One could say The Sixties really started sometime during the Civil Rights Movement and the Beat Generation, but I think that’s conception or gestation. They were birthed between the Kennedy killing and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Blood and screams and joy.

The Fifties ran from ‘47 to ‘63. They came in with the baby boom and went out with the JFK assassination. Their look was Dior and Brooks Brothers. I remember vividly being a little kid amidst women with narrowed waists and wide skirts, and men with sharp creases in their pants and fedoras on their crowns. The first concerns of these adults were raising families and putting food on the table. Suburban growth exploded then, fed by a burst of highway construction. In the Fifties, the military industrial system moved into he civilian domain, and soldiers went to work for giant corporations, glad for whatever faustian bargains they made, because at least the Depression and the War were long over, and they were living the American Dream, or close enough. The contrast between that dream and the realites of social injustice — especially segregation in the South — festered in the Fifties and burst the country’s seams in the Sixties, when all those early boomer kids were reaching the ages of rebellion and military service.

I’m not sure we’ve had any eras as sharply defined as those in the years since. I suspect that the period we’re entering now — the Obama one — will be as distinctive as those. But I don’t know. I hope I live long enough to find out.

However, having married a Republican, I must have learned somewhere along the way to keep the discourse civil. We’ve been married for 20 years without separating over politics, though prop 8 very nearly undid us both.

What we found is that in some areas we agree, in many we disagree, and since we usually cancel each other’s votes out, we don’t need to fight about it. This is the first year ever that we have voted for the same candidate for President. May the trend continue.

The Beats most certainly prefigured The Sixties (which, oddly, ran from around 1964 through 1979, near as I can tell). But don’t kid yourself–they did drink a lot, too. It’s what killed Kerouac, or at least was the physical cause of death.

One of the more interesting scenes was the tension between the lead character’s culture of alcohol and that of his beatnick girlfriend’s culture of jazz and weed. It seems to pre-figure the cultural battles of the late 60s and early 70s. Perhaps the lack of civility of current political discourse is a by-product of Red Bull, coke, speed and ritalin; the drugs of choice of people who grew up in the 80s and early 90s.

Makes you wonder what the politics and political discourse will be like when the current Ecstacy generation hits 40 and has two kids.

But there again, maybe I’m stretching the “culture reflects the dominant drug” metaphor too far.