IT AIN'T US, BABE

By JAMES S. KUNEN

This is a disgusting generation. It's a disgusting time to live in. It's boring," says Alexandra Lynn, who is 15 going on 25, as she languidly smokes a cigarette with a gaggle of similarly jaded teens in Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park on a sultry Wednesday night. "The '90s is an exhausted decade. There's nothing to look for, and nowhere to go. This generation really hasn't got any solid ground. I mean, the '60s had solid ground, but that's gone now."

Long gone. Thirty summers have flashed by since the Summer of Love. Back then, when I was a teenager, we appreciated being young. We thought being young meant we were something special, rather than just one more run of a mill where the molds are never broken. Our misconception can perhaps be laid to the advertising industry, which had drummed into us that New! new! new! meant Better! better! better! Now, of course, we are neither new nor better. But we were lean and energetic in those days, and there were lots of us, so we thought we could change the world. Our parents disagreed. Remember the generation gap? (Or was that a clothing store?) We thought our mothers and fathers were materialistic, hypocritical sell-outs. They thought we were spoiled brats. There were a lot of hard feelings.

We knew that when we became parents, with our '60s spontaneity and spirituality intact, our kids would want to be just like us.

It hasn't turned out that way, not even in Greenwich Village, the navel of the counterculture, where the tides of the '60s would be least likely to have receded. Alexandra and her friend Harlequin Rose (nee Cheryl LaRosa) are standing around by the particular tree where teenage hippies, goths, techno-goths and freaks from all over the New York City area congregate. Later--much later--they may try to get into the Bank, the Pyramid Club, whatever, to dance all night and get blasted by music. But right now they are holding forth for a middle-aged reporter who is having a close encounter with his own cluelessness.

Harlequin, 17, whose Deadhead father gave her a hippie nickname, as he did most of his 12 children (Sunshine, Moonshine...), opines that "the '60s life-style still seems to be going very strong." But beyond her fashion statement--a flower-child revision, with pastel jewels on her nose and forehead--she is hard-pressed to cite any examples. "We have Phish, now that the Dead are gone," she ventures. "And raves. It's very much the same idea as a be-in or love-in to go to a rave."

But what of politics? In the '60s we used to say, "The personal is political," which meant that everything was politics, and politics was everything.

"I don't think anybody wants to deal with politics anymore," says Harlequin. "They want to get as far away from it as possible."

Her friend agrees. "Everything has been done, and everything has been stood for, everything has been fought over, and now it's basically like there is no more debate," says Alexandra, whose prim black cocktail dress and silver-buckled black vinyl corset (worn on the outside) make her a techno-goth--for the day at least. She is passionately apathetic, as if to spite her father, who demonstrated against the war from the City College of New York to Berkeley and who by his own count was arrested "about 11 times." But isn't there still poverty and inequity? she is asked.

"Yeah, but, hey, that's life," she shrugs. "There is no oppressor. It's just luck, bad f__ing luck."

It is a stance calculated to break a '60s father's heart. But Steve Lynn is sympathetic to his daughter's anomie. (Her mother, seven years separated from him, did not wish to be quoted in the same article with Steve.) "When we grew up, it was simple to rebel," he recalls. There were so many rules to be broken. When he wore jeans to a high school assembly in 1963, violating the dress code, "it was like burning the flag." He put on a tie-dyed shirt and was beaten up for it. His long hair got him pulled over by a sheriff who threatened to cut it off. "That was wrong," he says of the law officer's bullying. "It was easy to rebel against that. In those days, right was so right. Now, what's so right out there?"

For those of Alexandra's generation, us-vs.-them causes are hard to find. They already have peace and freedom, the Holy Grail of the '60s. "But with that," she says, "comes the monotonous undertone of the entirety of life, you know? What is there to do? There's nothing to do, there's nothing to stand for, there's nothing even to look at, because the shock value is gone."

Her park buddy Harry Siegel, 19, elaborates on this point. "The ability to howl at the moon has been lost," he laments. "The counterculture has been absorbed by the culture. The blue hair and pierced nipples are trite, and no one pays them any mind. Nothing is outside the fold."

So this is how their generation rebels: they dump their parents' avowed political beliefs but pick up their parents' social-sexual mores and run with them. They smoke, drink, take drugs and have sex--earlier than we ever dreamed of doing. According to recent government surveys, 45% of 10th-graders and 31% of eighth-graders say they have taken illicit drugs; 21% of 10th- and 10% of eighth-graders say they have been drunk in the past month. In 1995, 50% of girls ages 15 to 19 said they had had intercourse, compared with 29% in 1970, when our famous sexual revolution was in full swing.

All those things about hippie freedom and giving each other space go out the window at 3 a.m. when you don't get a phone call," says Steve Lynn, a hard-driving entrepreneur who operates nine burrito restaurants and still wears denim overalls to work. "My mother said, 'I hope you have a child just like you. It's the only way you'll know how much it pains me, what you're doing.' But the gulf between me and my mother was greater, because the change from the '50s to the '60s was greater. I mean, what could you tell your mother about Berkeley? Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll--she didn't have a clue, except it wasn't kosher. I know what's going on. But saying, no, no, no--I saw that wasn't going to work. No, no, no meant yes, yes, yes. They have to do it to set themselves apart from their parents."

A mother of one of the Washington Square teenagers concurs. "This is the hard thing for parents, when you realize you don't have a lot of control. Sometimes we get into a big argument, with the worst thing happening being her throwing a few things, breaking a dish. [It's] the old motherdaughter story: if you don't hate your mother, you're gonna become your mother. She has to make sure she's not her mother."

But she is her parents' child, as were we, much more than we realized. Our parents outlasted the Depression and defeated the armies of fascism. They taught us, by word and deed, that we Americans could do anything if we put our minds to it--that the world would bend to our will, and that it was our duty to exercise that will. We were raised to believe that what we thought mattered, that what we did mattered. What were we trying to do but complete our parents' liberation of the world? What were we trying to build if not that shining city on a hill--albeit in rainbow colors?

We failed. We ran out of answers. Now there is no politics, just the petty scuffling of narrow self-interests. There is no cause but our own happiness, which we search for in the marketplace. And this is the example our children have grown up with.

"It's very hard to get them to see that you can make change either in yourself or something around you, as opposed to finding your niche and sort of riding the wave through life," observes State University of New York-Buffalo history professor Michael Frisch of the 18-year-olds who come through his door. "These kids have no sense that they have any power over the world."

Says Alexandra Lynn: "There's nothing to do but entertainment--make it or watch it. The '60s and whatever it stood for have mutated into something that's just another show."

Our children turned out like us after all. But we are not who we thought we'd be.

James S. Kunen is the author of The Strawberry Statement, a journal of the '60s.