, a triumph of American technology unexpectedly created environmental awareness: images of Earth taken from Apollo 8 showed just how vulnerable the Blue Planet looked in what astronaut Jim Lovell called the "vast loneliness" of space.

People who did not come of age then (which is to say the vast majority of the world's population today) may tire of hearing how epochal it all was.

French conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, only 13 when the barricades went up in the Latin Quarter, ran his victorious presidential campaign this year against those "sixty-eighters" who still had an odor of irrational left-wing romanticism clinging to them.

Yet Paul Berman, a New York University historian, and author of "Power and the Idealists," argues that in Europe today, and especially in Sarkozy's administration, the '68 generation is perhaps more influential than ever.

He says there are two very different legacies: the cliche sloganeering associated with what he calls "antique" 19th-century ideologies, which mostly died of their own irrelevance, and the core sentiment that ruled the streets in Paris, a visceral hostility to ruthless authority, continued, says Berman, as a legacy of "anti-totalitarianism and human rights."
他说,有两种不同的遗产:那些与他称做“古董”的大多已经死于它们自己的枝节问题的19世纪意识形态相关的陈腐标语,还有就是那关键的主宰了巴黎街道的情绪,即发自内心深处的对残忍权力的敌视,这是一“反极权主义和人权的”遗产,berman继续说道。

In this, the European and American experiences were very different. Overt colonialism and violent, overwhelming fascism were living memories in Europe, and not, as in the United States, mere words in overheated left-wing rhetoric.

The European protests and the government responses, moreover, while violent, were rarely deadly.
Thousands of people were arrested and injured, but not a single person was killed in France's May uprising. In the United States the leaders of the civil-rights movement, if they survived, endured, matured and became influential inside and outside of government. In Europe, a handful of well-known student leaders would do the same, holding on to the idealism that marked 1968, but adapting to the demands of realpolitik实力政策, including "the use of Western power against extreme repression."

One of the leading '68ers is Joschka Fischer, foreign minister of Germany from 1998 to 2005, representing the Green Party, but a street-fighting leftist radical in the early 1970s.
When pictures of him hitting a cop during a 1973 protest appeared in 2001, they provoked outrage. The photographs came from the daughter of Germany's most notorious woman terrorist, whom Fischer had admired. Not only was he pilloried, but, by extension, 1968 was put on trial使经受考验. Yet Berman portrays Fischer as the man who "ushered the Germans into the actual modernized world by making them active participants in NATO, first in the Kosovo war, and now in Afghanistan."
In France, Bernard Kouchner epitomizes the flamboyant style and the moral imperatives命令需要 of 1968, as well as the rejection of its antique ideologies. Once a communist, he cofounded the humanitarian organization M?decins sans Fronti?res in 1971 to defy Third World dictators and help people in need.
His experiences trying to rescue "boat people" fleeing Vietnam after the fall of Saigon dispelled whatever illusions he might have had about Hanoi's tyranny.

He went on to work with Afghans fighting the Soviets, and with Kurds fighting Saddam Hussein.

In 2003, Kouchner was one of the few prominent French politicians to support the idea of liberating Iraq, but, from the start, had serious reservations about the way the Americans planned to do it.

Last June, Sarkozy picked Kouchner as his foreign minister, and they've built warm ties to the United States, which they talk about, sincerely, as a land of liberty.

And they've been tougher on Iran than any other European government. These policies are the natural outgrowth of the spirit of '68. If some of their old slogans seemed playful to the point of nonsense, others still make sense when applied to governments, like Iran's, which maintain power by stifling抑制 freedom. "It is forbidden to forbid," they used to say on rue Gay-Lussac. One day crowds may say the same thing in Tehran. They might even discover the beach beneath the stones.
© Newsweek, Inc.

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